A study of 650 million LinkedIn profiles just confirmed what a lot of us have felt in our gut.

Here's what's really happening to entry-level work, and the one advantage this generation has that we didn't.

This article features research and concepts from my new book, Indispensable: A Student’s Guide for Thriving in the Age of AI.

If you have a high schooler, college student, or recent grad in your life, this book is for them. And you.

Pre-Order Today

SignalFire analyzed 650 million LinkedIn profiles to uncover hiring patterns.

Here’s what they found (brace yourself): At major tech firms and VC-backed startups, hiring of people with less than a year of experience has dropped 50% since 2019.

Half.

The entry point an entire generation was told to aim for is quietly disappearing, while the advice we keep giving assumes it's still there.

The rest of the numbers point the same way:

I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the kind of topic that gets weaponized to scare people. So let me stay on the empirical side. I spend my days inside companies racing to adopt AI, and I keep seeing the same pattern from the inside: the tasks that used to go to the new hire, the intern, or the junior analyst are the first ones handed to AI.

And schools haven't caught up. In one American Association of Colleges and Universities survey, 63% of faculty said their 2025 graduates were not very, or not at all, prepared to use AI at work.

Meanwhile 55% of parents say they're anxious about whether their kid is being prepared for the jobs that will actually exist. If you're one of them, know you’re not alone!

For decades, the entry-level job was really an apprenticeship in disguise. A company absorbed the cost of teaching someone the ropes, and in exchange that person did the repetitive, lower-stakes work.

AI changes that math.

When a model can draft the memo, clean the dataset, and generate the first version, the economic reason to hire someone with zero experience gets weaker. Companies still want talent. What they no longer need is someone to do the work that used to be the training ground.

There's a name for this: the compressed career ladder.

The bottom rung is being erased, so the ladder is shorter, but importantly it’s not gone. Your kid can still reach real responsibility, probably faster than you did. They just have to arrive far more prepared.

You can see it on real balance sheets. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff cut his customer support headcount from 9,000 to 5,000, and said the company isn't hiring new software engineers, because AI can do much of that work. That's not a forecast. That's roughly 4,000 roles that no longer exist, at one large employer.

PwC's research shows the same pattern everywhere: AI-exposed entry-level jobs are now seven times more likely to demand senior-level skills like judgment and leadership. Those "seniorized" roles have grown 35% since 2019, while traditional entry-level roles have shrunk. Jensen Huang put it more bluntly: you won't lose your job to AI, you'll lose it to someone who uses AI.

The advice most of us grew up on went like this: pick a safe major, grind out an internship before senior year, land the entry-level role, then climb.

I can already hear the objection: That advice worked for me, so why wouldn't it work for my kid? It's a fair question, and the adults giving that advice aren't wrong to trust it. It just assumes the bottom rung is still there to step on.

When it isn't, "just get your foot in the door" stops being a viable plan. What replaces it isn't a better credential. It's arriving already able to do the work without time off for sick days or vacation.

Finally, the good news!

This generation has something we never had: advance notice. The disruption is visible years ahead, and companies are telegraphing their moves. The only question is whether your kid uses it.

The move is to prepare for the second job first, the role they'd have been promoted into, instead of the routine first job that's being automated away. I call it the "Second Job" framework, and it flips the old advice on its head:

Students who prepare for the second job are the ones who will land their first job.

This stopped being abstract for me when my own two kids started asking what they should actually do about it.

I went looking for a straight answer to hand them: a real, data-driven playbook for building a career that holds up as AI does more every month.

There wasn't one on the shelf.

So I wrote it.

Indispensable: A Student's Guide for Thriving in the Age of AI is the book I wish I could have handed my own kids. It's a stage-by-stage playbook for becoming genuinely hard to replace: building real AI fluency while doubling down on the human strengths a model can't touch.

It's available to pre-order now at DamnGravity.com. Pre-order this summer and you'll also get an invite to a live online workshop, where I'll walk through how to approach the 2026 and 2027 school year with an AI-ready path in mind.

But you don't need the book to start. Tonight, ask the young person in your life one honest question: "Are you doing your extracurricular activities because they matter to you, or because someone told you they'd look good on an application or resume?" Then just listen. If I'm right, that ten minutes is worth more than another lecture about grades. If I'm wrong, you spent ten minutes actually talking. That's a fair trade.

The kids who become indispensable won't be the ones with the most perfect plan. They'll be the ones who started adjusting early. You can help yours start tonight.

Scott Kosch · ScottKosch.com · Author of Indispensable: A Student’s Guide For Thriving in the Age of AI