Artificial intelligence has a broad range of applications and is already starting to reshape the way we do work, allowing people to automate tasks, analyze large sets of data and work more efficiently in general.
It’s also starting to displace workers, especially some who are new to the workforce.
Lindsay Ellis, who covers the workplace and careers for The Wall Street Journal, has a new story titled AI is wrecking an already fragile job market for college graduates. She joined the Texas Standard to discuss her reporting.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity:
Texas Standard: Obviously, not all jobs and industries are going to rely equally on automation. Which types of jobs, though, are you seeing dry up for early career workers?
Lindsay Ellis: We’ve seen declines happening across a variety of sectors. Layoffs are higher than the national average in tech jobs, finance, insurance, professional business services, that space, for bachelor’s degree holders.
And we’ve heard from executives that coding jobs, marketing roles and back office, HR positions, those are positions that have been subject to automation – either, you know, instead of backfilling a position when someone leaves, leaning on tech, or saying, hey, for this type of position, we’re going to strategically kind of move into this space more purposefully.
If you think about the tasks that artificial intelligence can absorb most readily, a lot of it is the grunt work, the data entry, that type of manipulation that has been core to an entry-level job for many years now.
Is there any way of quantifying or gauging just how much of an impact AI is having? How many jobs are being taken off the table for recent college graduates?
How do you go about doing that, and is there any way to get at some hard numbers here?
Yeah, big picture, we don’t have hard numbers of this number of entry-level positions are being lost to artificial intelligence. But we’re tracking these trends in a few different directions.
One, the unemployment rate among new grads is much higher than the unemployment rates nationally. And according to an analysis from the Burning Glass Institute that looked at labor data, with each subsequent year since 2017, a smaller and smaller share of new grads is getting a job that uses their credentials.
Now, that doesn’t mean that, you know, AI is taking all of the good jobs that they would’ve gotten. I mean, the findings from our story is that AI is kind of leveling onto an already weak market for entry-level graduates because companies were being cautious of expansion because of geopolitical considerations, tariffs.
And we’ve been looking at the big-picture data on employment and, you know, trying to report out what’s actually happening with our sources in the C-suite.
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It’s interesting, you have that chart in your story with the unemployment rates breaking it down, showing that the folks with bachelor’s degrees appear to have had the biggest increase.
But what does that mean for the job market? What can someone in that market sort of extrapolate from this? Does this mean that you’re going to have to go back to school to stay competitive, to up what you have to offer? How are you interpreting this?
I think what it means most imminently is that it’s going to be competitive if you’re in this age range and you’re looking for jobs. And the people who I talk to who are on the job hunt right now just describe such a lull.
They are not just competing against people who graduated this past year, maybe a couple months ago, but they’re also competing against the people in their early 20s who have been laid off in a lot of these tech cuts or maybe by the federal government or in any number of sectors that have been trimming the payroll over the last couple of years, making it harder for the new graduates to break in.
Well, you think about the probable or likely ripple effects. I mean, a lot of young people use these entry-level jobs to get situated in the workforce. You build your network, eventually you pick up more valuable skills.
If those people are not entering the workforce or there are fewer of them being hired, is AI disrupting this chain in a more fundamental way than we’re really even giving much thought to?
It’s the biggest question that my colleague, Katie Bindley, and I were grappling with as we were reporting out this story.
There’s just long been this agreement of sorts, like an unwritten pact between companies and entry-level workers: Companies hire people with very little experience, give them a toehold into the job market, whereas these entry-level workers, they work hard, they probably are paid less than people with more experience, but they get that experience and that sort of helps them launch their careers.
And this question of where the talent funnel goes from here and how companies are going to train the next generation of managers, of leaders, I am so curious how different organizations are going to figure out how to proceed there.
Were you able to talk to any people who are hiring at companies to ask them, “How are you working on early career talent? How are you cultivating that? “
Yeah. So I talked to a few different organizations that offered some interesting perspectives.
On the one hand, another hiring leader told me that one of the most important skills that she’s looking for now is a healthy dose of skepticism, because even casual users of AI know it spits out information very confidently. And that organization was telling me, you know, we need new graduates to be able to say, “well, is this really true? Let’s widen the lens a little bit.”
So I found that to be very interesting when we think about the skills that will be newly relevant in this moment.
