Transcription
As an individual, I don't have a 10-year plan. No one knows what the jobs are going to be in 10 years. Entry-level workers, new grads, they are dealing with what I call a sort of perfect storm. You have all the uncertainty in the macroeconomic environment. But you also have the beginnings of disruption from AI in entry-level work, going after entry-level tasks. And that's all leading to unemployment for young people and new grads being higher than national averages. Gen Z is feeling the most pessimistic about their futures than any other age group. We're going from static career paths that can be confining for a lot of people to dynamic career paths that are going to be exciting for a lot of people. It's sort of Charles Dickens, the best of times and the worst of times, because I really do think as AI plays out, at the other end of it is going to be more options for people as they build careers, and I think better work for humans at work.
So, all you need to do is have a today plan. And your today plan is: I'm going to learn something new. I'm going to push myself in some new way. I'm just going to keep working on who I am, what I'm good at, where I want to work, and I'm going to apply that to whatever job I find. But no matter where you work right now, you could be CEO of the biggest company in the world, or you could be an entry-level worker doing your first shift. All of our jobs are going to change. So, all of us have to do the same thing. All of us need a today plan. At some level, the great equalizer is that we're all in it together. And then we can create a moment of great democratization of opportunity if we get leaders and systems to adapt.
Anish, thank you so much for joining me. I have been wanting to do this story for a long time, in part because I have a 25-year-old college grad who's got a master's and is looking for a job, and his girlfriend who has two master's and is looking for a job. Then I see keep seeing these stories in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and Bloomberg and NPR about the crisis of jobs for college grads. And I look at my older kids, and they never had that, right? They graduated from college five, six years ago, and it seemed to have been pretty straightforward for them. So, are there some graduates that are suffering more than others? Five, 10 years ago, we all wanted our kids to do computer science. Um, should we now be pushing them to do poetry?
Well, so let's take computer science. That was and remains sort of the poster child of the knowledge economy. It was the job that, especially, I'm a child of immigrants, like immigrant communities, all communities were looking to get their kids into that path because it was security.
That's where you were going to make the big money.
Yes. And and that was like the right math for what the knowledge economy represented. The knowledge economy is on the way out. We're living that reality. We're entering a new economy. And so you see the headlines of computer science degree holders who are graduating and finding it very difficult to get a job. Our own data. I did a New York Times op-ed last year with this point: 96% of the average computer software engineer's job is susceptible to being done by AI, either immediately or soon. Now, we argued in that op-ed that doesn't mean that job goes away. It means what it is to be a computer scientist, to be a software engineer, changes. We started to see employers saying, if you have that CS degree, do you have a philosophy minor so you can help me think about the ethical implications of what I'm building? It used to be in the predictable path: I got this degree. Now give me that job. And we all knew that like 1 plus 1 equal two. That was great if you got the degree. It was not great, by the way, if you couldn't afford to get the degree, if you weren't in a like privileged community that gave you a pipeline to get to the degree. But it was all like known. Now, saying I got the degree doesn't really say much. You've got to say what that means you're going to be able to do. I think retail jobs start to have a lot of value in a way they didn't in the knowledge economy. If you could say you worked a job where you have to show resiliency, adaptability, managing hard work, those are things that employers are looking for. Where work is going, it's really going to be: none of us are our job title or where we sit in an org. We are these individuals with unique lived and learned experiences, unique energy that we bring, unique like resilience we bring. That's what we're going to get hired for and moved around with. And so articulating that is something folks can control. And honestly, I have a 10-year-old and an 8-year-old. The main thing that I'm trying to sort of like shore up is a sense of self and self-worth and ability to handle hard work. I think those two buckets of skills are the most durable.
Back to the entry-level jobs. I saw that LinkedIn survey, um, of what, some 3,000 executives saying that 63% of them think that AI will absorb entry-level tasks. So, in a sense, are is Gen Z just is going to suffer anyway? However much of a good story they tell about themselves, however much, you know, waitstaff work they do, however much they manage to connect those narrative dots, maybe there just aren't going to be those entry-level jobs because corporations are going to give them to AI.
We don't know. Uh, but we do know the same percentage in that survey, like literally the same percentage that said AI is going to eventually take on tasks that are currently allocated to entry-level employees, say entry-level employees bring fresh ideas and new thinking that is valuable to business growth. The same generation that's got this tough time landing a first job is AI-native, is bringing a whole new sense of what consumers want and what businesses should do differently as they try to adapt to this new economy. The knowledge economy is on the way out that we've lived in for half a century. A new economy is emerging. When a new economy emerges, and this is when we went from the farm to the factory, and we went from the factory to the office, disruption comes first. We're in that. Jobs change. We've got data. 70% of the average job will have changed by 2030. So, we're all going to be in new jobs, even if we don't change jobs. The third bit is that entirely new jobs get created. Influencer wasn't a job, you know, 10 years ago. Data scientist wasn't a job 20 years ago. So we haven't even started to see that yet, aside from AI jobs. And then fourth phase, we're in a new economy. So if you're entry-level, yeah, right now you're at the whim of companies doing this sort of math of how do we transition? Some companies are going to use old math for the new equation and just think it's about shrinking. Others realize we've got to just redo work, uplevel, entry-level, bring these folks in who are going to help us build new business lines and think in different ways. The key to it all is, is you've got to just keep leaning on your own ability to develop skills and expertise.
Anish, what's the downside, um, for individuals, uh, young individuals leaving college if we don't fix this entry-level job issue? What are they losing out on? Paint that picture for me.
We, there's a lot of research on the lingering impacts of a bad start. I mean, just like if you're unemployed for a period of time at the start, that just sets you further and further behind over time because as you get further along, people want X number of years experience, more than X number of years experience. So, it's really hard to start behind.
Do we have any data on how long behind and how much of a?
There's different studies. I mean, it could be months, it could be years. It depends on the cohort. So much of this is obviously socioeconomic, and so the children of wealthier, you know, parents have an easier time catching up, have a more, you know, immediate ability to go into entrepreneurship. So a lot of what we're talking about in terms of the vulnerable are two groups: one, people who are going to feel the job disruption from AI first and most fully. Those are people across their career in jobs that have a lot of tasks AI can do, and we can help them figure out how to use the tools to start to move what they do into more and more tasks around their unique capabilities. And people from lower socioeconomic, you know, communities who stall out at the start. But even there, I think there's ways we can piece together a path forward because of new work, like we talked about, retail, hospitality, healthcare, like a lot of these sectors that are hiring, teach you a lot of these skills that are going to be durable across your career. It's not the knowledge economy. Tech isn't the only place you want to work. CS isn't the only degree and pathway you want to take.
Okay, Anish, give me three concrete things you would say to a 22-year-old graduating from college, struggling to find a job, part of the rejection generation that is sending off hundreds of applications and not even getting replies back again. Or perhaps something you'd even say to their anxious parent.
Thing one: Be pro-you. A lot of my thinking about AI and work is that I am radically pro-human, which can sound funny to folks, but nothing about work has been human-centric. The story of work has been the story of technology at work, not humans at work, certainly since the first industrial revolution. What we have been training people for, and this predates the knowledge economy, this is even when high school emerges, to build managers for factories, has been to be task managers around technology, around machines. We now are going to flip that and put humans at the center of work. So, you've got to be pro-you. You've got to really understand what are your unique curiosities. What drives you? Don't feel like what gives you energy is something that isn't relevant because the old world of work didn't appreciate it. Really start to understand how you're going to get to a place of no one beats you at being you.
The second thing I would say is lean on other people. I mean, we've got new data that shows two big things: people are feeling totally overwhelmed, and people are turning to each other. We've got, I think, 82% increase in the number of people posting on LinkedIn about feeling overwhelmed. A lot feel like AI training is a second job. But what's interesting in all the memes you're seeing on TikTok of people asking GPT, like, "What should I say to my wife?" And the wife's like, "What should I say to my husband?" Is that actually isn't what's happening. People are turning to other people more than AI, more than search engines. And that's really comforting to me. Like, the number one source for professionals at work is their network. So, thing two: build your network.
And then the third thing I'd say is just learn, learn, learn, learn, learn. Like, first thing is empowering. Be pro. The third thing might feel a little crushing, having just graduated. You didn't graduate. Like, you're not done at all with learning. Like, you're not going to not read again. You're not going to not have to sit and learn something new and fail again. That's all going to be forever now. And that's an amazing thing, cuz like the best of life comes at the other end of hard and challenge and pushing yourself. But just start learning every day. Just start building that daily habit. I think if you do those three things week over week, month over month, things will feel easier because you'll feel more in control. You'll be going off your own map.
That isn't to say it's not going to be hard, but just know it's going to be hard for everyone. And and so you're not alone. And at the other end of it, if you're starting your career, you're going to have more years in what I think will be better work with more options for how you want work to be in your life, what kind of work you want to do, than any generation has had before, certainly since the industrial revolutions. And so, just lean into it.
Anish Raman, thank you very much.
Thank you.