AI gives with one hand and takes with the other for entry-level roles

Various sources contend that artificial intelligence is leading to an employment crunch for graduates. But even if the technology really is the sole cause of junior vacancies falling by a third in the last year, new research from Pearson and Cognizant shows that employers remain optimistic about the future of early-career hiring.

UK graduate vacancies have fallen by more than a third over the last 12 months. According to jobs platform Adzuna, analysis shows a 34.9% decline in graduate vacancies in that time – and while other factors are at play too (including geopolitical turmoil and slow economic growth leading to common graduate employers issuing hiring freezes), the study cited artificial intelligence as a potential cause of the trend.

If that is the case, the figures would align roughly with the latest insights from Cognizant and Pearson, too. The study of 750 HR leaders across the UK, US and India showed that businesses believe a growing portion of their entry-level work is now carried out by AI.

Overall, 33% said that the technology now handled around 33% of the work once expected of graduates. In the UK, that rose to 39% - the highest of any of the individual markets examined. And while the researchers did not break it down in the same terms, their report notes that overall, 18% of all HR executives said that AI now performed 50% of more of entry-level tasks.

Polling professionals at the director-level or above, working at companies with 1,000 or more employees, the study therefore determined that AI-readiness was now “the defining reality for HR leaders today”, and it is “reshaping the hiring process from the ground up”. But that does not only need to mean the ‘jobs apocalypse’ touted by some quarters of the tech industry as being inevitable.

Part of that process also includes the creation of new graduate roles, reshaped by the work AI is capable of handling, or complementing. With 85% still considering entry-level roles “essential”, even in the AI era, 96% said they expected entry-level roles to evolve into “AI supervision positions” in the next five years – rather than disappear completely.

“AI is reshaping the talent landscape and exposing the limits of traditional talent and learning models,” said Kathy Diaz, chief people officer, Cognizant. “With the fundamental shift in entry-level tasks and skill requirements changing rapidly, organizations must rethink how they hire and develop talent at pace.”

One thing that incumbent business leaders don’t have, that many new graduates will have, is an ‘AI-native’ skillset – having gone through education and grown with the technology, to understand its shortcomings and fix them. To that end, a further 94% of the HR bosses polled said they anticipate that AI will generate entirely new entry-level roles that do not currently exist. The question to them will not be “do we hire graduates”, but “what do we do with early-career talent when it arrives?”

Part of that process of adjustment remains how to measure success, though. Many businesses already overestimated the impacts of their innovation beyond AI. But since its advent, multiple studies have shown that business leaders seldom understand how to measure ROI on their AI transformation – and there is a danger that if they move to ‘evolve’ a role – graduate or otherwise – in accordance with AI yielding productivity that it actually isn’t, they could be setting themselves up for a fall.