PwC says the first rung of the career ladder did not disappear. It climbed a floor.
In the most AI-exposed fields, entry-level postings are seven times more likely to demand skills that used to arrive years later: judgment, leadership, stakeholder management. The routine work that once served as the apprenticeship got automated, so newcomers are asked to enter as juniors and perform as veterans. Entry-level jobs are not vanishing (11 million US postings in 2025, up from 7.3 million in 2018); they are repriced. And the report hands the fix back to the twenty-three-year-old as homework: develop senior skills fast. Judgment is not a file you download. Somebody used to pay you to learn it. It was the job.
