The Future of Entry-Level Jobs

A few days ago, at a Shawarma shop, a man approached my friend Carmine and me – he’d noticed we were speaking about all things software.

He asked: “my nephew is studying software engineering - what would you recommend to him?”

I said: “don’t study software engineering.” 

We chuckled. It was said in jest, but does contain a grain of truth. 

This morning, I read a new paper that came out 2 weeks ago out of Stanford called “Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence”. 

Look at the graphs below. The more a profession can be automated by AI, the stronger the decline of headcount in junior positions. Seniors are (still) safe, as are health workers, supervisors, and - to some extent - businesspeople. 

This leaves me with 2 open questions: 

1. Who will be the senior engineers of the future if the juniors can’t learn on the job anymore?
2. What’s the best way to future-proof your career (especially when you’re just starting out)? 

Let’s dive in.

Who will be the senior engineers of the future?

Early in your career, the biggest obstacle to getting job experience is having no job experience. Even when companies are hiring interns, they (understandably) prefer candidates who already have experience. 

A perfectly vicious cycle.

They early employments are important: they teach you how work works. But if these opportunities go away, building a proper career in your field will be virtually impossible.

Universities can’t do this for you: after all, nobody would hire a recent grad with zero work experience, regardless whether they studied computer science or business. 

We need businesses to take a chance on an inexperienced intern to teach them the chops, to provide this first early experience.

I got incredibly lucky with my first internship. A friend of mine worked at this up-and-coming mobility startup in Munich called Flixbus (now a global behemoth), and mentioned they were looking for a few interns. I applied for business development, got the interview, and came up with a few ideas how we could grow the business. 

At the time, I went to a lot of festivals, didn’t have a car, and it was always tedious to get there and organize everything. What if there were bus lines taking you to Rock am Ring? How cool would that be? 

Well, it just happened to be that my hiring manager absolutely ADORED going to festivals. She was way more hardcore than I was.

The idea was half-baked and not well calculated, but after hearing my pitch, she obviously was sold on me. She loved the idea, and I got the internship.

In retrospect, this was one of the inflection points of my career: I learned that startups are awesome, stayed for 1.5 years, wrote my thesis there, got to work alongside an experienced entrepreneur to build out a new venture (who’s still a mentor to this day), which gave me the confidence to co-found my own company after university. 

All because someone took a chance on me.

As entrepreneurs, we have the social responsibility to provide such chances to young men and women.

Small businesses in Germany who take on apprentices have done this for a long time; as startup founders, we aren’t any different. While we don’t have to train apprentices, I firmly believe that we should take on interns regularly. 

But this alone isn’t enough. As a candidate, you also have to do your part. 

What’s the best way to future-proof your career when you’re starting out? 

Let’s assume nobody gives you an internship. What do you do?

• Low Agency move: sit there, complain, and vote AfD. 
• High Agency move: get the experience yourself.

We all have a phone and access to the internet. That’s all you need to start something by yourself. The real experience comes from doing something for an extended period of time. 

I love MrBeast’s advice when aspiring YouTubers ask him for help: “Upload 100 videos, and then come back to me with your question.” Without exception, one of two things happens: 

1. Most don’t upload 100 videos
2. The ones who do don’t have a question anymore 

Pick something that’s interesting to you, and just start doing it. 

Take Justus. He started shooting social media videos at age 18, spending a lot of time there himself. Now, at 20, without university education, he runs this agency and works with a few prolific clients. 

He just got interested in videos, started making them relentlessly, and guess what – when you do things for a long period of time, you eventually get so good at them that people will pay you. 

That’s the High Agency move. 

But it doesn’t have to be content. It could be a small side hustle. Carpentry projects. Painting. Organizing events. Anything that you can build that turns into a business eventually. 

Building a business automatically forces you to do a large variety of different things. It forces you onto the path of being a generalist. 

Just as we couldn’t predict based off the data in the study that software engineering jobs were going to decline like this, we can’t predict today what the next technological shift will bring.

Adaptability becomes the key trait that we all need to develop in order to survive in the future. 

And the best way to become adaptable is to continuously learn, to try new things, to dabble in a variety of disciplines and to connect the dots between them. 

To become a generalist. 

TL;DR: 

1. Junior jobs in professions that can be automated with AI are on the decline. 
2. But junior jobs are still essential for career development. 
3. Companies of all sizes have the social responsibility to contribute to workforce education by providing internship opportunities. 
4. Candidates also have the responsibility to get that experience. 
5. We don’t know which profession is next on the chopping block, so adaptability is a core trait for the future.
6. You become adaptable by doing various things. By becoming a generalist. 

Thanks for reading. 

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