Is AI Stealing Your Job? Junior Roles Are Down!

There's an AI study on 62 million workers, over 285,000 companies or firms, and it shows that relative junior hiring has dropped by 12% at AI adopters. So I'm pulling up a graph for you all to see right now. Okay.

What do you mean junior hiring?

Okay. So junior hiring, look, if you look at this graph over here, seniors mean like someone that's a senior level hire.

Oh, you're talking about like entry level?

Yeah. Yeah. Entry level hires like interns and things like that, or people coming outta college. Right. So you can see here juniors over time, you can see the different quarters like 2023, 2022 and all that. After AI comes out around 2022, it starts to decrease over time. And then in the blue here, seniors are still continuing to go up. And so this is— there's been a couple of these studies already. We talked about the 70,000 Filipino study and how the recruiters, 72% of people or so, they prefer the AI. And so this just shows that the gap is getting larger and larger. And I just saw something the other day were on, I think it was CNBC, your favorite channel, where they were talking about how it's actually going up the stack now. So it's not just juniors anymore, but it's going up to seniors. And what I also think is interesting here is check this out. So there's this U-shaped graph over here. This is tier 1. Number 1 here is like a Harvard, for example, a tier 1 college, okay? And then you have tier 2 college, tier 3, tier 4, tier 5. So 5 is like tier 5 is like the lowest college, okay?

Yeah.

So you can see, For a Harvard type of deal, the decrease in juniors is less than the other ones. Tier 2, 3, 4, it is significantly less versus, you know, tier 1 and tier 5. So that's interesting to me because if you're a tier 5 college, for some reason you have the least decreases and then Harvard would be the second or like a tier 1, like a Harvard would be like number 2. So we're seeing a massive decrease.

Tier 1 colleges are seeing some decreases. But tier 5 is seeing the least amount.

Correct. Yeah. And so my—

And what— for what type of positions? All positions or just the junior positions?

Or just juniors? Okay. Just juniors. And then one more thing before we kind of react to this one too, is it's not just IT related too. So if you look at seniors versus juniors, juniors are in the red over here. Seniors are in the blue. You can see for health, seniors are still continuing to— wait, percentage change in number of hires. Okay. So in healthcare and social, it's gone up the most. And then you can see the percentage change for juniors over here, -20, -40. So seniors are getting hired more, right, for health. And then when you look at these other roles over here, it's almost all decreases for juniors.

So the right side of the chart is healthcare. So that means they're actually seeing increases, correct? The left side is seeing decreases.

Yeah. Manufacturing seniors, they're not hiring as many. It's almost a zero.

Yeah.

Yeah. And then manufacturing, oh my God, it's like -20.

Oh yeah, you're right. Because the seniors for healthcare is actually increasing, but the juniors are actually Decreased.

Yeah. 25% up for healthcare, but then you go all the way to manufacturing on the left, it's basically zero. So they're holding steady at these other ones, or they're increasing a little bit for seniors, but for juniors it's less. And so what this tells me, because we've talked about this, you're doing this and I'm doing this and we have friends doing this. The only juniors that we're hiring are extremely big on AI. They have to give examples. They have to talk about workflows. And I remember I was interviewing someone recently. I was like, so rate your AI fluency on a scale of 1 to 10. She's like, 10. I was like, oh, like you never want to rate yourself a 10 first and foremost. No. Then I was like, okay, so 10, like, so you built like agentic workflows, you built like agents and things like that. Oh, she's like, oh yeah, I've done all of that. I was like, okay, so can you give me an example of like a tool or workflow that you built? And she was like, oh yeah, I'm sorry, I just got certification. I said, oh, so you basically lied to me.

And then they rate themselves as a 10.

Yeah.

And it's like a 1.

How could you rate yourself as a 10? You're just doing certifications, right? So, you know, in my mind I'm like, look, it's— this is how if you're a leader in your company, you have to— if you're going to hire juniors, you have to hire people who are AI native. who are really big on it, who are obsessed about AI, because this gap is going to get bigger. And this is already starting to bleed over into more mid-senior level roles, and it's going to bleed over into senior. And I'm not particularly— I don't think this gives you and I joy by any means, but it's happening. Look, you look at this graph over here, seniors is going up, but look, it's starting to flatten over here, whereas juniors are starting to trend downwards, total starting to trend downwards. This is going to happen for a lot of roles, even for your role and my role. If we're not on top of it, yeah, we're going to be in trouble too.

Dude, I totally agree. But this chart, I'm assuming the total, is it accounting for mid-level too? Because junior's the entry level, senior's like executive.

I think, I think if you're, I think it's just looking at this graph. It's only seniors and juniors. I don't think it's accounting for the middle.

Got it.

Yeah. What do you think? All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital. And they work with a whole host of global companies or global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more and we'll see you on the other side.

Yeah, I think AI is going to have an impact on a lot of jobs. It already is. It already is. Google, there was an article that ended up coming out that Google has decreased mid-level managers, but it was by 30%. Google mid-level managers. I see so much stuff. Yeah, 35%. So Google has eliminated 35% of managers overseeing small teams in the past year. And no one has proof of it. But they're saying, is AI the reason? Is, you know, is this why Google doesn't need as many people?

Yeah.

And I don't know for certain, it could just be a restructuring. It doesn't look like Google went out there and made a statement being like, yeah, we're eliminating a ton of people using AI because That sounds bad itself, and I don't see corporations volunteering that information, whether it's true or not.

Yeah.

And that 35% could have been for other reasons as well, but you're going to see it. And you're also going to see the flip side in which people aren't certain yet what AI is better than humans for or what it's worse. A great example of this is Taco Bell and their—

Oh yeah. Wall Street Journal article?

Their drive-through.

Yeah.

They're thinking about getting rid of AI. So they did a small test in which for the drive-through assistants, they had some humans going out there and saying like, or AI saying like, hey, what would you like to order? And in some cases it worked really well. Some cases it worked so bad. I think one person asked for like 1,800 cups of water, something ridiculous like that. So he can get in touch with a human. But yeah, different organizations are testing different things. And Taco Bell is just like, oh, for our drive-thrus that are busy and have long lines, we're thinking of keeping humans. For the ones that are shorter, don't have as much lines, we're thinking of using AI. But in essence, what they're saying is for like busy lines, Yeah. it's not necessarily just about efficiencies, it's There— how I'm reading this is when you have a lot of lines and you need people constantly, that of course costs money, but it shows that the human's probably messing up less, so it just moves the line through. But if you have a drive-through with very few cars coming through, you use AI instead, you're saving some money because you don't need a full-time human. And even if they mess up a little bit here or there, the cost of fixing it is probably cheaper than hiring a human.

Yeah, so I think it's what's going to happen is even if we use the Taco Bell example, maybe AI will do 70 to 80% of the work, but you still have a human loop for 20 to 30%, and that's still a lot of efficiencies ultimately. And I do think we're going to move into a world— this is a little more philosophical, but most people will have universal basic income to supplement. And I think I also believe in what Elon said about universal wealth. I think universal wealth will happen probably 10, 15, 20 years out. There's going to be a period of adjustment. But I think if you want to get ahead of this and maybe you don't want to rely on universal basic income, income, what you do is you arm yourself with the knowledge here, you stay curious, and then you are constantly building on yourself. You're building skills to make yourself more marketable, and then you won't have to worry about this. This is why I think tier 5 schools, maybe those people are, they might be a little cheaper, but also you have, I think a lot of people that go to tier 5 schools, like sometimes they are more, for example, you went to a Cal State, right? A Cal State is like a, it's a decent school, but it's not a tier 1 school by any means, right?

No. Decent school.

It's an okay school. It's an okay school.

It's probably towards the bottom end.

Okay, so what do you think? What tier do you think that's in?

Definitely tier 5. That's the last tier, right? There's no tier 6?

No, there's only— let's just say in this scenario, there's only tier 5. Okay, so and I went— I barely got into UC San Diego, right? Transferred from UC Riverside.

I would consider it a tier 3 school.

Tier 3? Well, I think I was at a tier 4, tier 5 at UC Riverside. Okay, so I'm saying we're like the same person.

You know, you're UC San Diego.

I finished at UC San Diego, but I started at UC Riverside. Yeah. So, okay, let's assume I'm tier 3, tier 4, but you and I both worked our butts off. And I think people that go to tier 5s, a lot of them will— not a lot of them, but there's, there's, there are a select few that will work their butts off. A lot of the people that didn't do well in school end up doing really well as a business person or a leader.