My daughter is finishing an MSc in computer science. She is very intelligent, works really hard and takes immense pride in her work. As she gets closer to finishing in October she’s started looking at what jobs are out there, and any spare time she has (which isn’t a lot when studying for a masters), she’s been studying for and sitting Microsoft and Python exams to make herself more employable. The picture isn’t great, and having spent twenty-five years in IT I’m not entirely surprised, but I am concerned.
Graduate roles are disappearing. Not with any announcement or any honest conversation about why — they’re just not there in the numbers they used to be. Dev roles want two years of commercial experience. Support roles want the same. The entry level has moved up a floor and nobody’s put a ladder out.
Companies are either already using AI to cover work that would have gone to juniors, or they’re waiting, letting the dust settle to see how it all shakes out before committing to headcount. The logic isn’t hard to follow from a budget perspective, but whether it makes sense in the long run is a different question and one I don’t think enough people are asking.
Nobody in this industry starts out knowing everything. The knowledge and experience has to come from somewhere. The classroom gives a fantastic grounding and knowledge base, but the real expereince comes from troubleshooting real tickets, learning the process and that there is quite often more than one solution. We have all got things wrong sometimes and then figured out why. You build up an understanding of how things actually work in a live environment rather than a controlled one. None of that happens without someone giving you the work in the first place, and right now that first step is getting harder to find.
If the junior roles aren’t there, the people doing them don’t develop. In ten or fifteen years the seniors who carry that experience will have moved on, and I genuinely don’t know who comes after them. Maybe AI changes the shape of all this in ways nobody has really modelled yet. Maybe it works out differently than it looks right now. But it doesn’t feel like anyone is particularly worried about it, and perhaps they should be.
Seriously.