This story about Ai and job cuts is from Sally Rawsthorne at the SMH. Entry level jobs for university leavers are being cut and yet it’s vitally important for them to know how to use AI. A case of knowing your enemy? I’ve added some timely info on AI and jobs from UNSW.
AI expertise has become increasingly crucial for university leavers’ job prospects yet it is a double-edged sword.
The technology is so capable that it could wipe out half of all white-collar entry-level jobs, says Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, which built AI assistant Claude, while the World Economic Forum predicts that 39 per cent of jobs will “fundamentally change” by 2030.
Those predictions are being realised already. Law firm MinterEllison in May announced it was cutting its graduate intake from more than 100 to 72.
“Responsible use of AI is improving efficiency in some of the more routine work graduates traditionally start on, while demand continues to shift towards complex matters,” MinterEllison chief people officer Rachel Banks said. “That combination has led us to take a more targeted approach.”
Changes are also afoot in accounting. At PricewaterhouseCoopers, AI has changed the Australian graduate hiring pattern.
The firm has cut entry-level roles by 6 per cent, while it is looking for half of its 2027 graduate intake to come from non-accounting backgrounds. Deloitte hired 730 university leavers this year (up from 655 last year), with “strong demand” for technology, data and engineering graduates.
Morgan Stanley’s US-based AI disruption tracker found that while the technology has not harmed the job market too much, younger workers bear the greatest impact.
“Entry-level roles, which have historically served as the training ground for graduates, are increasingly being reshaped or removed altogether as AI takes on routine cognitive tasks,” said business trend forecaster Michael McQueen. “It’s almost as if the first few rungs of the career ladder are being removed in a number of white-collar professions.”
He said the short-term outlook was “more competitive and uncertain” due to the cooling labour market, employers looking to AI for tasks previously done by junior workers, and growing scepticism about the value of a degree as education costs rise.
“In the next 12 to 24 months we are likely to see a tougher transition from study to work, particularly for those relying on traditional pathways.”
The Future Skills Organisation said employers report graduates are starting work lacking practical skills, AI know-how, communication ability and professional judgment.
“As a result, employers are bearing the cost of developing workforce readiness post-hire. This takes away employer investment from early career development for graduates,” it said in a submission to the Australian University Graduates Senate inquiry.
Beyond AI skills, McQueen said graduates could stand out in a difficult market if they “double down on the human skills that are harder to automate, such as communication, curiosity, creativity, ethical reasoning and collaboration”.
From UniNSW
As organisations race to adopt AI, Prof. Walsh from UNSW says the most successful businesses will be those that use the technology to support their people, rather than simply replace them.
“It’s your employees who understand exactly where the pain and pressure is and where the opportunity for innovation is in your business. You need to empower those people, give them the AI tools so that they can go off and make your business a better business,” says Prof. Toby Walsh, Chief Scientist at UNSW AI Institute.
Prof. Walsh says some organisations may be using AI as a convenient explanation for broader business challenges. “There’s a bit of AI washing,” he says. “A company that’s perhaps not been very well managed, and rather than saying that we’ve been poorly managed, they’ve been saying, ‘Well, we’re investing in AI’.”
Prof. Walsh says there is one area where the technology is already having a measurable impact: entry-level work. Today’s AI tools are particularly effective at tasks traditionally carried out by graduates and early-career employees.
“It’s certainly the case today that the sorts of capabilities that the AI models have, the sorts of things that people do when they start in their career, graduate level or entry level jobs, those are the sorts of things that AI seems to be able to do very well,” he says.
But he warns that businesses need to think beyond short-term efficiency gains. “Most business organisational structures are pyramids,” he says. “A lot of people go into the bottom, and fewer and fewer people rise up through the ranks and become managers.”
The concern is not simply about fewer graduate jobs today, but about the pipeline of future talent businesses will need tomorrow. Signs of that shift are already emerging. “There’s data showing that there’s been a decline in graduate-level recruitment,” says Prof. Walsh. “There was a chart in the Financial Times showing in the UK and the US, and I suspect very similar numbers in Australia, a 30% decline in graduate-level job adverts in the last three years.”