Yesterday I was on campus at Birkbeck University for the kick off workshop for my Msc in organisational psychology. Towards the end of the day we split into groups for an exercise on the Life Career Development module. We had to pick a photo that best represented our careers, and talk through that with our group. I found myself with three other students: a former senior leader in pharmaceuticals turned consultant, a train bridge manager, and a former advertising executive turned leadership coach.
As we shared our photos we looked for points of similarity and difference, and what stood out was how we had all arrived at the MSc with intentionality. The first half of our careers we had done things because they sounded cool, or we were asked or expected to, or because it offered good money or advancement prospects. We had been led by others, circumstances or need, rather than any big career plan we had designed ourselves.
I called this opportunistic. It’s not a strategy — when I was in my 20s my thinking about my career was not that structured. I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I grew up. It led me to do many different things, and figure out what I’m good at and what I enjoy. I don’t look back with any regrets on the jobs I did.
Within our group we had all experienced that opportunism across the first half of our careers. For some it had created opportunities to travel or live in other countries, for others it led to trying out lots of different industries and roles until we found one that fit, and then stuck at for 10, 15, 20 years.
We were then talking about this MSc in the context of what we wanted to do in the next twenty years. Even our tutor shared her thinking that she would be working well into her 60s, 70s, maybe even 80s… (how do you feel about the thought of retirement? Do you even have a plan yet? — I don’t).
It made me reflect on research I concluded last week, about how AI is impacting product roles (hit reply and I’ll gladly share you the final report). I spoke to 8 senior product leaders across UK and Europe on what they were seeing happen within their companies, and how they saw AI impacting them and their teams.
I specifically asked about juniors, and every single one of them agreed it was important to keep bringing juniors on, giving them opportunities to join and progress within their organisations. A welcome counter to the moral panic inducing narrative of ‘AI is replacing entry level roles’.
Many of us are asking “what entry level roles will exist in the future?”, but I think this is the wrong question.
It’s far more useful to be asking “what is the purpose of entry level roles, and how do we create opportunities that fulfill that purpose?”
There is an implicit social contract within our society that seems to be breaking at the moment. The responsibility of each generation is to support and nurture and prepare the next generation for what lies ahead. It’s a collective responsibility, one we must all play our part in, including companies.
So this is less about what juniors can do for us now, and more about what we can do for them now so they can do things for us in future. It’s an investment, not a withdrawal.
The purpose of entry level roles is to give juniors safe exposure to different situations where they can build their capability to become valuable contributors and leaders in future.
A brief interlude here to share a model I use when I talk about capability:
capability = knowledge + skills + experience
AI is only relevant to one part of this equation. It’s great at democratising access to skills: I don’t know how to create a beautifully designed slide deck, so I use Claude Artifacts to do that for me.
However, until we have microchips inserted in our brains that we can download data to there is no real substitute for internalised knowledge. This is why I believe there is a growing demand for job candidates to have domain knowledge, particularly in regulated industries, where there is nuance and grey areas that AI woefully gets wrong.
And when it comes to experience, this is about actual embodiment within time and space. Exposure to different scenarios and environments, and how those make you feel in your body (interoception drives our survival). You learn the stove is hot by touching it, not by intellectualising or reading about it. Our acquired experiences are what lead us to make good decisions and develop our judgement — whether that’s product sense or design taste, or some other euphemism.
Building capability requires learning. This is an inherently frustrating, confusing, sometimes painful process. I strongly believe it’s not something we should be removing friction from or shortcutting. This is where we can all be encouraging juniors (and ourselves!) to embrace the discomfort that comes from growth.
I made a point in yesterday’s workshop that being opportunistic during those first 10 years of my career were absolutely essential to developing my capability. I kept saying yes to see where it took me. I learned things you can read about in a textbook or LLM output but not truly understand, like what happens when you push a new feature live on a Friday afternoon, or how to respond when you’re put on the spot by an angry CEO, or whether button colour matters at all.
So your role as a leader is:
To create employment opportunities for juniors that give to them more than you gain initially (first two years)
To create learning opportunities within your company that provide an appropriate level of accountability (i.e. consequences for failure) — think discomfort, not pain
To provide training, coaching and personal role modelling so juniors can internalise knowledge around what ‘good’ looks like
Do you agree? I would love to know your thoughts — hit reply to send a message direct to my inbox.