A shark can out swim me, but I could definitely run faster than a shark on land. In a triathlon it all comes down to whichever of us is the better cyclist.

Last week I wrote about the challenges facing junior professionals in the current work environment. More work typically done by entry level workers is being given over to AI. As a consequence, the job market for these positions is getting tougher. People just getting started in their careers are not finding roles to gain valuable mentorship. They are not being given the same opportunities to build experience that they used to. The pipeline for moving from junior into senior is narrowing.

The prospects of junior professionals are top of mind for me this week. Last Friday, I attended the Per Scholas graduation ceremony for their IT Support cohort. In February, I had the pleasure of doing mock interviews with each of the 18 graduates. Many of the students are making career transitions. It's a reminder that it's not just young college graduates who are starting their careers, but parents, immigrants, and people (like me) who have been laid off and are looking for a change.

You can go back and read last week's post for a deeper dive into the problem. This week I'm talking about solutions. The value of junior professionals used to be measured in terms of the repetitive, lower skilled work they took on. Much of that work is now being handed to AI instead of junior professionals. We need to remind ourselves of all the other ways that early career employees bring value. If everyone replaces junior roles with AI, the short term efficiency gains won't be a substitute for the long term erosion of the future work force.

Experienced professionals start out as juniors. There is a pipeline that starts workers out with entry level tasks. It builds their expertise through mentorship and exposure, and layers on responsibility and ambiguity over time. This progression toward senior teaches people to recognize when their work is "good" or at least "good enough." For example, junior lawyers draft briefs, summarize depositions and make first drafts of contracts. Junior engineers are often asked to implement pieces of software or diagnose time consuming bugs. Senior employees have already defined these tasks and know what "correct" looks like. But they have meetings to attend, so the actual work is given to someone less experienced.

The challenge is that if we're replacing junior level jobs with AI, the pipeline for gaining the expertise necessary to direct the AI will disappear. Senior employees retire. They quit to raise chickens, make wine and write newsletters. Without training juniors, the pipeline is broken. At some point, there won't be enough senior level people left to hire.

The stock market incentivizes companies to make these short term decisions. It's also common for newer generations to frequently switch jobs. It can take a few years to train up a junior worker to where they are operating on their own. That investment isn't attractive if you think they are just going to leave soon after. Asking individual companies to take on the cost and the risk of hiring and training junior employees isn't an attractive proposition. Nobody wants to invest in training someone just so they can leave for their competitor.

In order to prevent a scenario where we've hollowed out the workforce, some companies are going to have to bite the bullet and train junior professionals. This means extending their compensation plans further into the future to keep people around longer. It means plotting achievable milestones so that promotions are more predictable. By keeping people around longer, investing in junior talent makes more sense. Companies will benefit in ways that go beyond output, such as improving the performance of your senior staff.

There's a practice in software development called Rubber Duck Debugging. The idea is that the act of explaining your code out loud, step by step, will reveal mistakes and gaps. The technique doesn't require you to explain things to another human (a rubber duck will do). But a real human is a much better debugging partner than a piece of plastic. Juniors fulfill this role well. They will ask questions, consider alternatives, and make connections to other parts of the product and business. These are things that AI systems has difficulty with, given their limited ability to maintain context.

Yes, juniors require mentorship and instruction. It takes attention from experienced employees to make sure they're doing the right thing. When they fail, those same people must step in to correct and teach. But it's not a one-way street. The act of teaching and explaining helps senior staff clarify their thoughts and uncover gaps in their plans.

Quality control is everyone’s responsibility, but there's always room for something to slip through the cracks. More brains on a project means more opportunity to identify defects and fix them before they become critical failures. Smaller teams are more likely to miss an important flaw in the product, plan, or documentation. Juniors are expected to review the work their team delivers and ask questions when something doesn’t make sense. It's how they gain experience. This isn't a task that can be effectively handed off to a machine with the same results.

People early in their careers have the ability to spend more time working. People talk a lot about maintaining work life balance. Early in my career, I slept under my desk a few times. In the professional world, your twenties are rocket fuel that you burn to achieve escape velocity. Nobody should be forced or even asked to work late hours. But if someone chooses to forgo attachments (pets, spouses, houses) and double down on their career, a company would be well served to support that choice. Often, the lack of balance early in your career allows you to enjoy balance later on.

AI tools still need human guidance and verification (or at least someone to blame when things go wrong). Senior engineers are excited to engage with AI right now. Directing the tools and guiding them to fix their errors is an exciting, new way to work. But the shine will wear off. There will come a day when senior staff get tired of babysitting and correcting AI. They will realize they need to make some changes when they look up and notice their kids have grown three inches while they were busy prompting. Then they'll look around for someone to hand off the rote parts of the process.

Enter junior professionals. They are well suited to tediously analyzing an AI’s output. Doing so will give them the experience they need to understand the business and recognize when a deliverable is finished. It’s different than doing the work themselves, as has been the case historically, but will be an important entry point for gaining the skills and knowledge needed to eventually take on senior level responsibility.

This article took me three weeks to finish. It usually takes one. In that time, there are already signals that things may be shifting for juniors. IBM has announced it is tripling the number of just out of school software engineers it plans to hire. They've rewritten their job roles to take into account use of AI, focusing more on the customer than the job of coding.

This makes a lot of sense for IBM, which has an average company tenure of seven years. In other tech companies, the average is closer to four. When people work for you longer, the investment to hire and train juniors makes a lot more sense. Over time, employees gain deep knowledge about the business and its customers' needs. This knowledge is extraordinarily valuable and is exactly the kind of knowledge needed to be able to direct AI tools toward real business objectives. Look for company tenure to become a critical metric for companies adopting AI. For the ones that get this right, the payoff will be long term resilience.

The path forward isn’t about replacing junior professionals with AI. Early career employees create value beyond the rote work that AI is starting to handle. If we want a future where AI meaningfully augments human work, we need people who understand the work deeply enough to guide it, challenge it, and improve it. That skill is built through experience, mentorship, and time spent doing the job. Companies that continue to invest in junior talent won’t just be doing the right thing for the workforce as a whole. They’ll be guaranteeing their own success by ensuring they aren't trading off short term results for long term value.

For more information related to the junior professionals, check out these links.

The Shartle is a hulking turtle-bodied leviathan with with the savage head of an enormous shark. Its shell is often layered with crude metal plates, bolted and chained in place, scarred from countless battles. Rust bleeds into barnacled seams, and iron spikes jut outward like the teeth of a bear trap. The ground trembles when it lumbers forward on legs like pillars. when it opens its serrated jaws, the air fills with the stench of rot and brine. Its black eyes, never blinking, constantly search for prey.

As always, you can find more on the shartle for free over on Patreon.

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