My wife asked me to pick up groceries on my way home. “Buy one carton of milk and, if they have avocados, get six,” she said.

I came home with six cartons of milk and she got upset when she saw them. “Why did you buy six cartons of milk,” she asked.

“They had avocados.”

There was no newsletter last week because I was on vacation with my family. I should have mentioned this in the previous newsletter and I didn’t. My mistake. I’ll do better.

This week I want to talk about the challenges early career professionals are facing. News reports, industry analysis, hiring data, and my own conversations tell me that getting started professionally is becoming harder. This isn't a topic where I'll be able to fit all my thoughts into one article. This week, I’m focusing on describing the problem. Next week will be about solutions.

The core problem isn’t just fewer jobs. It’s the reduction in opportunity of the professional pipeline that turns beginners into experts. Whether someone is a new graduate or pivoting to a new career, corporations are narrowing the opportunities to enter the workforce. Education helps people prepare for work by building strong foundations, but the real training happens on the job, through exposure, repetition, and mentorship. That well worn path is fading.

Mentorship and modeling play a huge role in professional development. Research shows that behavior, norms, and judgment are learned through proximity to more experienced practitioners. A study on police training found that rookies paired with more aggressive training officers were more likely to use force even after their training period ended. The broader lesson is that people absorb professional habits, knowledge, and values from the people around them. When early career professionals lack consistent access to strong mentors and role models, they are forced to navigate professional life largely on their own.

The pandemic drove this lesson home. For people already established in their careers, remote work meant flexibility, autonomy, and more time for their personal lives, even while they continued to do work they already understood. But for those early in their career, the benefit was less clear. The shift to remote work sparked widespread discussion about how the loss of in-person mentorship would affect this cohort.

For early career professionals, learning on the job depends on observation, informal interaction, and rapid feedback. Professional acumen comes from watching how others solve problems, handle ambiguity, manage conflict, and recover from mistakes. It comes from spontaneous questions, overheard conversations, and quick guidance that keeps small blockers from becoming major obstacles. Remote work did not eliminate learning, but it made it slower and more fragmented. The pandemic is over, and many people are returning to the office, but the challenge remains.

Today, AI keeps these challenges alive. Employment in AI-exposed roles is declining fastest among early career workers. Experienced professionals use AI tools to amplify their productivity, reducing the need for a team of juniors supporting them. A senior engineer who once led junior developers can now supervise a network of coding agents. Lawyers who once relied on junior associates for research, drafting contracts, and summarizing depositions can now use AI for those same tasks. This means fewer people are needed for the same amount of work. The people being excluded are the ones with the least experience.

From a business perspective, the incentives are clear. AI-enabled senior employees produce more output with less support. Companies seeking efficiency (i.e. all of them), naturally reduce hiring, freeze junior roles, and restructure to rely on fewer, more experienced workers. The result is fewer entry points into professional careers and increased competition for the on ramps that remain.

The long-term risk is systemic. If junior professionals cannot gain experience, they cannot develop into senior professionals. Organizations gain short-term efficiency, but they undermine the pipeline of future expertise. AI only increases the importance of skilled judgment. Systems still fail, and without experienced professionals to diagnose and correct those failures, organizations become more fragile.

Even large technology companies are acknowledging the risk. Microsoft executives have raised concerns about the need for sustained training and mentorship to preserve the software engineer pipeline. Eliminating junior roles creates a future shortage of professionals capable of supervising complex AI systems, fixing failures, and managing high-risk decisions. Even with that recognition, it's unlikely that businesses will decide to increase their costs for the altruistic purpose of training more juniors. Why spend money now when you can spend money later to attract a dwindling number of senior professionals?

Let's examine what got us here in one of the most AI-exposed job roles, software engineering. Decades ago, software creation was the responsibility of engineers. Roles such as product manager and UX designer did not exist. During the dotcom boom of the 90s and early 2000s, businesses competed not only on functionality, but on usability, experience, and accessibility. This led to specialized roles in design, product strategy, and user research.

Over time, software development became increasingly specialized. Responsibilities once held by engineers were given over to information architects, UX designers, product management, and organizational leadership. Engineers largely supported this shift. Many were happy to give up their non-technical responsibilities to focus on new programming languages, design patterns, and arguing about tabs vs spaces. Software development increasingly focused on how to create things while leaving others to decide what to create and why. With the advent of powerful tools that can do most of the "how" on their own, software engineers are stuck trying to justify their value.

The primary risk from the loss of entry points to early career professionals is not specific to individual companies, but to each profession as a whole. Organizations will act rationally in isolation to reduce costs by hiring fewer workers, decreasing the number of opportunities to enter a particular field. But the individual actions collectively create a system unable to sustain itself in the long term. Each company optimizes for efficiency, but the collective outcome is a shrinking talent pipeline.

Senior professionals are effective with AI precisely because they have accumulated experience, judgment, and systems understanding. They understand dependencies and know when outputs are wrong. They can diagnose failures and anticipate knock on effects. These skills are developed through years of guided practice.

If early career professionals no longer have the opportunity to learn under supervision, those skills won't develop at scale. Over time, the number of professionals capable of managing these complex systems will decline. Organizations will become increasingly dependent on automation without having sufficient human capacity to govern it. This creates long term fragility. Failures become harder to diagnose as institutional knowledge erodes. The workforce becomes sclerotic and less adaptable.

For decades, early career professionals learned by doing work that required less judgment but high repetition. That process created familiarity, confidence, and intuition. Much of that repetition is now being automated. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Few eight-year-olds ever announced their desire to spend three years doing data entry to earn the opportunity to pursue their own projects. The elimination of some repetitive work will allow humans to focus on the intuitive leaps and creative problem solving they are good at.

The challenge is that organizations are still evaluating the value of junior professionals based on the work they did that is being replaced by AI. We need to shift this perception. If organizations treat early career development as a cosst center to reduce, they will optimize themselves into long-term fragility. If they recognize the other ways that early career employees bring value to the table, they can build systems that scale talent instead of just consuming it.

Next week, I’ll focus on what that could look like.

For more about the challenges facing early career professionals, check out these links.

The avocadodo is a strange fusion of fruit and fowl. This plump, green-bodied creature has the stout frame of a dodo bird and the tough, pebbled skin of a ripe avocado. Its wings may be stubby and useless, but it hardly needs them. The avocadodo has the ability to teleport if threatened. When attacked, its body shimmers and vanishes, reappearing somewhere safe with a soft pop of displaced air.

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

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