Career navigation gets trickier. Ladders breaking, org charts scrambled, and potholes emerging (where may you least suspect).
- sciart0
- Jul 21
- 2 min read
Excerpt to first link above: Last month, my friend Amy, a mid-level marketing manager at a Fortune 500 company, had her entire junior analyst team “restructured.”
Why officially? “Strategic realignment.”
Reality?
AI tools now handle what used to be three full-time positions.
AI has eliminated 76,440 jobs in 2025 alone, and 41% of global employers plan to reduce their workforce in the next five years due to AI automation.
But, you don’t just lose your current job when this happens, you lose the corporate ladder you were climbing. The relationships you made and the personal career brand you built that led to promotions and growth are gone.
We are currently experiencing changes in the job market that we have never seen post-industrial revolution, specifically in Big Tech. Big Tech reduced hiring new graduates by 25% in 2024 compared to 2023. Simultaneously, they increased hiring professionals with 2–5 years of experience by 27%.
How can you pay your dues, learn, and build your career when there are no entry-level positions to be had?
This paradox is becoming more and more common in today’s workforce; companies want someone with experience, but there are fewer and fewer positions that allow an employee to gain experience.
This sea change feels different.
The past 35 years have given us more rapid change than at any time in history. The speed at which technology has advanced has placed us in the dot-com boom, the mobile phone revolution, and the cloud transformation.
AI isn’t just changing what we do and how we perform, it’s eliminating the steps we traditionally started with to learn, grow, and develop our soft and hard skills to build a foundation for a career.