The career ladder is breaking down. The bottom rungs especially are hollowing out, and a lot of serious people are talking about it. Alan Milburn’s review for the government found that “the first rungs on the old career ladder have weakened”, with apprenticeship starts for young people down by more than 40 per cent.[1]
Not all of this is due to AI. The decline predates ChatGPT. In addition, the cost of employing an 18 year old is up 40 per cent since 2015.[2] But AI is an accelerant, and it is not the first. I’ve watched the PC, Office, the internet, offshoring, the cloud and SaaS each take a layer of work that used to occupy people, make it cheap, and make the rest of us more productive.
Here is what my own first rung taught me. In the late 1980s I joined a property developer, with six months on another firm’s graduate scheme already behind me. On one of my first days, I went to a colleague and asked if he had any work for me. He was in the middle of something that actually mattered to the company, and I was in his way, so he gave me a task. We both knew it was made up. He didn’t care whether I did it, and I did it anyway, because that is what the bottom rung was. My boss had told me on my first day that I would be useless for two years. I thought three to six months. He was right, and I suspect he was being generous.
Anyone who has designed a work-experience placement knows this from the other side. Giving a young person something useful to do, that isn’t a drain on every member of staff involved, is very hard to do well. Very often the value of the placement to a firm is negative.
Much of the work that once kept juniors busy can now be done by AI that an experienced person puts in place. So it’s getting harder to design junior roles. The bottom rung existed because there was grunt work that needed doing by someone who couldn’t say no. Whatever the junior learned, they learned by osmosis, from whoever happened to sit nearby, over two or three years. It was never designed as teaching, and it was not particularly good teaching.
Policy responses are arriving to fix the creaking first rung. Alan Milburn launched First Chance last week, asking employers to open entry-level jobs, work experience and apprenticeships to young people; Royal Mail, Octopus Energy, Greene King, Lloyds and NatWest have signed up.[3] In Preston, a pilot is putting young people at risk of becoming NEET through three weeks of AI training with apprenticeships at the end from BAE Systems, Heinz and JD Sports.[4] I hope all of it works.
I’d argue that if rebuilding the first rung is going to work, it must teach something on purpose, and we need to decide what that something is. That raises a question this publication exists to answer: which skills count now? We need to get clear about those, then teach them formally, rather than hoping they arrive as a by-product of donkey work that no longer exists. Some employers have already started thinking this way. Lucy Beaumont of SHL, which assesses graduates for employers, describes a large bank now recruiting psychology and law graduates on the grounds that the technical skills can be taught, and “it doesn’t really matter where you’ve come from.”[5] That instinct is right, and it needs a framework behind it, so that colleges can teach to it and employers can trust the certificate. In the meantime, anyone signing up to First Chance can start by deciding what their placement will teach before the young person walks in.
That is what After the Ladder is for: to understand, articulate and build frameworks around the skills that count now. We must help people to find and build on their strengths, carry responsibility earlier than the ladder allowed, and multiply what they can do using the tools and people around them. A consensus is emerging on this, which I’ll come to in future posts. The young people I meet on careers programmes are not asking for a forecast of which jobs will go. They want to know how to succeed at work, and they need us to chart a positive way forward for them.
One more thing. Everything above still assumes young people need years of drudgery before they can be useful. I’ve spent six years working with 16 to 24 year olds and I no longer believe that. Next week: The inevitable rise of the Forgotten Third.
Notes
[1] Young people and work: interim report, Alan Milburn for DWP, 28 May 2026. Also: six in ten young people who are NEET have never had a job (four in ten twenty years ago); nearly 30% of NEETs have good GCSEs, 15% a degree (gov.uk/government/publications/young-people-and-work-interim-report). In the United States, Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab finds employment among 22 to 25 year olds in AI-exposed jobs running 19 per cent below trend, almost entirely through hiring that never happened (Canaries in the Coal Mine, updated Sep 2026; thesignal.substack.com/p/ai-is-phasing-out-the-entry-level). The Open University Business Barometer 2026 reports 19% of 1,500 UK business leaders have already cut entry-level recruitment; of those, 42% cite AI. And the people who hire graduates for a living are blunt about what that means: entry-level jobs, says Lucy Beaumont of SHL, “are your training ground. If you take that away, it has serious implications for every rung of the ladder” (CNBC, 23 Sep 2026).
[2] Tony Blair Institute, reported by the Independent, 23 Sep 2026
[3] First Chance launch, FE News, 22 Sep 2026
[5] Lucy Beaumont, SHL, interviewed by CNBC, 23 Sep 2026 (see [1]).