With the use of AI, we keep setting the bar higher and higher for ourselves

We work longer, sleep less, produce more and differently, understand concepts typically unbeknownst to us, while sometimes questionings its true value.

This is being called the new Standard of Success. And if it’s happening at the individual level, it will obviously happen at the company level. Or maybe the companies are driving our own individual adoption.

Some companies will use this crutch to race to the bottom = let’s cut all humans and widen our margins as much as possible.

Some companies will use this advantage to race to the top = let’s have our humans do more of what they like and are good at.

Many junior employees are worried about this dynamic as their jobs are always in the headlines due to the oncoming “job-apocalypse”. Experts say that these media headlines are used to boost valuations of the AI companies that can press the button at any point and delete all our professions. By the way, juniors and seniors alike are impacted by the dominance of AI in companies… If you are not willing to upskill yourself, your age is not the differentiator, maybe it’s your mentality and approach to work.

A recent study by PwC of over 1 billion job posts across 6 continents hints that the job-apocalypse may be overblown, BUT that important changes are coming:

Entry level jobs didn’t disappear; UNTRAINED entry level jobs have

Required skills for a junior to enter a company have changed: motivational leadership, team building, people management, even mentorship

Entry level roles that listed those skills grew by 35%, while those that did not fell by 10%, indicating that skills deemed as purely entry level are now easily automatable

So-What: the job market now demands at entry the exact skills that are developed while ON THE JOB, sometimes called apprenticeship. Leadership, process management, team management are not taught from a textbook, you gotta practice them. But where do you practice them if you are supposed to arrive at the company having already learned them?

It’s true that some companies are just getting lazy with it, posting that we need 10+ years of Claude Code as a basic qualification. Maybe some AI slop there..