Michelle Sims, CEO of YUPRO Placement, a skills-first placement firm sourcing, recruiting, retaining and advancing overlooked talent.
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Removing the first career rung has shaken the entire ladder. Middle managers are drowning in low-level execution, senior roles are starving for qualified talent, and the C-suite is left watching the company’s innovation reservoir run dry.
We’re left with a question that threatens the viability of every organization: Where will the next generation of experienced workers come from?
The ladder is getting top-heavy.
Over the last few years, we’ve seen employers all but extinguish the entry-level career rung. Many factors—AI, economic uncertainty, rightsizing and a slow hiring market—have converged to create this shift. Short-term, it saved some money. Longer-term, employers are second-guessing their decision. Gartner predicts that half of all companies that made AI-related headcount reductions will rehire workers.
While junior talent is still being overlooked, though, employers are asking for more senior-level roles. Indeed found that senior-level job postings increased 13.5% between January 2025 and May 2026, while mid-level postings declined 6.7% and entry-level postings declined 6.3%. In software development alone, nearly 70% of postings in the first quarter of 2026 were senior level.
Today’s senior developer was once a junior developer. Today’s operations leader was once an analyst. Today’s executive was once learning how to navigate a workplace. Experience is not a natural resource; it must be intentionally created. As we head toward 2027, employers should consider what happens to their talent pipeline when fewer people get the opportunity to gain experience.
Here are some of the cracks in the ladder that we need to fix:
1. Learning How To Work
In automating so many entry-level roles, we’ve effectively eliminated the critical career stage of learning how to work. This isn’t just an entry-level problem; it’s becoming an organization-wide problem.
Those manual tasks helped workers learn how to communicate with a manager, meet a deadline, receive feedback, solve problems, recover from mistakes, understand customers and exercise judgment.
AI can increasingly perform pieces of these tasks, but it cannot give an inexperienced worker the judgment that comes from performing it themselves. The consequence is a workforce experience deficit. And the business impact? Fewer workers are developing judgment, institutional knowledge and durable skills; ramp times are longer when companies eventually hire; and experienced employees face greater pressure to compensate for this gap.
2. Execution Too High On The Ladder
A manager who once coached six people, improved a process or worked with customers is now reviewing AI output, correcting deliverables, preparing materials and completing work previously delegated to junior employees. Companies are creating a paradox of reducing headcount while simultaneously reducing the leverage of their most valued talent.
The business impact extends well beyond burnout. Managers have less capacity to coach and develop people, and strategic work gets crowded out. High-potential managers who should be preparing for leadership roles are instead consumed by execution in their current one.
3. Consuming The Talent Pipeline Faster Than It’s Being Replaced
Demand for senior leadership is increasing, but companies cannot continually buy experience from the external labor market if fewer organizations are willing to create that experience internally. Without analysts, coordinators, junior developers, associates, recruiters and technicians learning today, the future senior leadership pipeline significantly shrinks.
Over the long term, this leaves senior positions vacant and compromises succession planning.
Redesigning The Career Ladder
The old career ladder doesn’t need restoring; it needs redefining. The new career ladder should be created around learning, leverage and leadership.
1. Entry-level workers should become learners, doers and AI co-pilots.
Instead of requiring two or three years of experience for entry-level jobs, employers can intentionally create experience through apprenticeships, internships and other work-based learning models. Junior employees should learn to use AI, but also to question its conclusions, audit its output, communicate recommendations and exercise judgment.
2. Middle managers should become developers of talent.
As junior capacity is rebuilt, managers should delegate meaningful work, teach judgment and develop future leaders. Organizations can reinforce this by incorporating talent development and internal mobility into management expectations.
If we measure managers on talent progression and use AI to increase teams’ productivity, rather than simply eliminating the bottom layer of those teams, our middle managers will build the bottom and prepare for the top.
3. Senior leaders should become architects of organizational capability.
Leaders need to identify where critical knowledge resides, create learning pathways, sponsor emerging leaders and make succession planning an active business discipline rather than an annual HR exercise.
The old career ladder is gone.
The old career ladder is never coming back, and it shouldn’t. When the first rung broke, it compromised the integrity of all of them. Yes, we changed the rungs, but we didn’t eliminate the need for a ladder. Someone still has to learn the business, make the smaller mistakes, develop judgment, manage people for the first time and eventually become the senior talent every organization wants to hire.
As we prepare 2027 plans, the question every leader should be asking is how people will gain the experience their organization will need three, five and 10 years from now. The organizations that answer that question today will build a better, stronger career ladder for their AI-enabled workforces of tomorrow.
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