Not long ago I had heard from some friends about a slow inflection on the junion positions openings, in the sense that after a time of decline, they finally seemed to start going up again. I have been wondering if this was just an anecdote or if things were finally changing from the better..

Today, I heard from the Morning Weekend italian podcast, that unfortunately this does not seem to be the case at all. The full story is presented, for the Netherlands, in a recent article by the Dutch newspaper NRC: AI zet juniorvacatures op de tocht: hebben bedrijven liever Claude dan een gen Z’er? (AI puts junior job openings at risk: Do companies prefer Claude over a Gen Z’er?).

Let me quote the article and the podcast (don’t worry, translated to English)

Unemployment among young people aged 15 to 25 in the Netherlands has risen to around 9% of the workforce in recent years, according to Statistics Netherlands (CBS). While overall unemployment in the Netherlands remains very low at 3.9%, it is rising fastest among young people. A Rabobank study earlier this year found a noticeable decline in junior job openings in professions most exposed to generative AI. Since the end of 2022, employment among 15- to 24-year-olds in these professions has dropped by 13%. Banks, law firms, and consulting firms worldwide are already hiring fewer juniors and expect AI to permanently change job roles. […]

The effects of AI on jobs are only just becoming measurable. But the nature of many office jobs is changing rapidly due to AI, and various international studies so far show that companies are primarily automating simpler junior tasks with AI. For starters in sectors like legal services, administration, and marketing, the number of job openings in the Netherlands has fallen by 30 to over 40% in recent years. […]

In between these sad news, they also rectify a bit by observing that

It’s too simplistic to say AI is making young people unemployed en masse, as new opportunities are also emerging, and declining employment has multiple macroeconomic causes.

But the problem remains that at the current pace, the pool of potential future “senior” employees is shrinking fast. If GenAI continues to take over nearly all junior tasks, how will companies train young talent? After all, how can they gain the experience needed to climb the career ladder if the foundational tasks are now handled by chatbots?

Warnings on the unsustainability of this practice have been coming for a while at this point.

Talking to our students, I can see that they notice the problem. This is is highlighted also in the article, that mentions the hostility that many young people feel towards these developments. Unsurprisingly, tech billionaires keep being booed at university speeches all around. And now there is data backing it up, at least in the Netherlands. As the pollster Martijn Lampert from Glocalities told NRC:

Among people aged 18–34, 48% are worried or very worried that AI could replace them in the workplace.

Yet Lampert cautions against oversimplification:

This is not technophobia. These young people aren’t afraid of AI itself, but of a society that doesn’t protect them. [..] They’re not afraid of AI, but of who will pay the price.

And what will be this price I would add.

What’s puzzling to me, is that employees are starting panicking because of the negative effects that GenAI is already having on the preparation of some students. One would hope they would see the irony of the situation, where they are themselves are offloading the work to AI and exacerbating the problem by not training their next generation of employees.

At the end of the day, most opeople are probably not afraid of GenAI per se, but of how its benefits and the wealth it generates will be distributed. I agree with Luca Misculin from Il Post’s Morning: if the current distribution model persists, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, then the fears of this generation are entirely justified.