AI isn't killing entry-level jobs. Experienced workers are taking them

Young job seekers are blaming their vanishing prospects on AI. Older employees are quietly absorbing their roles instead

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Ask why a recent graduate can't land a job this year, and you'll hear the same answer almost everywhere. Artificial intelligence ate the entry-level position, the thinking goes, because chatbots now draft the memos, write the code, and design the ads that junior employees once learned on, and those roles simply aren't coming back. It's a tidy explanation. It's also incomplete.

The entry-level crunch itself is real, but the mechanism behind it looks less like robots replacing new graduates and more like older, more experienced workers reclaiming jobs that used to belong to someone younger and cheaper. Workers who lost the roles they expected haven't left the workforce so much as slid into the ones meant for people half their age.

Aaron Terrazas, Glassdoor's former chief economist, raised this possibility in a recent examination of the white-collar labor crisis. "It might not be that AI is taking new grad jobs," he said, "as much as workers with........

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