If AI Takes over all the Entry-Level Jobs. Who’s Building Your Next Leaders?
Right now, layoff trackers are reporting job cuts at a pace of nearly a thousand a day, with more than half of this year's layoff events citing AI as a reason. The roles disappearing fastest are the ones at the bottom of the ladder. Entry-level. Junior. With companies saying, “We’ll just have AI do that.”
Unfortunately, when you delete the bottom rung, you don’t just lose a task. You lose a place where your future leaders were supposed to start.
The farm team you forgot you had
Every great leader you admire started somewhere small. Answering the phones. Closing out the register. Doing the work that looked like it didn’t matter… until it became the training ground that did.
Entry-level positions were never just cheap labor. It was your farm team. The place where green talent learned the standard, got developed by someone above them, and slowly became the person other people could count on.
AI can do the grunt work. AI cannot become a leader who knows when to develop you. And it cannot grow itself into the person who, five years from now, raises the standard of an entire team.
What the data actually says about development
This is where leaders get to choose between comfort and the long game. According to the National Workplace Trends Study, 81% of American workers believe the most successful companies prioritize learning and development. That same 81% agree that companies who prioritize training and development are the ones that retain their top talent.
Now layer this on top. 42% of Gen Z workers plan to look for a new job within the next 12 months, and lack of advancement is one of the loudest reasons. They are not asking for a beanbag chair. They are asking to grow. 64% told us clearly that a career path with real milestones boosts their motivation and commitment.
You cannot deliver any of that to a role you just eliminated.
Bar Raisers™ raise the person. Tolerators just cut the cost.
A Tolerator looks at an entry-level role and sees an expense to optimize. Cut it. AI is faster anyway. A Bar Raiser™ looks at that same role and sees a person to develop.
We call it the Committed Cultivator, and it’s the 12th trait in the Bar Raisers™ DNA. A Bar Raiser™ intentionally looks for moments to develop greatness in others. They don’t just raise the bar. They raise the person. They leave everyone they encounter more capable than before they showed up.
I learned that trait from a team lead named Michelle, years before I ever stood on a stage. She stayed late one night to teach the greenest person in the building a closing procedure nobody else would slow down to explain. That person was me. And the standard she handed me outlived her shift, her job, and probably her memory of that night. (I’m telling the full story Thursday, so stay tuned.)
Here’s the cultivator math a spreadsheet will never show you. Develop one person well, and you don’t get one better employee. You get the standard they carry to everyone they touch for the rest of their career.
The Tolerator isn’t a villain. They’re just comfortable.
Cutting the role feels responsible. Efficient. Defensible in the budget meeting. And when 'we're letting AI handle it' is the easiest thing to say in a budget meeting, comfortable starts to look a lot like strategic.
A Resignation Workplace and a Destination Workplace® are built on the same boring decisions, made differently, day after day. One develops people. The other deletes them and wonders why nobody wants to stay.
What to do tomorrow.
Pick one early-career person on your team this week. Just one.
Hand them a standard to grow into, not just a task to complete. Then schedule fifteen minutes to teach them something only you know how to do. Not a delegation. A true development.
Those fifteen minutes are the one thing AI will never put on your calendar for you. And the ripple you start this week, will turn into the leadership pipeline you’ll be grateful for in five years.
About Betsy: Betsy Allen-Manning is the wake-up call you didn’t know you needed. She’s a high-energy leadership keynote speaker and creator of the Bar Raisers™ Movement: a proprietary system redefining how organizations are approaching performance, leadership, and culture. Featured on FOX, CBS, NBC, ABC, and TEDx, Betsy works with organizations across corporate, franchise, association, nonprofit, and government sectors. She’s the lead researcher behind the National Workplace Trends Study, and delivers programs around her Bar Raisers™ and Leadership Mastery frameworks. She is the founder of Destination Workplace®, an award-winning leadership development firm in Dallas, Texas.
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