My daughter is finishing an MSc in computer science. She worked hard through both her BSc and her masters, got fantastic grades, and has been sitting Microsoft and Python exams in whatever spare time a master’s degree allows to make herself more employable. The picture isn’t great, and having spent twenty-five years in IT I’m not entirely surprised, but I am concerned.
There doesn’t seem to be the same number of graduate roles available as there used to be. Dev roles want two years of commercial experience, support roles want the same, and entry-level roles expect experience that can only come from doing the job.
Companies are either already using AI to cover work that would have gone to juniors, or they’re waiting to see how things shake out before committing to headcount. That makes sense from a budget perspective, but I do wonder what it means long term.
Nobody starts out knowing everything. An IT graduate comes away with knowledge that would be of real value to any company, but what they need next is the chance to put it into practice. You build an understanding of how things work in a live environment rather than a controlled one, and none of that happens without someone giving you the work in the first place. Right now that first step is getting harder to find.
If the junior roles aren’t there, those people don’t develop, and in ten or fifteen years the experienced people will have moved on or retired with nobody coming through behind them. Maybe AI changes the shape of all this in ways nobody has really modelled yet. I hope so, because I don’t see many people with the ability to do something about it treating it as a problem worth solving.
Seriously.