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Tag: entry level

  • This 26-year-old was laid off from his ‘dream job’ at PwC building AI agents. He’s worried the tech he built has led to more job cuts | Fortune

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    Titans of industry like Salesforce, Microsoft, and Intel have all been slashing staff, and employees are hand-wringing about being next on the chopping block. Donald King, a 26-year-old who built AI agents for PwC, never thought he’d be the next one out the door—but he soon realized why consultants are called “hatchet-men.”

    After graduating with a degree in finance from the University of Texas at Austin in 2021, King landed a job at one of the “Big Four” consulting giants: PwC. He packed his bags and moved to New York to start his role as an associate in technology consulting, working with major clients, including Oracle, during his first year. But everything changed when PwC announced a $1 billion investment in AI; King was already intrigued by the tech, so he pitched himself to join the company’s AI factory team. Working 60 to 80 hours a week, he immersed himself in the tech, even throwing knowledge-sharing AI agent block parties within the firm that drew up to 250 participants. King logged a ton of hours—sometimes at the expense of his weekends—but was confident he was excelling in his role as a product manager and data scientist.

    “I was coding and managing a team onshore and offshore. It was crazy, it’s like, ‘Give this 24-year-old millions of dollars of salary spent per month to build AI agents for Fortune 500 [companies],’” King tells Fortune. “[It was] my dream job…I won first place in this OpenAI hackathon across the entire firm.”

    Although King was proving himself as a key AI talent for PwC, he did begin to question the impact of his work. The AI agents King was building for major corporations could undoubtedly automate swaths of human roles—perhaps even entire job departments. One Microsoft Teams agent his group created mimicked an actual person, and King was a little spooked. 

    “We had a late night call with all the boys that are building this thing, like, ‘What the hell are we building right now?’” King says. “Just saying ‘Treat them like humans’ is probably not the best way to think about it.”

    Behind the scenes, a layoff was brewing—but this time, for King. In October 2024, just eight months into his final role at PwC, the Gen Zer presented his winning project from the OpenAI hackathon: a fleet of AI agents that automated manual tasks. King was proud and felt confident in his place at the firm, but two hours later, PwC called King to inform him he was being laid off. The 26-year-old recorded the meeting and posted it on TikTok, raking up more than 75,000 likes and 2.1 million views. Commenters under his videos expressed shock that King would be let go after winning the hackathon.

    “I thought I was safe, especially after I won first place,” King says. “I just got a little blindsided.”

    King clarifies he doesn’t think there were any “nefarious” intentions behind his layoff, reasoning he was likely a random staffer dismissed after the firm had overhired in previous years. However, he does connect the dots between the AI agents he built for PwC customers and the layoffs that soon ensued at those client companies. 

    Fortune reached out to PwC for comment. 

    King believes his AI agents may have been connected to layoffs 

    While King doesn’t believe his former role at PwC was automated, he recognizes that the AI agents he built likely had an impact on others. The year after his layoff, King observed that some of the Fortune 500 clients he served were implementing staffing cuts. Those AI agents he helped create may have had a hand in the layoffs. 

    “It’s 100% connected,” King says. “I knew that consulting was a hatchet-man type job, I knew you’re going in to potentially lay people off, but I didn’t think it was going to be like this.”

    While King believes AI agents are akin to the reasoning power of a five-year-old, they still know “all the corpus of information in the world” and can automate mundane tasks. Oftentimes, that means entry-level jobs are most at risk of being disrupted. 

    “It’s automating tasks, 100%, those are gone,” King says. “If your job is doing those menial types of things, if you’re just emailing a spreadsheet back and forth, you can kiss your job goodbye.”

    Pivoting to his new life purpose: founding a marketing agency 

    While being on PwC’s AI team may have once been his dream job, the layoff didn’t crush his spirit. 

    “I’m grateful for it happening…It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, but then it turned into the best thing,” King says. “Overall, [I’m] very grateful that I got laid off.”

    In the aftermath of being let go, King says he was inundated with job offers from major tech companies to join their AI operations. However, the scrappy young entrepreneur sidelined the idea of returning to a nine-to-five gig; instead, King started his own marketing agency, AMDK. The business officially launched in December last year, less than two months after being laid off from PwC. 

    So far, King says AMDK has roped in clients ranging from small companies to billion-dollar enterprises, many of whom are looking for AI agents of their own. His end goal is to build a swarm of agents that help companies with their back ends—but after his experience on PwC’s AI team, he says he’s being cautious about the ramifications of his creations. He’s still learning the ropes of entrepreneurship, but wouldn’t trade the highs and lows for a salaried corporate job.

    “This is my purpose in life, versus this is someone else’s purpose,” King says. “[I’m] way happier.”

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    Emma Burleigh

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  • Ethics: I Sent a Harsh Email to a Failing Employee. They’re in Tears. How Do I Fix This?

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    A Reddit member writes: I’m a new manager working with a very entry level person (1-2 years of working experience). We have a project with a very high maintenance client.

    Now, my original approach for the entry level was very conversational, asking if these deadlines work with their schedule, checking in every two weeks that the work is being done, providing opportunity to discuss any questions, and having an open door for any questions. Every two weeks I received the “everything’s great,” and we talked through a few minor items. When it came down to the internal deadline the assignment was NOT to the level of detail or completion I was told it was at.

    I redid the assignment on my own over the weekend to get it to the client. 

    Implemented changes on my approach, set up weekly meetings, gave smaller assignments that built on one another to get us to the goal of the deliverable. Through those smaller assignments I saw that the entry level person didn’t actually understand what they were doing. I would go into detail explaining things and tell them it would be good to take some time on their own to do a little background research to expand their knowledge. We are now at month 5, and they still are having a hard time comprehending the project, their role in the project, the expectation of quality, and overall just seem lost.

    “I sent a pretty harsh email.”

    I sent them a pretty harsh email laying out the expectations, that I need updates in writing from them, and for them to explain their reasoning on why they went about something. (Not my finest moment, but stress and exhaustion won the best of me.)

    The next day the entry level person gives me a call, clearly upset, possibly was crying, explaining how it’s just been difficult for them and the assignment is hard and that they’re trying and that email just really discouraged them.

    So, now I need to know how to fix this. Because although they weren’t meeting expectations, and I had to redo every intermediate assignment given to them, they’re still stuck on my project… They’re fully checked out and are just giving me worse quality work now.

    This is an abridged version of a very detailed post.

    Minda Zetlin responds:

    Let’s begin by acknowledging that you are in a very tough situation not of your own making. In an ideal world, there would be some pushback from your employer on this client’s demands, particularly since you mention that there is also a very tight deadline for completion.

    Your entry-level person should absolutely not be working on this high-pressure project. And you certainly shouldn’t be spending your weekends re-doing their work. So it’s no surprise that your frustration boiled over into a harsh email. Don’t be hard on yourself about it; that won’t help anything.

    Beyond that, it’s time for a reality check. Contained in the phrase “entry-level” is the idea that someone in this role needs to learn how to do their job. Yet both your employer and you seem to expect something different. Asking an entry-level person if a deadline works for their schedule doesn’t make much sense when they don’t seem to know what the work actually entails. Instead, you should figure out how long a task ought to take a completely inexperienced person. Then give them that amount of time to do it.

    This employee needs training.

    Similarly, it likely wasn’t helpful to suggest that the new person do background research. I’m not sure what you actually said, but a specific suggestion of a book to read or a video to watch might make more sense. That isn’t enough, though. This employee needs actual training. They need someone to teach them the job, and perhaps help them do it step by step. As one commenter mentioned, just providing more and more detailed instructions won’t help.

    At this point, both because of the tight deadline and because of your past interaction, you are not the right person to train this employee. You mentioned that they have a supervisor other than you. That supervisor should provide or arrange the training this employee needs to competently do their job. Without it, there’s little hope that their work will improve.

    As to fixing your own relationship, that may or may not be possible. But you can try. Begin by having an honest conversation, perhaps over a meal or coffee to make for an easier atmosphere. Apologize again, not only for your email, but also for expecting them to know more than they do. Ask them to talk about their view of the situation and listen to what they have to say.

    Acknowledge that everyone involved, including you and this employee, are in an impossible situation because of the demanding client. Ask if the two of you can start over with a clean slate. Let them know you want to help them succeed. It might work, or it might not. But it’s certainly worth a try.

    Got an ethical dilemma of your own? Send it to Minda at minda@mindazetlin.com. She may address it in a future column.

    The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

    The early-rate deadline for the 2026 Inc. Regionals Awards is Friday, November 14, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.

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    Minda Zetlin

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  • The Gen Z hiring nightmare is real, but AI is a ‘lightning strike’ not a ‘house fire,’ Yale economist says | Fortune

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    Especially alarming to many has been AI’s effect on entry-level jobs. A blockbuster Stanford study in August was especially rattling, as it claimed to find a “significant and disproportionate impact” on entry-level jobs most exposed to AI automation—like software development and customer service—have seen steep relative declines in employment. This came out close to the MIT study that said 95% of generative AI pilots were failing and the somewhat sudden realization that AI could be building toward a bubble. Even Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell sees something going on, commenting that “kids coming out of college and younger people, minorities, are having a hard time finding jobs.”

    But according to a new study from Yale and Brookings researchers, these instances are “lightning strikes,” as opposed to “house fires,”. The U.S. labor market just isn’t showing any signs of broad, AI-driven disruption, at least not yet.

    Martha Gimbel, a Yale economist and the paper’s lead author, hopes that understanding this data helps people to relax. “Take a step back. Take a deep breath,” Martha Gimbel, a Yale economist and the paper’s lead author, told Fortune. “Try to respond to AI with data, not emotion.”

    No apocalypse yet

    The new study examined multiple measures of labor market disruption, drawing on Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data on job losses, spells of unemployment, and shifts in broader occupational composition. The conclusion: there’s movement, but nothing out of the ordinary.

    While the mix of occupations has shifted slightly in the past years, the authors stress that this change is still well within historical norms. Right now, the forces driving those shifts appear to be macroeconomic rather than technological.

    “The biggest forces hitting the labor market right now are a slowing economy, an aging population, and a decline in immigration—not AI,” Gimbel said.

    It’s easy to conflate noise in the economy with the impact of AI, particularly for younger workers, who may already be feeling the pinch from a cooling job market. But Gimbel stressed that these effects are “very specific impacts in very targeted populations,” but there aren’t any broad impacts of AI for young workers, which are more consistent with a macroeconomic slowdown.

    Economists — including Fed Chair Jerome Powell — have described the current labor market conditions as a “low hire, low-fire” environment, where layoffs are rare, but so are new opportunities. Recent college graduates have been taking the hit: they are struggling to find entry-level roles in white-collar sectors like tech and professional services, and the youth unemployment rate has climbed to 10.5%, the highest since 2016. But the effect has hit older workers, too, more than a quarter of unemployed Americans have been out of work for over six months, the highest since the mid-2010s outside of the pandemic years. 

    Exposure to AI does not mean job loss

    It’s not surprising, then, that many workers assume AI must already be responsible. But Gimbel argues one of the biggest misconceptions is conflating exposure to AI with displacement. Radiologists illustrate the point. Once seen as automation’s prime victims, they are more numerous and better paid than ever, even as their workflows rely heavily on AI-powered imaging tools.

    “Exposure to AI doesn’t mean your job disappears,” she said. “It might mean your work changes.”

    The same applies to coders and writers, who dominate AI adoption rates on platforms like Claude, the researchers found. Using the tools doesn’t automatically train away your livelihood—it could simply reshape how the work is done.

    Molly Kinder, Gimbel’s co-author at Brookings, added another layer: geography. Americans are used to thinking about automation as something that devastates factory towns in the heartland. With generative AI, Kinder said, the geography is flipped.

    “This is not your grandparents’ automation,” Kinder told Fortune. “GenAI is more likely to disrupt—positively or negatively—big cities with clusters of knowledge and tech jobs, not the industrial heartland.”

    In her view, cities like San Francisco, Boston, and New York, dense with coders, analysts, researchers, and creatives, are far more exposed to generative AI than smaller towns. But whether that exposure turns into devastation or growth depends on the future.

    “If humans remain in the loop, those cities could reap the most benefits,” Kinder said. “If not, they’ll feel the worst pain.”

    The key, she emphasizes, is that exposure doesn’t tell us whether jobs will actually be eliminated, rather,  it only tells us which tasks could change. The real story will depend on whether companies treat AI as a helper or as a replacement.

    Lightning strikes, not a house fire

    Kinder, like Gibbel, stressed that diffusion takes time. Even as AI systems improve quickly, most organizations haven’t redesigned their workflows around them.

    “Even though it feels like AI is getting so good, turning that into change in the workplace is time-consuming,” she said. “It’s messy. It’s uneven.”

    That’s why the Yale-Brookings analysis is deliberately broad. “It can tell if the house is on fire,” Kinder explained. “It can’t pick up a stove fire in the kitchen. And right now, the labor market as a house is not on fire.”

    That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to see here, however.

    Kinder called today’s changes, like the ones the Stanford study picked up, “lightning strikes” in specific industries like software development, customer service, and creative work. These early jolts serve as canaries in the coal mine. But they haven’t aggregated into the kind of disruption that reshapes official job statistics.

    “Our paper does not say there’s been no impact,” she said. “A translator might be out of work, a creative might be struggling, a customer service rep might be displaced. Those are real. But it’s not big enough to add up to the economy-wide apocalypse people imagine.”

    Both Kinder and Gimbel said they expect the first clear, systemic effects to take years, not months, to appear.

    What comes next

    If and when real displacement arrives, both authors believe it will come from embedded AI in enterprise workflows, not from individual workers casually using chatbots.

    “That’s when you’ll see displacement,” Kinder said. “Not when one worker turns to a chatbot, but when the business redesigns the workflow with AI.”

    That process is beginning, as more companies integrate AI APIs into core systems. But organizational change is slow. 

    “Three years is nothing for a general-purpose technology,” Kinder said. “GenAI has not defied gravity. It takes time to redesign workflows, and it takes time to diffuse across workplaces. It could end up being phenomenally transformative, but it’s not happening overnight.”

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    Eva Roytburg

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  • Entry-level workers haven’t been this anxious about the job market in almost a decade

    Entry-level workers haven’t been this anxious about the job market in almost a decade

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    All things considered, most employees are slightly more confident these days. Just don’t look down, or compare it to how they felt last year … or ask entry-level workers how they feel. 

    Entry-level workers are losing confidence at a rapid clip. In March, their rate of a positive outlook dropped to 46.1%, the lowest it’s been since 2016, owing to a depressed hiring market and minimal turnover. That data comes from the latest Employee Confidence Index installment from anonymous job-review site Glassdoor, published on Tuesday. 

    A slow hiring market hurts entry-level workers the most, leaving them fewer opportunities to break into new industries, much less climb the corporate ladder when no one above them quits for a new gig. 

    Of course, one major reason for the glass-half-empty outlook is the spate of layoffs hitting nearly every industry indiscriminately. Many bosses have blamed the unfortunate job cuts on over-hiring following strong pandemic-era performance, which, naturally, hasn’t gone over well with their workers or boosted morale. The share of Glassdoor reviews that mention overhiring jumped 24% from last year, and more than tripled from March 2022, before the layoff flood really began.

    It’s really no wonder entry-level workers are stressed. Career consulting firm Challenger, Grey & Christmas recently reported that this year kicked off with 82,307 job cuts—a 136% increase month-to-month increase. (Save for January 2023, the January 2024 figure represents the highest number of cuts since January 2009.) Add that to the fact that there are fewer jobs to apply to if you happen to get laid off; by late 2023, total listings were down 15% year-over-year, Indeed found.

    Ever since late 2022, when layoffs “really began to grab headlines,” employee confidence has been dropping sharply, and it’s stayed subdued despite economic data showing that layoffs are actually low by historical standards, Glassdoor’s lead economist, Daniel Zhao, told Fortune on Tuesday. “The share of Glassdoor reviews mentioning layoffs continues to rise even as layoff waves come and go, signaling that this economic anxiety about layoffs is sticky.” 

    The company has even seen that effect in reviews written by workers who were unaffected by layoffs, but still reported stress and burnout from layoffs in their industry. As Zhao wrote in the report, “economic anxiety about job security does not necessarily match actual layoffs one-to-one and the impacts on morale and employee sentiment may last longer than employers realize.”

    But despite the monthslong lows, a revitalized job market could stand to boost employee confidence. As Zhao pointed out, rates of hires and quits are both low, because both bosses and workers are sitting tight. He compared that job market freeze to the current housing market. “where interest rate lock-in has reduced the number of buyers and sellers.” 

    “If the economy thaws and hiring opens up, that can get workers back to moving up the career ladder,” Zhao added.

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    Jane Thier

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