For decades, organizations were pyramids. A broad base of junior employees supported narrower layers above. Entry-level hires did the grunt work, writing tickets, processing data, creating basic designs, conducting routine research, while slowly building the judgment that would carry them upward.

That structure is collapsing.

Why the Pyramid Existed

The pyramid made economic sense because execution required humans. Junior employees were cost-effective because they could do high-volume, low-judgment work at scale. You hired many of them, accepted that they'd need training and make mistakes, and waited. Over time, people developed pattern recognition through sheer repetition. They developed judgment. Then you promoted them.

Those two years of mind-numbing task execution weren't hazing; they were training.

Why the Pyramid Is Collapsing

AI can do the tasks that a lot of junior employees used to do much faster and at a fraction of the cost. The research synthesis that took a week? Done in minutes. The competitive analysis, the user interview summaries, the front-end bug fixes, AI handles them now, often better and always faster than a human working alone.

A manager facing budget pressure now has a stark choice: hire a junior employee who needs six months of training and makes mistakes while learning, or use AI that delivers quality output immediately and scales infinitely.

Most managers are choosing AI.

The numbers tell a stark story. In the UK, graduate job postings have collapsed: down 78% in HR, 46% in marketing and 42% in accounting. In the US, unemployment for 20–24 year olds is growing past 9.2%, with recent graduates now making up 25% of all unemployed workers.

This isn't a temporary market correction. Entry-level roles are structurally disappearing.

Meanwhile, demand for middle managers remains strong. These are the people who can diagnose problems, evaluate solutions, coordinate across teams, and direct both human and AI resources. They have judgment that AI can't replicate and relationship networks that AI can't build.

The shape is shifting from pyramid to diamond: fewer people at the bottom, a bulge in the middle, and the same narrow top.

This transition creates three distinct problems that organizations must confront.

Problem 1: The Entry Crisis

The immediate effect is obvious: fewer opportunities for people starting their careers. 

This creates an uncomfortable paradox: candidates need judgment to get hired, but they need work to build judgment. AI has eliminated most of that developmental work. Organizations now expect people to arrive with judgment already formed.

For the junior employees who do land roles, a different problem emerges. A designer who generates fifteen layout variations instantly skips the slow iteration that builds taste. A researcher who relies on AI summaries misses the intuitive understanding that came from reading hundreds of raw transcripts. A developer who asks AI to write functions skips the debugging that teaches how errors propagate. 

AI makes it easier to produce work while making it harder to develop the judgment that work once provided. Organizations are hiring people into environments that no longer train them.

Problem 2: The Capability Gap

For people already in the workforce, the diamond creates a different problem: many are operating at the wrong level for their position.

A "Senior Product Manager" who spends most of their time updating roadmaps, writing tickets, and attending meetings is now competing with AI for relevance. Their title says "senior," but their work is being automated.

A "Lead Designer" who operates at the evaluation level but never questions whether they're solving the right problems is stuck in a role that's being compressed from above.

The diamond doesn't eliminate these people immediately, but it makes their positions increasingly precarious. As AI handles more execution work, organizations need fewer people doing execution, regardless of their titles.

Many organizations have compounded this problem by promoting based on tenure rather than demonstrated capability. "You've been a PM for three years, so now you're a Senior PM."

Problem 3: The Missing Middle

Here's the long-term danger that few organizations are discussing: if entry-level roles disappear, where does the next generation of capable leaders come from?

Organizations need people who can diagnose root causes, align cross-functional teams, and set strategic direction. These capabilities don't appear fully formed. They develop through progression.

In the old pyramid, junior employees spent years building pattern recognition through execution. The best ones developed judgment and moved into middle management. The best middle managers developed systems thinking and moved into leadership. Knowledge is transferred through proximity and repetition.

In the diamond, that pipeline is breaking. Fewer people are entering at the bottom. Those who do enter are expected to already have Level 2 capabilities, which means they're not developing them on the job. The chain of knowledge transfer, where a junior learns from a middle manager, is severed.

Five years from now, organizations may face a talent shortage not at the entry level, but at the middle. There will be a gap in experienced professionals with the judgment and cross-functional fluency to lead teams and drive outcomes. The people who would have developed those capabilities through the old system simply won't exist in sufficient numbers.

How Organizations Must Adapt

Most organizations are still operating as if the pyramid exists. They're watching entry-level hiring collapse without adapting their development models.

This isn't sustainable. 

Organizations that don't adapt will face broken talent pipelines, widening capability gaps, and a leadership crisis when the current middle generation ages out.

Rethink entry points entirely. If traditional junior roles no longer make economic sense, organizations need alternative paths for new talent. Some are experimenting with apprenticeship models where new hires pair with experienced professionals on real work, even without a formal "junior" role. The goal is building judgment deliberately rather than hoping it develops through repetition that no longer exists.

Implement explicit capability assessment. Titles and tenure are no longer reliable proxies for what someone can actually do. Organizations need mechanisms to verify that people can operate at the level their position requires before promotion, not after. This means defining what "Level 2" or "Level 3" work actually looks like in concrete terms, then assessing whether someone demonstrates those capabilities consistently.

Accelerate cross-functional development. The wide middle of the diamond is filled with professionals who can see across disciplines and connect solutions across functional boundaries. Organizations that keep people siloed in narrow specializations are developing the wrong capabilities. Rotation programs, cross-functional projects, and deliberate exposure to adjacent domains build the breadth that diamond organizations require.

Create new knowledge transfer mechanisms. If junior employees no longer learn by sitting next to senior ones for two years, how does institutional knowledge propagate? Some organizations are pairing AI tools with structured reflection, where they ask the AI for explicit reasoning about why approaches were chosen and what tradeoffs were accepted. Others are investing in documentation of decision-making rationale, not just decisions. The goal is to capture the judgment that is used to transfer through osmosis.

The Stakes Are Organizational, Not Just Individual

It's tempting to frame this as an individual problem where people need to adapt, build judgment faster, and take responsibility for their own development. Which is true, but it's incomplete.

Organizations created the pyramid because it served organizational needs. They will need to actively create whatever replaces it. Leaving development entirely to individuals means accepting that the talent pipeline will break, that capability gaps will widen, and that the next generation of leaders may simply not emerge.

The pyramid is breaking. The diamond is forming. Organizations that recognize this shift and restructure accordingly will build the workforce they need. Those that don't will find themselves with impressive AI capabilities and no one qualified to direct them.

This is the third article in a series exploring how AI is reshaping careers. The next article examines the causes of and solutions to technical and product debt as AI produces output. If you want to go deeper, check out our free ebook: Managing your Career in the Age of AI.