The running fear of the past two years has been that AI kicks away the bottom rung of the career ladder. A global study released this week argues most employers are planning the opposite — at least on paper.
AMS, a Korn Ferry company, published “Class of 2030: The Future of Early Careers Hiring” on 20 October 2026, drawing on surveys of more than 5,000 candidates and 500 HR and talent-acquisition leaders across 13 countries. Its headline finding: 81 percent of organisations plan to increase early-career hiring over the next two years.
Read as reported by Yahoo Finance and Recruiting Headlines, the report does not claim AI is sparing junior jobs — it claims AI is changing what they are. The study found junior employees at some leading organisations are already moving away from repetitive execution toward researching and synthesising information with AI, analysing data, testing AI-generated outputs, automating workflows, and applying human judgment to machine-made work.
The numbers behind the claim
Three findings, all attributed to AMS’s surveys, stand out against the displacement narrative:
- 81 percent of organisations plan to increase early-career hiring over the next two years.
- 76 percent of talent-acquisition leaders say entry-level jobs are not disappearing from their organisations.
- Nearly three-quarters believe entry-level work will change rather than be eliminated — though roughly half admit they do not yet know what that change will look like.
“Entry-level hiring is fundamental to the health of any organization. It is how you bring in new skills, fresh thinking and build the talent you are going to rely on in the future,” said Susan Major, Global Managing Director of Early Careers and Campus at AMS, in the release. “The roles themselves are evolving, and that makes investing in young talent even more important.”
Worth noting on transparency: AMS sells early-careers recruitment services, so it has a commercial interest in the answer. The survey sizes are large and multi-country, but stated intent to hire is not the same as actual hires.
Where the counter-evidence sits
The Korn Ferry reading sits at odds — or at least in tension — with hard data from companies already running the experiment. Anthropic’s own employment report, which this site covered on 18 October, showed its own junior technical hires fell from 27 percent to under a tenth of new technical roles in about a year, even as total headcount grew. Employers’ intended trajectories and observed behaviour in individual firms can diverge for years.
There is also a middle reading, and it may be the most credible one: the ladder is being rebuilt rather than removed, but nobody fully agrees on what the rungs are made of. The AMS data itself captures the uncertainty — half the organisations that expect change say they don’t know what shape it takes. A Korn Ferry survey of more than 1,600 talent leaders earlier in 2026 found 84 percent planned to use AI in hiring processes this year, with shrinking junior pipelines already flagged as a concern.
What it means in New Zealand
For NZ graduates, the useful signal is the skill list, not the growth forecast. If junior work is shifting toward checking AI output, synthesis and judgment — as both AMS and New Zealand job-ad data have been suggesting since winter — the applications that matter are the ones that demonstrate exactly that. SEEK’s NZ data showed AI ethics and governance mentions in job ads growing faster than any hands-on AI skill locally.
Public and corporate programmes are also converging on the same bet: that the entry rung survives if someone funds and structures it. Singapore’s year-long internship expansion is the most aggressive state-level version; Salesforce’s move to bring 1,000 new graduates through despite AI-era efficiency drives is the corporate one. AMS’s research, whatever its bias, suggests those early bets are closer to the mainstream than the doom timelines assume.
The honest summary for the Class of 2030: most employers in this survey intend to keep hiring you. What they plan to pay you to do looks steadily less like the job the person three rungs above you started on.
FAQ
Is AI eliminating entry-level jobs? The AMS/Korn Ferry research says most employers — 76 percent of talent leaders surveyed — say no, though about three-quarters expect the work itself to change rather than disappear. Company-level evidence, such as Anthropic’s hiring data, shows the shift can be steep in individual firms.
What will entry-level jobs look like in 2030? Per the research: less repetitive execution, more researching with AI, testing AI outputs, data analysis and workflow automation, with “half of organisations” still unsure of the details.
Are companies still hiring graduates in 2026? 81 percent of organisations in the AMS survey plan to increase early-career hiring over the next two years. That is intent, not outcome — but it runs against the hiring-freeze narrative.
— CJ Murden, editor of Singularity.Kiwi. Former digital technologies teacher, author of AI-focused books. Writing with a New Zealand focus.
