A year ago, most CEOs said they planned to grow their junior ranks.
Today, more than 40% want to do the opposite, and the flip happened in just 12 months.
A global survey by Oliver Wyman found more than 40% of CEOs plan to cut junior positions over the next one to two years, with only 17% planning to grow them.
Those numbers are essentially the mirror image of last year's survey, when the bias was clearly toward expanding entry-level hiring. John Romeo, who leads the Oliver Wyman Forum, said the junior level is "finding it harder now to enter the workforce."
The shift is happening fast enough that it's already showing up in real hiring data.
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AI agents can write code at the level of a junior developer, evaluate sales leads, and handle the kind of basic analyst work that used to feed the entry-level pipeline.
What they can't do, according to labor experts, is make the judgment calls that come from years of doing the actual job. CEOs increasingly want mid- and senior-level workers who can manage an AI-driven team rather than juniors who'd compete with the tools directly.
The shift is already visible in academic research as well as in CEO surveys.
A Harvard study found firms adopting generative AI have meaningfully cut junior positions while keeping senior employment stable, and Stanford research showed young workers in AI-exposed fields were 16% more likely to lose their jobs. IBM, which said in February it plans to triple entry-level hiring in the U.S., remains a rare outlier moving the other way.
The catch: you can't have mid-level workers in five years without juniors today.
Older workers aren't necessarily safe either, even with the leverage shifting their way.
Labor economist Teresa Ghilarducci at the New School said "firms' commitment to workers is weaker and weaker," meaning the same companies cutting juniors today could turn on seniors tomorrow. Watch entry-level hiring data and AI capex announcements together. They tell the same story. AI isn't just changing what gets hired. It's changing who.
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