The Non-Obvious Future Word of the Week: Entry Cliff

The pipeline for any industry comes from the jobs at the bottom that offer that initial training for what a career is like. One fear quickly becoming reality is that we are at a moment in time when AI is rewiring companies and managers to rethink whether they even need people doing entry level roles anymore. The disappearance of those jobs and the money saved certainly may help the bottom line in the short term, but the longer term question is where the skills for that next generation of leadership will come from if there are no longer entry points into industries on the bottom level. The effect was so pronounced, we declared this the entry cliff and wrote in Future Words about the potential dangers to entire industries and the livelihood and optimism of young people who are seeing these sorts of roles erode. Shining a spotlight on this effect is one of the ways that those of us inside of industries affected might be able to rethink what that entry level role now should mean. If the “grunt work” often associated with the new hire or intern can now be automated, how else might we be able to train that next generation of talent in the things that will matter for our industries moving forward? What if they can help imagine what those priorities will be based on their perspective? The point is, like many of our Future Words, the entry cliff might feel like a dystopian way of looking at the prospects of young workers. It can just as easily become a call to action reminding us that there are some futures that we might describe with new words, but that doesn’t mean we need to accept them as they are.