A new study reveals how AI’s influence is fast-tracking junior roles and creating a “two-track labor market.”
By Gillian Manning
There’s a popular conception that AI will eliminate a number of jobs from the market—but a new study from PwC shows that AI isn’t getting rid of jobs, it’s shifting them.
According to PwC’s Global AI Jobs Barometer, which analyzed more than one billion job advertisements, the skills required for AI-exposed roles are changing more than twice as fast as those in less-exposed fields and early-career, AI-exposed junior roles are now seven times more likely to require traditionally senior-level skills.
Job postings for entry-level candidates are increasingly mandating strategic fluencies such as motivational leadership, team building, stakeholder management, mentorship, and data-driven decision-making. And while overall early-career job postings have fallen in sectors with high AI use, these “seniorized” junior roles–where positions added more than 10 traditionally senior skills–are thriving, showing a 35% growth rate since 2019; whereas entry-level roles that did not evolve to include these senior skills saw a 10% decline.
The report explains that AI is splitting the broader workforce into “professionalized” roles (where AI handles routine data, forcing the human role to elevate into deep expertise, judgment, and oversight) and “democratized” roles (where AI lowers the barrier to entry for non-experts) in what PwC refers to as a “two-track labor market.” Professionalized roles show double the job growth and 42% faster salary growth since 2021.
The report also found:
- new requirements being added to entry-level job descriptions are 2.5 times more likely to rely heavily on human attributes;
- productivity growth is 40% higher at companies that are most exposed to AI, compared to those who are exposed to it the least; and
- the average wage premium for workers with technical AI skills has jumped to 62% globally.
“There is a clear lesson from this year’s AI Jobs Barometer for both business leaders and workers: winning is not just about using technology, it is about human skills. The more AI is deployed, the more distinctly human expertise is valued,” PwC says. “For organisations, the focus should be on redesigning work not just automating tasks, while for individuals it will be important to make sure they hone their leadership, judgement, creative and teamwork skills so they can do what AI cannot.”
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