66% of global companies plan to reduce their entry-level recruitment due to AI adoption. This data from the IDC/Deel study reveals the scale of a silent shift: entry-level positions that traditionally enabled social mobility are disappearing, creating a missing rung in the social ladder.
The unemployment rate for graduates aged 22 to 27 reached 4.8% in June 2025, up from 3.8% recorded in May 2022. For the first time in decades, young people face a more hostile job market than their predecessors. This historical inversion reveals the profound transformation of a system that promised education would open all doors.
The Algorithm Devours the First Rungs of Career Ladders
A Stanford study reveals that workers aged 22 to 25 in jobs most exposed to AI have seen their employment rate drop by 13% since 2022. Junior positions historically served as talent nurseries, enabling on-the-job learning. Today, some of this learning is being absorbed by AI.
Dario Amodei, president of Anthropic, estimates that 50% of junior office jobs could disappear by 2030. This prediction is anchored in concrete observations: positions for administrative assistants, support staff, junior analysts, and content producers are becoming scarce.
A survey by Hult International Business School reveals that 37% of employers prefer hiring an AI rather than a young Gen Z graduate. More troubling still, 89% of employers avoid hiring young graduates. The machine becomes more attractive than the beginning human worker.
Finance and Consulting Close Their Entry Doors
In the United States, there is already a decline in employment of young graduates in coding, finance, and marketing. These sectors, traditionally springboards to the middle class, are automating their entry-level tasks on a massive scale.
In France, the number of job offers for junior developers dropped by a third between January 2024 and the end of 2025. The technology sector shows 35% fewer junior positions. From fixing minor bugs to writing basic functions, many tasks entrusted to young graduates can now be automated. Companies prefer to hire experienced profiles capable of supervising AI.
At Shopify, managers must now justify why AI cannot perform a task before obtaining authorization to hire. This inversion of the burden of proof marks the end of an era: humans must prove their value against the machine.
A Generation Disillusioned by Its Diplomas
49% of Gen Z job seekers believe their university education has lost value in the job market due to AI. Only a third of millennials share this opinion, and only one in five baby boomers experiences similar regrets.
This bitterness reveals a cruel paradox. Gen Z graduates believe their university education was a waste of time and money, facing an AI capable of surpassing their hard-earned skills. University degrees are losing their priority in job offers. While companies abandon the requirement for four years of study, half of Gen Z members state that university was a bad investment.
New Training Programs Attempt to Rebuild the Social Elevator
Faced with this crisis, the French government is launching the AI Clusters program with a budget of 360 million euros, aiming to train 100,000 people by 2030, including 20,000 in continuing education. At the Ministry of Labor and Health, 119 million euros are invested to train 500,000 health professionals in five years.
93% of AI graduates find employment within 6 months, with a median salary of 50,500€ per year. This striking contrast with the difficulties faced by other fields reveals the emergence of a two-speed economy.
Training programs are reinventing themselves. In 2025, an AI program can certify technical skills in a week, whereas it previously took months of intensive learning. Students have access to excellent academic curricula, professionals in transition rely on bootcamps and apprenticeships, while the general public benefits from free and certifying MOOCs.
Prompt engineering requires no coding knowledge initially, making it a career change option open to many profiles. This accessibility contrasts with the closure of traditional pathways.
Public Investment Facing Massive Retraining Needs
77% of young people in career transition seek employment with more meaning. 95% of young people who have changed careers say they are fulfilled in their new activity. But individual optimism collides with systemic constraints.
The vocational training budget suffers a drastic cut of nearly 4 billion euros compared to the initial 2024 budget. Apprenticeship budgets are reduced by one billion euros compared to 2024, as are those of the Personal Training Account.
The “Collective Transitions” scheme, endowed with 8 million euros, positions itself as an essential lever to support career transitions. This amount seems derisory compared to the scale of the challenge: retraining millions of young people whose entry-level jobs are disappearing.
Artificial intelligence creates an unprecedented generational trap. It automates precisely the jobs that enabled learning and social mobility. Without an entry point, access to experience becomes a privilege reserved for those who can acquire elsewhere the skills expected from the first position. Young people find themselves at an impasse: too academically qualified for the rare positions still available, but not experienced enough to supervise AI tools.
Retraining programs are emerging, but their success will depend on massive investments that public finances struggle to assume. Between technological promises and budgetary realities, the future of an entire generation hangs in the balance in this race between the destruction and reconstruction of professional pathways.