Outside King’s College London on the Strand an old typesetters’ station is on display, a reminder of how technological change reshapes work. After Murdoch won his war with the printing unions in the 1980s, thousands of traditional typesetters lost their jobs. Digital editing and printing technology was finally forced onto Fleet Street.
Will AI hollow out the graduate labour market? Or will AI reshape graduate roles, just as desktop publishing software changed the skillsets and career pathways for anyone working in the newspaper industry, from editors to journalists to printers?
The evidence in our latest ISE Student Development Survey suggests employers are far more likely to reshape roles than eliminate them. Around 87 per cent expect AI to change entry-level roles in some way – but most anticipate this will involve adjustments to tasks rather than wholesale job losses.
In fact, four in ten employers expect no jobs to be replaced at all over the next three years, while a similar proportion expect only a small number of roles to be affected. The issue is not the disappearance of graduate jobs, but a realignment of the skills and capabilities graduate careers involve.
For universities, this reinforces the importance of embedding these capabilities across the curriculum, not treating them as add-ons.
Less focus on tasks, more on judgment
The most immediate impact of AI is not on roles themselves, but on the tasks within them. Routine activities such as basic research, drafting, and administrative processing are becoming less central.
AI capability is quickly moving to a baseline employer expectation – the majority are building AI literacy and practical usage into their training programmes. Employers’ emphasis is not on advanced technical skills, but on everyday competence: understanding how AI works, using AI tools effectively and applying them in problem solving situations that require judgement.
At the same time, the skills that matter are shifting. Employers are placing increasing value on critical thinking, judgement, adaptability and communication – capabilities that enable graduates to interpret and apply AI outputs rather than simply produce them.
The work readiness gap
In an AI-enabled workplace, roles become more fluid and graduates increasingly need to navigate ambiguity, take responsibility for their own development, and make sense of increasingly complex environments.
While employers remain broadly satisfied with graduates’ foundational skills, they have concerns about work readiness. These concerns are not about technical skills. In areas such as adaptability, self-awareness, and awareness of the wider organisational context, one-third of employers rate graduates as below expectations on entry.
AI is also creating new challenges in how skills are assessed through employers’ recruitment stages. Two-thirds of employers are concerned that candidates are using AI in ways that misrepresent their abilities during selection.
Employers are responding by placing greater emphasis on professional skills in induction programmes – over half have increased the time devoted to supporting the move from education into the workplace.
What this means for the HE experience
Employability is not solely about job acquisition. Career success increasingly depends on how well graduates adapt and develop once in a workplace that is becoming more fluid. The skills agenda is evolving as employers increase their focus on certain core skills.
Universities can lean into this by increasing students’ understanding of how to exercise judgement, adapt to change, and develop a level of self-awareness. AI literacy also needs to be embedded across the student experience, not treated as a specialist capability or limited only to certain subject disciplines.
The importance of high-quality work experience is growing. Our analysis shows that over 90 per cent of employers believe placements contribute significantly to student development. For universities, this reinforces the importance of work-based learning, placements and experiential opportunities. Helping students access and reflect on these experiences is a core pillar of employability skills development.
The implication of our analysis is that graduates will need to become productive more quickly, and more ready to pivot in their careers than previous generations. The current jobs market is tight and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Even more than is historically the case, the student who is mostly closely aligned in capability and potential to the recruiter’s brief, is the one who will be successful.
One outcome of the 1980s printing revolution is that many of the jobs and careers that emerged from the industrial strife became more skilled, not less. The history of technological change suggests that new technologies tend to increase the skill level of work rather than diminish it. AI is unlikely to be any different.
The best way to re-shape entry level roles is to make them available to 18 year olds and stop forcing our young adults into a lifetime of debt and an extra 9% ‘tax’ which drags down their finances, just for them to be considered for a ‘graduate role’. Nothing magic happens when a graduate completes another 3 years of academic education (on top of the 13 years of state funded school education they’ve already had); they are just the same person with the same abilities and employers need to be made to stop the discrimination against non-graduates by the banning of most graduate only job adverts. To get good at most jobs, then you are better off just doing the job by starting as a trainee; not sitting in the classroom & paying a fortune to the HE sector. We need to end Mass HE and stop blighting the lives of so many with a debt for three extra years of study that was unnecessary for the job they end up doing.
Thanx very much for this.
I would be interested in how many work experience places are provided by employers who value work placements. My experience in Canada and Australia is that the difficulty is not in encouraging students to undertake work placements, nor in integrating them within academic programs, but in finding work placements for the large number of students who seek them.
13 years of state funded education is far from sufficient preparation for many jobs. The development of young people between 18-21 who have the privilege (and expense) of going to University is immense in most cases. The progression of those that are able to secure placements and/or quality work experience is even more enhanced. The idea that young people at the end of A Levels or their equivalent are as ready to enter the world of work as are graduates is far from my experience. Of course, graduates, still have much to learn but it was ever thus.