<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/06/graduation-students-jobs-market-ai-accountancy-finance>
"September is the beginning of many young people’s lives, as cars speed along
motorways transporting 18- and 19-year-olds to their new university
accommodations. I remember my own journey down to Exeter in 2022, the first
stage in what I hoped would be an experience to set me up for the rest of my
life. Little did I know that this was the calm before the storm, before anyone
had heard of ChatGPT, or imagined the chaos that generative AI was about to
cause for new graduates.
Fast forward to 2025, and some of the young people I began this journey with
have realised that they’ve spent the last three years training for graduate
jobs that don’t exist. Many firms are now slashing their number of new hires.
Big accountancy firms have cut back on graduate recruitment; Deloitte reduced
its scheme by 18%, while EY has cut the number of graduates it’s recruiting by
11%. According to data collected by the job search site Adzuna, entry-level job
opportunities in finance have dropped by 50.8%, and those for IT services have
seen a decrease of 54.8%.
The main cause of this is artificial intelligence, which is destroying many of
the entry-level jobs open to recent graduates. Companies are now relying on AI
to replicate junior-level tasks, removing the need for them to hire humans. It
feels like a kick in the teeth to students and recent graduates, who were
already entering a challenging labour market. Once, graduates who had toiled
through multiple rounds of interviews, battled it out with other applicants at
an assessment centre, and made it through to the final round, could hope to get
a job in a sector such as consultancy or accountancy. These historically
secure, solid and (some would say) boring options guaranteed you gainful and
well-paid employment and a clear career path.
Now, those secure opportunities feel as though they’re evaporating. Since
applicants can’t see jobs that no longer exist, their experience of this
intense competition for fewer jobs is often limited to a series of
disappointments and rejections. Should a student or recent graduate apply for
one of these elusive opportunities, their application will frequently be
evaluated and often declined by an AI system before a human even reads it.
Friends who have recently graduated tell me of the emotional toll of talking to
their webcam during an AI-generated interview in the hope that the system
judges in their favour, a process that can be repeated again and again.
So far, creative fields, and those that involve real-life human contact, seem
more impervious to this trend. It will probably be a period of time before
doctors or nurses, or professions that rely on genuine creativity such as
painters or performing artists, find themselves replaced with an AI model. Even
so, if people become increasingly unable to spot AI, and businesses continue to
embrace it, the risk is that professions such as art and illustration also get
devalued over time, and replaced by a bleak, AI-generated cocktail of eerily
familiar “creative” work.
Conservative politicians and the rightwing press have often suggested that the
most valuable degrees are those that have a clear job at the end of them (and
that those in more creative fields, such as the humanities, are by implication
less valuable). As one
Times columnist wrote recently, students who do “less
practical” degrees are more likely to be “living at home, working on their
script/novel/music/art portfolio while earning pocket money”, without either a
profession or a useful skill.
But what use is a degree in accountancy if you can’t then get an accounting job
at the end of it? Why is this course more valuable than studying something that
teaches you critical thinking and transferrable skills – anthropology, say, or
(in my case) Arabic and Islamic studies? Cuts to higher education mean that
we’re already seeing the end of some of those degrees often labelled as
“useless”, yet the supposedly “useful” subjects start to look less valuable
when the jobs associated with them are replaced by AI models that didn’t take
three years to learn these skills."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
