Cutting entry-level jobs is no longer a future threat—it’s happening now across major industries. From tech to finance to media, early-career roles are disappearing at a pace that’s alarming both workers and workforce planners. At the same time, companies are eliminating layers of middle management in the name of speed and efficiency. Leaders argue that AI can handle routine tasks once assigned to junior staff. But a deeper question is emerging: what happens to organizational learning, leadership development, and judgment when the bottom and the middle of the workforce vanish together?
Data from LinkedIn shows entry-level job postings dropped by roughly 30% from early 2024 to early 2025, on top of a steep decline since 2020. Sectors that once relied on large graduate intakes—finance, law, tech, and media—have pulled back sharply. Generative AI tools can now draft documents, clean data, summarize research, and triage customer issues in seconds. That’s led many executives to treat junior roles as optional. But what looks like efficiency on paper is actually the removal of the workforce on-ramp that once built context, judgment, and loyalty.
The fear that automation will swallow early-career work is no longer speculative. Dario Amodei of Anthropic has warned the world may be “sleepwalking into mass unemployment,” especially in knowledge-based roles. That warning has intensified executive caution around hiring. Instead of redesigning junior roles for the AI era, many firms are simply deleting them. The short-term cost savings are clear. The long-term loss of institutional memory and leadership pipelines is not.
While entry-level jobs are shrinking from the bottom, the middle is collapsing too. At Meta, Mark Zuckerberg famously criticized “managers managing managers managing managers.” At Amazon, Andy Jassy has pushed aggressively to increase worker-to-manager ratios. Research from Gartner projects that through 2026, one in five companies will use AI to flatten structures and eliminate more than half of current middle-management roles. This is no longer a tech-only trend—it’s spreading across retail, finance, and professional services.
The assumption that managers are expendable misses what they actually do. According to Deloitte’s 2025 Global Human Capital Trends report, managers are anchors of coaching, conflict resolution, judgment, and skill development. They translate strategy into daily execution. They sense risk before dashboards show it. They stabilize teams during constant change. AI can automate tasks, but it cannot replicate escalation decisions, emotional intelligence, or context-heavy leadership. Cutting the middle removes the connective tissue that holds complex organizations together.
When firms shrink entry-level hiring and eliminate middle managers at the same time, they create structurally brittle organizations. There are fewer people learning the business and fewer leaders shaping how the work evolves. Execution becomes fragile because judgment is thinly distributed. Innovation slows because no one owns the translation between strategy and reality. AI may handle tasks faster, but it cannot redesign roles, resolve ambiguity, or rebuild trust after disruption. The organization becomes faster on paper, weaker in practice.
Instead of turning the corporate pyramid upside down, some companies are exploring more resilient models. Beamery’s Inside the Human–Machine Economy report proposes a pentagon-shaped workforce design. This model restores a stable entry layer for early-career development, strengthens the execution-rich middle, and sharpens the strategic apex. In this structure, AI reshapes work but does not hollow out human capability. Each layer evolves instead of disappearing.
Cutting entry-level jobs and middle managers may boost short-term efficiency, but it quietly undermines long-term adaptability. Organizations still need people who can grow into leaders, translate complexity, and redesign work as technology evolves. AI can execute—but only humans decide what matters and how value is created. The companies that thrive in the next decade will not be the flattest ones. They will be the ones that preserved learning, judgment, and human connection while integrating automation at scale.
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