Good Morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

“I wish I could live through something”—this line from the opening scene of the 2017 coming-of-age film Lady Bird captures a young person’s longing for experience and hope for life ahead. 

If you are an early-career professional in 2025, you are definitely living through something. But with very little hope. Consider these career news headlines and analyses from the last three months: 

The graduate ‘jobpocalypse’: Where have all the entry-level jobs gone? 

Global firms slash jobs amid weak sentiment, AI push 

AI is waging war on white-collar jobs. It won’t end well. 

We are all feeling the impact in India. The traditional engineering-to-IT path is  broken, gig work is on the rise, and quality jobs are few and far between. And how can we forget the rounds of layoffs? 

Altogether, it’s a state of unprecedented flux in the job market—one we are still trying to make sense of. 

The latest episode of 90,000 Hours (which you can now also listen to on Spotify by linking your The Ken account) goes a step beyond these headlines. We asked early-career professionals how they are navigating this specific moment, and a picture emerges of fear, anxiety, and confusion about the future. 

Rahul, who graduated from a tier-1 engineering college this year and now works at a high-cap IT services firm, told us that he and his group of friends are looking ahead and thinking about Plan Bs. That could mean setting up a business or doing something else entirely. He has even considered becoming a content creator.

Forget alternate paths—many employees do not even know where or how to upskill. 

And the larger question of whether their work mattered was weighing on the minds of many employees we spoke to. 

A consultant with three years of experience, armed with one of the world’s best MBAs, said she was uncomfortable using AI to work and is looking to move to a strategy arm of a conglomerate—even if that means a pay cut. Her fear is palpable, as more and more consulting firms outsource entry-level work—the deck-making and research that fills a young consultant’s days—to AI.

These conversations drive home one point: today, you enter an organisation with expectations and land in a reality you didn’t sign up for. You don’t know if you stand out, or if your work matters. 

Forget a plan for life. You don’t know what’s gonna happen in the next six months. 

It’s not as though young people in previous generations magically found their dream jobs at 22. But earlier, there was a path. Now, that path is broken. You do not even know what you should be hoping for. This is the “hope gap” at play today. 

So even if you are ambitious and driven, there is a high chance your organisation—which is also in the midst of figuring out a transitioning job market—will not provide what you are looking for. This is especially true for entry-level employees in the process of honing their craft and explains why the engineer and consultant mentioned above are looking to move out of their jobs. 

The risk of this AI-induced automation will be most acutely felt in “cognitive tasks that don’t require at least five years of specific vocational preparation”, argues Bloomberg columnist Andy Mukherjee.

This, precisely, is the “grunt work” that entry-level employees do to learn from experts. So the career pipeline has a leak. 

That begs the question: if entry-level employees are not getting time to learn and specialise, where do they go? 

While reporting this story, we wanted to find a semblance of a solution—or at least one way out of this rut. 

The answer, it seems, lies in finding a community that lets you be the apprentice—one where you can train and better your craft. It might just be the antidote to the “hope gap” we’re facing today. 

Nothing is more reassuring than knowing there are others in the same boat. And even more important is knowing that some are committed to figuring out what’s next through trial and error. You can tune in to our latest episode to get the full picture. 

In the podcast, we talk about FOSS United, the non-profit that promotes free and open-source software. There, you can work on projects you like, sometimes alongside thousands of others. The goal is to experiment and improve technical rigour.

A more recent example is also the AI Learn Circle in Bengaluru, a community of over 2,000 people who meet every weekend to build in a pressure-free environment. The results? Members tinker away to create everything from an exam-prep assistant to a gaming-news scraper that offers tips for your favourite games. 

These are just two examples in the software space, but I am curious to hear how early-career professionals in other fields are navigating shifts in their workplaces. If this resonates with you, I would love to hear from you! 

Also, we are looking to explore workplace situations through an inter-generational lens for a potential future episode. Have you recently experienced something you could not discuss with your manager? Did you feel you had an entirely different point of view on a particular situation? If so, please write to me at [email protected]. I am eagerly looking forward to all your responses. 

Until next time,
Vidhatri 

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