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Over the last few months, I have shared multiple resources on how AI is reshaping entry-level and early-career roles, from a section of Stanford’s AI Index report on employment declines in AI-exposed junior positions to the World Economic Forum’s report on safeguarding early-career pathways. New research published in Administrative Science Quarterly, and repurposed for this new Harvard Business Review article, introduces a different factor into this discussion: remote work. Researchers analyzed more than 50 million job postings across 28 European countries and ran a controlled experiment with 1,200 hiring managers, finding that remote roles required roughly 25 percent more skills, experience, and credentials than otherwise identical in-person roles, driven largely by the loss of informal, proximity-based mentoring that once let managers take a chance on potential over experience. When the authors tested AI exposure and remote work against each other directly, the remote work effect held while the AI effect largely disappeared. One implication for early-career strategy is that we should continue to widen the lens beyond AI and look at other factors, like remote work, shaping early-career outcomes.
