The Career Ladder Is Gone. You’re Climbing a Wall Now.

LinkedIn’s data says 85% of entry-level roles already include tasks that AI can automate, even when the job title has not changed a letter. The first rung of the career ladder is dissolving while we watch. But here is the truth nobody hands the graduating class: some of us never had a ladder to begin with, and we climbed anyway.

Aneesh Raman, LinkedIn’s Chief Economic Opportunity Officer, put it plainly in coverage this month: today’s graduates are facing “a wall, not a ladder.” AI scrambled the tidy sequence of first job, promotion, next rung, by eating the exact tasks that once defined entry-level roles.

But Raman was equally firm on the other half: the first job is changing, not disappearing. The world now counts 1.3 million new AI-related roles. Entry-level hiring at small and mid-sized companies jumped 152% and 100% respectively between 2023 and 2025. And the youngest cohort brings weapons the rest of us had to learn late: native AI fluency and an entrepreneurial reflex.

The World Economic Forum reached a similar conclusion in its 2026 report on AI and the future of entry-level work: the bottom rung is not vanishing so much as being rebuilt mid-climb. Consequently, the real question for both sides is who adapts first, the graduates or the org charts.

Let me also name what the wall metaphor gets right emotionally, because the emotion is half the battle. A ladder promises order: do the work, wait your turn, rise. A wall promises nothing. It just stands there asking what you are willing to grip. That shift feels like betrayal to a generation raised on the promise of the ladder, and the feeling is valid. However, the wall has one advantage the ladder never offered: nobody controls it. There is no gatekeeper deciding when you get the next rung. There is only the next handhold and whether you take it.

I Know Something About Walls

I was born in Vietnam. There was no network waiting for me here, no legacy admission, no mapped-out career path. In fact, everything I have built, in recruiting, in writing, in life, came from scaling walls that nobody designed with a staircase for someone like me. Cancer was a wall. Getting sober was a wall. Seven-plus years later, I can tell you what every wall taught me: you do not need a ladder. You need grip strength and a reason to climb.

Recovery taught me the same lesson in a different classroom. Sobriety is a daily rebuild with no shortcuts and no ladder, just the next honest handhold. Cancer taught me that a timeline is a privilege, not a promise. Consequently, when a 22-year-old tells me the path looks impossible, I do not hand them optimism. I hand them a method, because methods survive bad markets and optimism does not.

How You Scale a Wall

First, find the handholds nobody is using. The big-brand graduate programs are shrinking, but small and mid-sized companies doubled their entry-level hiring. In short, go where the growth is, not where the prestige was. Second, make your AI fluency loud. After all, you grew up with these tools, while most hiring managers are still botsitting nervously. That gap is your leverage. Third, build in public. Show visible work (projects, posts, proof) and people already at the top will pull you up.

One more handhold that costs nothing: proximity. Walls get easier next to people who climbed them. Follow the operators one level above you, comment with substance, and ask one precise question a week. Most senior people ignore flattery and answer specificity. In six months you will hold something the ladder never gave anyone: a rope from above. If you want help braiding that rope, I have been the rope before.

Employers: Delete the Career Ladder, Delete Your Bench

However, Raman’s warning cuts both ways. If you automate away your entry-level roles entirely, you are also automating away your future senior leaders. The companies that redesign first jobs around judgment, relationships, and AI-amplified output will own the next decade’s leadership pipeline. Meanwhile, the ones that simply delete the bottom rung will spend 2035 wondering why they have no bench.

The redesign is very doable, and early movers are already proving it. Convert entry roles from task execution into apprenticeships in judgment: pair every new hire with a senior operator, hand them the AI tooling on day one, and grade them on the questions they ask rather than the keystrokes they produce. Additionally, let reverse mentoring run both directions: your youngest hires teach AI fluency up the org chart while your veterans teach consequence down it.

Companies that run this trade for two years will own a leadership pipeline their competitors will have to buy back later at executive-search prices. I would know. I sell the buyback.

So here is where I land, on both sides of the wall. Graduates: the market owes you nothing, but it is paying attention, and attention is a currency you can earn without permission. Employers: the first job you redesign this year is the leadership pipeline you will brag about in 2035. Meanwhile, the ones still mourning the ladder will keep mistaking nostalgia for strategy. The wall is not the obstacle. The wall is the filter, and filters are where careers, and companies, get interesting.

Source: HRM Asia interview with LinkedIn’s Aneesh Raman.

Cathy Trinh is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Recruiter Hustle, OC/LA’s no-filter media platform for talent, finance, and recruiting professionals.

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