Young people face a Catch-22: employers demand previous experience before they will hire, yet artificial intelligence is taking over the entry-level jobs.
A man stands before a labyrinth. Illustration by Ra2studio for Getty Images.
This article was produced out of News Decoder’s school partnership program. Philip Modupeh Atere-Roberts is a student at African Leadership Academy in South Africa, a News Decoder partner institution. Learn more about how News Decoder can work with your school.
After completing his education in Sierra Leone, Claudius Roberts expected stable employment and professional growth. Instead, he encountered job listings demanding 5-10 years of experience for entry-level positions.
For many graduates, this requirement is impossible to meet. Volunteering, short-term contracts and unpaid work become the only ways to remain active while waiting for something permanent.
For many young people, adulthood is meant to begin with work. Instead, it often begins with waiting.
Across continents, graduates leave school with qualifications, ambition and ideas, only to encounter shrinking job markets and rising uncertainty. Entry-level roles that once allowed young people to learn on the job are disappearing. Some are absorbed into informal economies. Others are quietly automated away.
The first step into the workforce feels less like a ladder and more like a missing rung.
Unending unemployment
This is not just a local frustration. It is a global pattern. Data from the International Labour Organization shows that young people are consistently more likely to be unemployed than adults.
When they do find work, it is often temporary or informal. The promise that education guarantees opportunity is weakening, especially in developing economies where population growth has outpaced formal job creation.
Roberts eventually turned to self-employment, founding his own youth consultancy not out of luxury, but necessity. His journey reflects what many young people are now told: if the door does not open, build your own. Yet even that advice raises a question. How many can build without capital, networks or infrastructure?
At the same time, another force is reshaping this landscape: artificial intelligence.
For Roland Walters, an IT specialist at the African Leadership Academy where I attend school, the impact of AI is not theoretical. It is structural. He describes how AI has “shifted the baseline” for entry-level work. Roles that once focused on repetition and basic learning tasks are disappearing, jobs like reception, basic customer support, administrative support and junior creative roles. The grunt work that once served as a training ground is being automated.
“The learning roles are being automated away,” Walters said. To enter the workforce now, young people must already operate at a higher level.
Bots get the jobs
This transformation is happening in both technical and creative sectors. In software development, what Walters calls “vibe coding” allows individuals to build applications using AI without fully understanding programming fundamentals. While this lowers barriers in one sense, it also forces junior developers to compete with machines for speed, sometimes without mastering core skills.
In music, media and marketing, AI tools reduce the need for studio time, photoshoots and entry-level assistants. Businesses cut costs. Efficiency improves. But the pipeline through which young creatives once learned their craft begins to narrow.
“What makes me better than AI?” Walters asks.
It is not a rhetorical question. It is a challenge. If AI can generate content instantly, answer customer queries, draft code, even mimic personalities, then human value shifts. To Walters, opportunity now lies in judgment, taste, strategy and oversight, not simply in using AI, but managing it. Become the editor rather than the generator.
He points to how AI has evolved. Early systems operated strictly within scripted boundaries. They responded only to what they were programmed to say. Today’s AI operates across vast datasets, capable of generating dialogue, images and even interactive storylines.
Systems need to change.
Streaming platforms experiment with allowing viewers to influence scenes through text prompts. Public figures are developing AI-powered digital twins, built using biometric data, voice replication and behavioral modeling, capable of generating content continuously without the person’s physical presence.
AI no longer supports work quietly in the background. It can replicate presence itself.
This expansion unsettles Walters. He believes AI cannot be stopped, only contained. Without urgent regulation, he warns, no job is entirely safe.
He worries about outdated or incorrect information being delivered through automated systems, particularly in sectors like telecommunications, where customers may not realize they are interacting with flawed outputs.
Governments, he said, should require companies using AI to maintain background human staff to safeguard entry-level employment and ensure accountability.
Work for free
At one point, Walters suggests something even more provocative: that internships may one day become entirely unpaid because AI reduces the cost of labor so drastically that companies feel less pressure to compensate for learning roles.
He ends with a metaphor that lingers: An “AI apartheid.” That’s a future where unregulated systems accumulate disproportionate power, widening inequalities between those who control AI infrastructure and those who merely live within it.
Placed beside Roberts’ experience, the contrast becomes difficult to ignore.
On one side, young graduates are told they lack experience. On the other, the very roles that once provided experience are shrinking. Some are advised to embrace simplicity, to pursue modest, practical jobs that can bridge unemployment gaps. Others are told to master AI tools or risk irrelevance.
International institutions continue to document the mismatch between education systems and labor markets. Reports from the World Bank, the African Development Bank and the International Labour Organization emphasize the need for stronger alignment between policy, skills development and economic transformation.
Education reforms
Education systems, however, often remain focused on memorization and traditional evaluation methods. As Walters notes, many schools ban AI rather than teach students how to collaborate with it.
Some argue that youth unemployment reflects individual failure. Others argue it reflects systemic breakdown. Listening to both interviews, the issue feels more layered than either explanation allows.
Young people are not idle. They volunteer. They build. They learn new tools. They adapt. But adaptation has limits when the structure itself keeps shifting.
If artificial intelligence continues raising the baseline for entry-level work, and employers continue demanding experience before opportunity, then the central question is not simply whether young people are prepared, it is whether the systems meant to receive them are prepared to change.
Perhaps the future is not disappearing. Perhaps it is being rewritten in real time. The uncertainty lies in who gets to write it.
Rewrite your future.
As I read both perspectives, I find myself caught between them. Like many students from Sierra Leone, I am continuing my education with the hope of studying law, yet I am also realistic about what may come after graduation. My concern is not driven primarily by artificial intelligence, but by the long-standing reality that formal jobs for graduates remain limited.
In Sierra Leone, education does not guarantee employment. It often serves as an added merit rather than a clear pathway. This creates a quiet tension for many young people.
We are encouraged to aim high, yet we are also aware of the growing number of qualified graduates who return home to wait. That awareness does not remove ambition, but it does introduce uncertainty.
Still, uncertainty has not erased possibility in my thinking. If anything, it has pushed me to look more seriously at entrepreneurship and initiative-building as parallel paths rather than last resorts. Sierra Leone remains a market with untapped potential, especially for young innovators willing to build where structures are still forming.
My hope is not only to find space within the existing system, but to help expand it. If the ecosystem can be strengthened through youth-led enterprise and leadership, then the economy itself can begin to shift. That belief, more than fear, is what I carry with me in to the real world.
Questions to consider:
1. What are some new challenges for people entering the work force?
2. In what ways is AI taking over starting jobs?
3. What talents or skills do you have that artificial intelligence programs would have difficulty replicating?
Philip Modupeh Atere-Roberts is a student journalist and youth advocate focused on youth unemployment, social impact and creative empowerment. He is passionate about using storytelling, music and lived experience to explore how global systems affect young people’s access to opportunity and meaningful work.