AI will break the career ladder; that’s good news

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

Aneesh Raman: This will affect every worker in every company, in every sector, in every society. New job titles, mine got made up eight to nine months ago. Moderna’s got a new chief digital and people officer that they’ve created.

Anyone with a growth mindset, ability to learn, constantly a curiosity that drives them, you’re about to enter the best world of work that’s existed for humans.

Bob Safian: That’s Aneesh Raman, Chief Economic Opportunity Officer at LinkedIn. Aneesh has been talking and writing about how AI will redefine the future of work. And his perspective is so intriguing and so urgent, I wanted to bring his ideas to this show.

Aneesh is absolutely convinced that the traditional career ladder is going away, but that he says is a good thing. So what’s going to replace it? A climbing wall that we all scale together. Listen in for what he means by that. I’m Bob Safian and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Aneesh Raman, Chief Economic Opportunity Officer at LinkedIn. Aneesh, thanks for joining us.

RAMAN: Thanks for having me.

SAFIAN: So you wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times with a headline about the bottom rung of the career ladder breaking, and it went everywhere like viral. Did that surprise you?

Copy LinkThe impact of AI on every job and industry

RAMAN: I’ve been in the arena for moments of big change before, when I was with CNN, when I was with President Obama, so I have a sense of what it’s like when cultural conversations start to take hold. With this one, I didn’t know what exactly was going to happen. I did an op-ed in The New York Times last year, and that one, it percolated here or there, but it wasn’t like this one.

And so this one really hit, I think, an underlying tension that we’re all feeling that something big is underway. That it isn’t playing out cleanly, quickly everywhere all at once. It’s not like the pandemic where we all just know what’s happening and then our life changes overnight, but that it is coming to us eventually.

And evidently, entry-level work is the place where we’re all able to focus first as a place where something real and big is happening. And that’s what I’ve been encouraged by, because a lot of what I wrote this op-ed for was to provoke the conversations about AI and work, which is what do we do about this and how do we get to better?

SAFIAN: And there’s speculation about where AI hits the workforce hardest. The CEO of Anthropic has pointed to white-collar jobs.

You’re talking about entry-level tasks. Are those two different scenarios based on different assumptions, or is it two parts of the same thing?

RAMAN: The thing I can say with certainty, is that this will affect every worker, in every company, in every sector, in every society. Now, when it impacts every worker in every company, I don’t know. It’ll depend on where you work, what you do, but it’s going to hit everyone. And it’s going to hit everyone in a way that can lead to better for everyone, which I know we’ll talk about.

What I don’t think anyone can do right now is in any absolute way predict net employment. We don’t know so much of what’s about to hit, and so much of where it goes depends on what we do as humans right now to shape this new economy as it forms. So we know historically, jobs have been disrupted, new jobs have been created every time we’ve gone into a new economy.

It’s unclear to me whether we’ll see more jobs changing than new jobs emerging, and it’s going to take a bit for us to figure that out. But what we know is happening right now is that everyone’s job is changing on them, even if they are not changing jobs. And that’s where we should be focused.

SAFIAN: And the data about roles that you see on LinkedIn’s platform, the overall jobs’ numbers that come from the government are fairly solid.

How fast is this change happening? Are companies already hiring fewer, newer grads, or do we not quite know yet?

RAMAN: Everything’s happening and everything’s not happening, because there’s no, again, universal way. It’s not an either/or situation. So I think a lot of what we got to push beyond is this, “Are entry-level jobs going away? Are they going to stay?” It’s neither, it’s both, it’s yes.

So when I think about entering a new economy and I look back across economic anthropology and economic history, there are generally four phases. The first phase is disruption. This new technology becomes real. And this is, I think, a technology equivalent to general purpose technologies like the steam engine, like electricity, like the internet.

We’re in that zone. So we already know that’s happening. Any number of metrics of people using AI at work, we’ve got data. Nearly 90% of C-suite leaders globally say, “AI adoption is a top priority for 2025.” So this technology is here and it’s in the day-to-day. Now the second thing that happens when you enter a new economy is that jobs change.

And a lot of what I looked at early on with AI is, is AI going to be more like electricity or like the internet? And the reason I ask that is that electricity changed everything for everyone, but it actually didn’t change much for humans at work. We still largely did physical labor. We just did it in the factory rather than the farm.

The internet came and it fundamentally started to change work for humans. Suddenly, it wasn’t just physical labor but intellectual labor that became valued by our economy. So the first thing I was looking at is like, “Okay. Disruption’s here, jobs are going to change. How are they going to change?”A new economy’s on the way, that I’m calling the innovation economy.

Copy LinkA more human-centric workplace

Because our core skills as humans, the things that differentiates our species, the ability to imagine, to invent, to communicate complex ideas, to organize around complex ideas, those are going to come to the center of work. And that’s a whole new set of skills that our economy has never fully valued. In fact, we’ve derided those skills often as soft skills or people skills that are nice-to-have, not must-haves.

So we’re already starting to see in our data, communication is like the number one skill across job postings, not coding. All the jobs on the rise, aside from just general AI fluency or deep AI knowledge if you’re going for that small set of jobs that’s explicitly about building AI, are all things like critical thinking, strategic thinking.

Closing that deal as a salesperson, persuasion, storytelling. So we’re already seeing that jobs are going to shift, they’re going to shift more to unique human capability. And then the fourth phase will come where we’ll see a new economy emerge. And part of what I’m waiting for, and I don’t think we have these signals yet, is new job titles.

Mine got made up eight to nine months ago. Moderna’s got a new chief digital and people officer that they’ve created. New roles will emerge that aren’t just AI, because we’re seeing head of AI jobs have gone up, I think, 3X in five years. But also new business starts, like a whole new era of innovation that’s going to happen through these tools.

So there’s some signals I’m waiting for. A different organizational workflow like org charts become work charts. You have project-based work. There’s a bunch of signals that we’ll start to see over the next year or two, that start to suggest where and how the new economy is taking hold.

SAFIAN: It sounds like historically, you looked at electricity and the internet.

And it sounds like you’re saying it’s more like the internet, but it’s also going to be something completely different that we don’t even really know yet what it is.

RAMAN: Well, we know that whatever the role of humans at work is, it’s going to be more human than work has ever been. And what’s really important about that, is I always start with, “Well, let’s evaluate the status quo we’ve got before we A, get afraid of changing it, or B, want to imagine what it should become.” Work has never been human-centric, ever. The story of work is the story of technology at work, not humans at work.

For a millennia, we had this goods economy largely about physical labor, the farm, then the factory. For a half century, we’ve had this knowledge economy, largely about intellectual labor. But across all of that, very few humans have been able to bring all of who they are to the core thing that we need for economic growth, which is innovation.

Copy LinkAI and the new meritocracy

Very, very, very, very few humans have had the ability to get the capital to turn their idea into an invention. They needed the credentials, they needed the connections. So we’ve done pretty poorly as a species at helping all humans innovate. But we’re about to go into an economy where that is going to be core to what all humans are doing at work. And then you’ve got, doing the work of matching the labor market.

The labor market is one of the least transparent, least dynamic, least inclusive markets that humans have ever created. It’s largely, generally guesswork. None of us actually know, are we overqualified, underqualified, overpaid, underpaid? Our bosses don’t even know. And so absent a meritocracy that’s skills based, that’s transparent, the opacity of the labor market has allowed this pedigree signaling to be how people rise.

Do you have the right degree from the right school? Do you have the right job title from the big name employer? Do you know the right people to get this job? Because I’m just decreasing risk by hiring you because it’s guesswork generally. And where we’ve got rigor, it’s around the technical skills. We spent a century building, teaching, training, assessing for IQ.

Well, all of that is getting upended by an innovation economy that’s going to be, “What are your unique curiosities? What is your unique ability to have resilience and adaptability and growth mindset? And how are you going to bring it into a project-based organization where you’re going to help us come up with new ideas and new ways of work?”

It’s a whole new way of work that’s going to allow anyone who is hungry for more, anyone with a growth mindset, ability to learn, constantly a curiosity that drives them. You’re about to enter the best world of work that’s existed for humans.

SAFIAN: It’s also very different than the kind of world that we’re trained for in the way our schooling works and everything.

That is much more hierarchical and task-based and not necessarily as creative, so there’s a disconnect. Is that going to trickle down too?

RAMAN: Oh, so not only is work being redefined, but every system around work is going to have to be redesigned. I talk a little bit about this in the op-ed. But educators are going to have to start really investing in helping students, and this is K-12 and post-secondary, understand these core people skills.

The humanities are suddenly going to be a really big deal in a durable degree, if higher education and post-secondary education makes them so. Remember, math was like an abstract academic field until the 19th century when employers said, “I need an engineer. Can you do an engineering degree, so I know I’m hiring someone ready to do this job?”

The humanities are going to have to do that. Applied humanities like we had with applied math, so people can hire for ethical training of AI. Can hire for organizational design around the mind, not the machine. So everyone’s got to bring these unique people skills to the center. We’ve also got to help everyone become an entrepreneur.

And that doesn’t mean you’re going to go launch a business. But it means you’re going to have to do what our species has always done best, which is adapt and innovate as a day-to-day thing. You’ve got to learn resilience, you’ve got to learn failing fast, taking risks. You’ve got to learn execution and what it is to shift.

SAFIAN: Because doing the same thing over and over again, which is what a lot of jobs have been, that’s not going to be there. Because that’s what the technology’s going to do for you.

RAMAN: Anything that is routinizable is going to be the technology. And that’s both physical and intellectual, as you think about robots aided by AI taking on more and more physical labor. So what you’ve got is what I call the five Cs. This list I’ve developed with neuroscientists, courage, compassion, creativity, curiosity and communication.

Those are the core skills, I think, that make us humans. Remember, our species until about 40,000 years ago, wasn’t the only sapiens around and we were never the biggest. We were never the fastest. What allowed us to emerge as the apex species on this planet, is that we were able to adapt in really important ways by those five Cs, in how we both told really complex stories through language.

And then how we organized to increase scale around things like nation states. So that’s going to come to the center of it all for us and we’ve got to shore those skills up.

SAFIAN: I’m curious, I talked to a CEO not too long ago, who talked about that people think that coders are going to go away. But actually, all the AI makes the ROI on every engineer you have higher, because you can get so much more from them.

So you’re actually going to hire more of those technical people. And I’m just curious, that’s a little bit different than the communication side that you’re talking about, or is it a different kind of engineer then?

Copy LinkBuilding unique value in the age of AI

RAMAN: Yes, I would say, and when I did the op-ed last year, I said, “Look, our data showed 96% of a software engineer’s job, the tasks that a software engineer does, are either currently or very soon will be disrupted by AI.” So immediately, the binary, use old math to solve new equation reaction will be, “Oh, that’s the end of software engineers.”

No, and we said this last year, the job’s going to change. And so if you want to be a software engineer, first of all, CS is still a great thing to study because of the way it helps you think about systems. The way it helps you think about how you might want to build with AI tools, even as they vibe code.

But also, with a CS degree, you are going to need net new skills if you don’t have them around those five Cs. All of this starts to merge into a full-stack builder. Someone is able to, with AI tools, come up with an idea for a better product or functionality, test it, design it, build it, and then get in a queue to ship it to see what happens.

That’s a different role. Now you could go into that role from design, from product, from engineering, but that’s where that role is going, which again is going to anchor around these five Cs. So everyone, just for right now, all you got to do is take a look at your job, your job, my job, CEO. You just got hired as a new worker. Bucket the top 12 tasks of that job into three ways.

There’s a bunch of tasks AI is going to do on its own, more so with agents. That’s true for all of us. Start testing the tools, start giving it those tasks. The second bucket of things you’re going to do with AI, which you’re going to have to learn the functionality of the tools to help you do those things in ways that uplevel your work.

I’m a writer by training, had a job explicitly about writing at different moments. The first big realization for me about GPT was, this can write. And so then I started saying, “Okay, what’s the first draft stuff that it’s going to do on its own? What is it then helping me do to uplevel the storytelling I do?”

And then your third bucket is what are you going to do with those five Cs? And so over the past two years, I spent more and more time doing this human-to-human conversation. Which until the humanoid robots are able to mimic facial expression, see the cues of you interviewing me, that’s where I got to shore up my skills. So everyone can start to map that out.

Everyone can right now see how vulnerable they are to AI. And everyone right now can start to develop their story of self around the skills and expertise that get them into that third bucket, and where all of us should go, which is nobody beats you at being you.

SAFIAN: Nobody beats you at being you. I love that idea, it’s empowering, refreshing. Though, of course, for some people, it might be daunting, so what’s it going to take to open up the opportunity Aneesh sees to everyone? And what can each of us do to prepare ourselves? We’ll talk about that after the break. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, LinkedIn’s Aneesh Raman explained why AI will create a better future for work. Now, he outlines how individuals, companies, and society can best prepare for the coming changes. Let’s jump back in. 

Copy LinkCrafting your personal story

As you describe the creating a story of yourself essentially, that’s hard work. It’s hard work for you as a storyteller. For a lot of folks, it’s not necessarily natural for them.

RAMAN: Well, what I like to remind folks is the systems that we’ve all grown up in over millennia, have not been human-centric and have not taught us in great ways how to be human. The things we do as a human with other humans, whether it’s being a parent, a spouse, a manager, you don’t get much training on that. You’re making it up as you go.

So yes, it’s very hard to do this because you’ve never been told you can do it or taught how to do it, but you have the ability to tell stories in you, it’s what we do. Joan Didion, the great American writer, said it best, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” 

Everything in our world is a choice that you make about what story you’re going to tell. Are you having a good day or a bad day? Are you on a good track or a bad track? The fact that we live in America, that’s a story. The nation-state is a story. We just all agree it means something, and then suddenly it’s here. The monetary order is a story that we just all agree, and then suddenly it’s there and it’s got laws around it. So you can rewrite your story at any moment, including right now.

And you can and should rewrite in a way that gets you excited about you. And if you need motivation, that’s what you’re going to get paid and promoted for doing in the coming years, because the whole point of work is going to be no one beats you at being you. And you’ve got to start that work to figure it out, but the tools can help you.

Every other generation of humans, I would’ve said this and it’s like, “Oh my God, I don’t even know where to start.” This is a great thing to take to the tools. Give it your resume, ask it, “What is the unique story of self in there?” And then when you go interview for those jobs, you know what’s the most important credential they’re going to look for when they interview you?

Copy LinkOpportunities for entry-level workers

It’s less and less going to be the degree. It’s less and less that you’ve already done the job somewhere else because everything’s getting changed. It’s more just how energized are you about being you and the stuff you want to do with that organization. And so the most important credential is really just self-worth, which starts with something we can all have agency over today, by developing that self-worth and that story of self.

SAFIAN: For employers, I feel like there’s a paradox, because there’s this concern over a shortage of tech-savvy, AI-ready talent.

Which theoretically, would open a door for young people coming out of school who’ve been raised on GPT, even if their professors didn’t always like it.

But on the other hand, your figures at LinkedIn indicate that young folks are less secure in some ways in their job or have lower confidence. Can you square some of that for me?

RAMAN: Yeah, so I think the first thing to realize is, so much about this right now is sentiment. People are, A, as humans, biologically wired to fear change. And we don’t do enough to talk about how broken the status quo has been for humans at work. So we generally feel like work as it exists, is the natural world or the mountains.

It just has always been this way and this is how it’s supposed to be. Or that work as it exists, which is true in many ways, is better than it’s ever been because we have protections and we have economic mobility at levels we haven’t seen. So everyone’s just really worried about things changing. We got to push past that.

So with entry-level workers, what you have right now is they are probably most affected by sentiment. Because right now, you’ve got both this uncertainty in the macroenvironment, and then this disruption that’s coming from AI in a lot of entry-level tasks. Not jobs writ large, not work writ large, but tasks. And that’s creating for companies this pause moment of, “What’s going on? Where are we going to use AI?”

I don’t know whether I should hire, because I don’t know what’s going on in the macro. And so we know that the younger generations are feeling that. They’re feeling that in the frustration of difficulty finding a job. They’re feeling it in a decreased sense of mobility and hope for their careers. So in that sense, it’s the worst of times for them.

Copy LinkWhy optimism lies in human potential

But as Dickens said, it’s also the best of times to be starting a career, because where work is going, as we talked about, is going to allow for more agency than ever before. Everyone is going to get to where I got to nine months ago, where our CEO just made up this job. It had never existed before.

But it was built around the unique skills and expertise I had in the moment and the need that the company had. That’s going to happen for all of us.

SAFIAN: And career has been defined traditionally by climbing up a ladder in an industry or at a company. It’s become more mythic in some ways, because people are changing jobs and fields more often than ever.

Does that analogy, that story, is that still the story? Is the entry-level job still the gateway, wherever our career goes after that?

RAMAN: The career ladder is done. Again, the knowledge economy is on the way out. It’s going to still be climbing, because you’re still going to start your career in one place and try and eventually get to another place. But it’s going to be more like my career, which has been this climbing wall. I’ve started over so many times.

I’ve gone down to go up. I’ve constantly had to readjust based on what was happening and where I wanted to go. But the path I ended up taking up my climbing wall is uniquely me, and it means that now where I am is something that is uniquely me. Start with what are the skills you have that you think the world needs and that you want to get better at?

What are the curiosities you have that you think could turn into an expertise around an issue area like economic opportunity, a sector like healthcare, a type of product like consumer? What’s going to motivate you every day to want to learn more and more? And then where are you going to apply that to the job you’ve got, the job you want?

So much of right now, if you’re a young worker especially, where you work matters so much more than what you do at that place. Because if you are finding your place to an organization that is using AI tools responsibly and that is doing project-based work, you’re going to learn so much in the early moments of this paradigm shift.

SAFIAN: The scale of disruption that you’re talking about is so intense and unclear, but you are optimistic in some ways about where it’s going to lead.

So tell me where that optimism comes from and where do you think it takes us?

RAMAN: Yeah. So the optimism is entirely born from the fact that I am radically pro-human. Humans are pretty incredible. Human intelligence is pretty incredible. And a lot of my optimism then is based on extreme pessimism about where work has been for humans to date.

This research that Raj Chetty at Harvard and others did in 2017 where they looked at STEM aptitude in early childhood, I think, in the kindergarten years or in elementary school. Equal aptitude across socioeconomic backgrounds, and then they looked at who filed patents. And rich kids were basically 10 times more likely to file patents.

And so those are the two datasets they had. But the conceptual point is that something breaks down from general aptitude at STEM, to who gets to file the patents that create new things in the world. And so they termed everyone who didn’t make it to the patent, the lost Einsteins.

So what drives me every day, is the billions of humans, the woman in rural India, the kid in the slum of Brazil, all sorts of Americans in the middle of the country or in rural America. Just all these humans who are sitting on all these great thoughts, but have never been given permission by themselves first, to think that that’s a thought worth turning something out of.

And if you extrapolate that over the course of human history, it’s a lot of great innovation that could happen. Think of all that’s going to happen if we can get this right, but this gets to the conversation of are we helping people understand this? Are we helping people navigate it?

Are we giving them the tools to not just be able to leverage AI and this unique technology, but also to better understand themselves and their unique skills and expertise?

SAFIAN: Right. Well, and tools in and of themselves aren’t necessarily good or bad, it’s how we use them.

And I guess that’s part of the fear a lot of people have about this technology, is like, “I don’t really know how it’s going to be used, that it’s necessarily going to be good in this way.”

RAMAN: Well, and I focus on AI at work, so put this technology and all the other contexts aside that are important discussions for us on cybersecurity, on societal cohesion and disinformation. Those are real debates we have to have. But when it comes to work, for anyone that’s worried, what has work been for humans to date?

Everything that we’re worried about AI doing, we’ve baked into the systems that we have now. They’ve shrunken us to tasks. They’ve been all, one size fits all around technical skills. They’ve never indexed on all we have as humans. It’s been physical labor and then intellectual labor to some degree for some people.

But never before has there been a generation of workers, and this is for anyone at any level, who’s staring out at an economy that has a very real possibility of getting us to better. The brokenness just won’t survive. If you think about AI’s ability to do more and more of the routinized, intellectual tasks. Robot’s ability to do more and more of the routinized, physical tasks.

A lot of people rushed to this idea of UBI in a workerless world of work. I don’t think you can go there until you’ve given our species a chance to do more than we’ve done. And that’s what’s really coming more and more by the day.

SAFIAN: And you personally, I know you use a lot of AI tools. But you personally, you’re not worried about staying competitive, that you might be outsourced or replaced by tech?

Copy LinkAI is not “cheating”

RAMAN: I get it, I get why people are right now holding back. There are very legitimate questions people should ask. How much data do I want to give a tool? What do I feel comfortable doing with this tool? But just know that if you’re holding back because you feel like it’s cheating, we thought calculators were cheating, we thought Googling was lazy.

That’s going to get normalized into work, so if you’re afraid and you’re holding back, just start today, for me, for you, start using these tools. Figure out how you want to build them into your day to day. We’re past the stage where this is about what is this and can I wait for it? It’s real, it’s here and you can’t wait for it, so just start getting in there.

And then in the course of that, you’ll start to define, “Well, where’s your job going? Where’s your career going?” And as you do that, you get to do it in ways that are uniquely you, and in ways you’ve never been able to do before.

SAFIAN: Another thing that people sometimes distrust is businesses themselves. And do companies, as they’re rethinking their approach to building a workforce, do they have any responsibility beyond what’s best for their own business?

Listen, I’ve asked business leaders this for a long time. Do the beneficiaries of tech’s advantages have an obligation to help those at risk of being left behind? And I hear lip service given to that, but not necessarily investment given to it.

RAMAN: Well, so I’d say two things. One, yes, but I’m even going to put that aside because someone might say that’s not their job. Their job is to grow and make profits. Putting that aside, the best way to grow your company, let alone survive over the next five to 10 years, is to focus on your people.

I often say chief people officers are the new chief technology officers and the next chief executive officers, because companies are going to win based on talent, not tech. AI is this tool to do work. It’s also a tool to build products. It can code. So the ability to build technology is now ubiquitously available.

There’ll be a few companies that that is what they do, and that is its own reality. But for other sectors, for other companies, the ability to build technology is going to become easier than ever. So then it’s really going to come down to, do you have invested people, curious people, innovative people?

Are they working in an entirely new org setup that is allowing for flatter orgs, more project-based work people to bring their best to different phases of a project? Because again, if you just look at the history of work and look at the fundamentals of this technology, much more likely to me is a company winning because of its workers and a company that’s workerless winning.

There was a little bit early on about the billion-dollar company with no employees. What’s more likely for a company to be worried about is a billion-dollar person that never had to work at a company. If you want someone to work at your company, you’re going to have to create a culture that makes people think they’ll become the best version of themselves there versus just doing their own thing.

Or doing it at any number of other companies that have that culture down. To your question about how we help those who are going to deal with the first wave of this, entry-level workers right now, for example, I do think we’ve got to have that as a cross-sector conversation. Obviously, the tech companies need to be part of that.

Obviously, voices like mine can help shape how we understand what’s happening. But I think this is where I’d love to see more academic leaders and policy leaders more engaged in the workforce development discussion of AI than we’ve seen to date. Because again, it’s going to require a complete redesign of systems, and we want to make sure that no one gets left behind.

SAFIAN: There’s some folks in the creative areas in the arts, who are likely underselling how much they’re using AI already. How much do you think some corporate workers are overstating how much they’re using AI?

RAMAN: So you can tell, you can tell by how quickly people are coming up with new ideas, how quickly those ideas are turning into tests, or those tests are turning into scalable projects. We’re past the fake it phase, and that doesn’t even matter. These tools are easy to use, it’s semantic, it’s conversational, and they will make your work better.

So the point is just start using them to use them, to make your work better, to give yourself greater agency over where your job goes, where your career goes. 70% of the skills for the average job will have changed by 2030 according to our data, like that’s coming. Again, your job is changing on you if you’re not changing jobs.

So use these tools to help figure out how your job’s going to change and what you want to change it into before someone figures that out for you.

SAFIAN: Well, Aneesh, this has been great. Thank you so much for doing it.

RAMAN: Thanks for having me and for having this discussion.

SAFIAN: I want to double-click on the five Cs that Aneesh mentioned. Courage, compassion, creativity, curiosity and communication. We don’t know if his full vision of the future of work will come to fruition, how bumpy the road ahead might be, the twists that AI’s evolution still has in store for us.

But whatever comes, those five Cs can and should be a guide for all of us. Even in the old-fashioned work world of career ladders, I’d argue that those attributes have differentiated the most compelling talent and have been the hallmark of human progress. I’m Bob Safian, thanks for listening.