Refers to an emerging shift in which jobs classified as entry level increasingly require skills, responsibilities, judgment, and capabilities that historically were associated with more experienced or senior workers. The trend is particularly visible in occupations highly exposed to artificial intelligence. As artificial intelligence performs or assists with some routine and foundational tasks traditionally assigned to early-career workers, employers may expect new workers to begin their careers performing higher-level activities such as problem framing, strategic decision-making, stakeholder management, leadership, collaboration, and the supervision or evaluation of artificial intelligence-generated work.

PricewaterhouseCoopers describes this process as the “seniorisation” of entry-level work. Its 2026 Global Artificial Intelligence Jobs Barometer found that the most artificial-intelligence-exposed entry-level jobs in the United States were seven times more likely than the least-exposed entry-level jobs to require skills traditionally associated with senior roles. The analysis defined early-career positions as jobs requiring zero to two years of experience.

The trend has implications across the learn-and-work ecosystem because it raises a fundamental question: How do people develop senior-level capabilities if the entry-level jobs through which those capabilities were traditionally developed are disappearing or being redesigned? Potential implications include:

• Education and training: Colleges, universities, high schools, and training providers may need to provide more opportunities for learners to apply knowledge, exercise judgment, work with artificial intelligence, and solve authentic workplace problems before entering full-time employment.
• Employers: Organizations may need to rethink onboarding, mentoring, supervision, and early-career talent development rather than assuming new workers will arrive with capabilities that previously developed through experience.
• Work-based learning: Internships, apprenticeships, cooperative education, project-based learning, and other forms of work-based learning may become increasingly important as mechanisms through which learners gain workplace experience before applying for entry-level positions.
• Career mobility: Seniorization may create additional barriers for people without access to internships, professional networks, or other opportunities to acquire and demonstrate workplace experience.
• Talent pipelines: If organizations reduce traditional junior work while increasing expectations for new hires, they may weaken the pathways through which future experienced workers, managers, and leaders are developed.

PricewaterhouseCoopers also found that among highly artificial-intelligence-exposed occupations, entry-level postings classified as “seniorised” increased 35% between 2019 and 2025, while comparable non-seniorised entry-level postings declined 10%. This suggests that some entry-level work may not simply be disappearing; rather, the jobs that remain or grow may be changing substantially in what they expect workers to do.

See Initiative: Research: Artificial Intelligence Jobs Barometer — PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) | Learn & Work Ecosystem Library

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Terminology note: Seniorization is the U.S. spelling; seniorisation is used in the PricewaterhouseCoopers report and in British English.