Most employers have no plans to replace graduate roles with AI

Students are increasingly altering their career plans post-university over fears that artificial intelligence will take jobs, a report has found, despite little evidence that entry-level roles are currently being impacted.

The “AI and Early Careers Report” surveyed 710 early career respondents about how they believe AI will impact their future employment, as well as 30 employers to anticipate how AI will reshape junior roles.

While students’ anxieties over the future of the labour market were significant, the report argues that there is a “discrepancy” between such fears and the reality, with employers reporting less drastic changes to entry-level jobs.

The survey, conducted by Prospects at Jisc and the Institute of Student Employers, found 13 per cent of students have changed their career plans because of AI, an increase from 10 per cent in last year’s report. A further 34 per cent said they were considering doing so.

Many attributed this to fears over AI’s impact on the job market, with 69 per cent stating that they feared their desired job would be replaced. The next most common response at 57 per cent was that their preferred job role is being reshaped by AI, followed by their decision being shaped by having learned new AI skills (36 per cent).

Respondents who were in employment with a postgraduate degree (73 per cent) were less likely than undergraduates (86 per cent) to say their career-plan changes were driven by concerns about job replacement, and more inclined to view AI as reshaping – rather than threatening – their future roles (73 per cent compared with 57 per cent).

Furthermore, they were nearly three times as likely to say that their plans had evolved as they learned new AI skills (40 per cent compared with 14 per cent), 1.4 times as likely to report that AI had opened new opportunities for them (40 per cent compared with 29 per cent), and twice as likely to report pursuing a higher-paying career because of AI (33 per cent compared with 14 per cent)

Some 27 per cent of undergraduates and 29 per cent of postgraduates said their current education was not preparing them “very well” for a future with AI.

However, “students and graduates often overestimate the scale and immediacy of automation risk”, the report says, and more than half (53 per cent) of employers said that entry-level hiring numbers would remain at similar levels over the next three years, while 27 per cent anticipated increases to their entry-level hiring.

None of them said they expected large-scale job losses owing to AI during this period. Employers also said that market conditions, strategic reorganisation and budget pressures were having a bigger impact on entry-level hiring than AI.

Chris Rea, early careers expert for Prospects at Jisc, told Times Higher Education that universities needed to prioritise “dealing with misapprehensions and misconceptions” that students and graduates have about the impact of AI on the jobs market, owing to the “growing gap” between student perceptions and employer behaviour.

He added that it is “easy for students to get demoralised” by concerns over AI and that it’s been considered a “doomsday” for the jobs market among some. However, it is universities’ role to help “strip all that rhetoric away”.

“That’s not about glossing over where there may be threats or where there may be risks, it’s about being clear about what they might be, and certainly being clear where there’s still a lot of good news as far as the graduate job market is concerned.”

This is something university careers services can lead on, Rea said, adding that they needed to keep working closely with recruiters to stay up to date with the realities of AI’s impact on the job market.

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com