What happens to graduate development when AI removes the first step of work?

Welcome! I think we all remember our first jobs out of university. They usually weren’t great. But if you’re like me, you can probably draw a direct line between that initial job and where you are now. For me, I spent the first year taking minutes in meetings, which helped me not only understand the business itself, but also how to communicate effectively. Now, AI is taking a lot of entry-level “menial” tasks, and with them, valuable experience.

This week, in a new edition of QS Insights, we explore how universities can provide that experience and help recent, or soon-to-be, graduates. We also look at the rise of gaokao as a tool for international admissions and the changing attitudes around it.

Stay insightful,
Anton John Crace
Editor in Chief, QS Insights Magazine
QS Quacquarelli Symonds

When AI takes the first step

By Seb Murray

In brief

• AI is automating entry-level "grunt work," threatening the traditional apprenticeship phase where graduates build vital professional judgment.
• While AI boosts initial productivity, it risks deskilling graduates by stripping away the repetition needed to develop expertise.
• Universities must prioritise human-centric cognitive skills and industry collaboration to rebuild the professional learning curve for future leaders.

For graduates entering the labour market this year, the climb has become markedly steeper. Students are applying earlier, completing more internships and attending more careers events than previous cohorts, yet breaking through less often.

By February of their final year, just 27 percent of UK finalists had secured a graduate job, down from 33 percent three years earlier, according to High Fliers Research, an analytics company focussed on graduate and apprenticeship research. Artificial intelligence is accelerating the squeeze, absorbing many of the routine tasks that once formed the backbone of entry-level work, from crunching numbers in finance to combing through contracts in law.

That has turned AI into the main focus of an increasingly unforgiving hiring market, not just in the UK but in economies across the globe. But it obscures a far bigger shift: many of the tasks disappearing first are the very ones that have traditionally forged professional judgement.

Graduates have long earned that judgement by drafting reports, gathering data and sitting in on client meetings. Much of it was grunt work. But it was also where they developed the instincts which classrooms seldom teach.

That raises a bigger question than whether graduates can secure their first job: if AI is stripping away the apprenticeship on which professional careers are built, what replaces it? And what role should universities play?

“Employers now expect AI competence from every graduate, but no one has yet defined what that competence actually is. That ambiguity is the real challenge for universities,” says Mohammad Khalil, Associate Professor of AI and education at the University of Bergen in Norway.

Reskilling or deskilling?

For generations, professional expertise has oftentimes been built the same way: through repetition. Graduates started with routine work, gradually took on more responsibility and, over time, learnt to make increasingly big calls as eventual managers and leaders.

None of those early tasks looked especially glamorous; nor were they expected to. Each one added another layer of judgement and eventually, graduates stopped asking how to do the work and started knowing how to do it.

AI is beginning to compress that learning curve. Increasingly, the first draft, the financial model, or the market analysis can be produced by a chatbot in seconds. That promises a significant productivity dividend. But it also raises an uncomfortable possibility: if the grunt work disappears, so too might the experience that came with it.

Caitlin Bentley, senior lecturer in AI education at King’s College London, has found in her research that people using AI often struggle to recognise whether their own skills are improving or quietly eroding.

“The more serious issue is what our 'deskilling' research is now showing empirically: people often cannot tell whether they are getting better or worse at their own job,” says Bentley.

In one of her experiments involving ship operators, they were given practice dealing with mistakes made by an AI system. When the same problems emerged later in the test, they performed much better. Yet those who performed worse were just as confident in their own abilities, suggesting AI can make it harder for people to recognise when their own expertise is beginning to disappear.

Bentley says: “Early-career workers in our data reported the highest concern about this, because they are the ones entering the workforce now with the least knowledge and experience to fall back on.” They may appear more productive, and may even feel more capable. But they lack the experience to recognise what they are missing.

Thinking about thinking

The irony is that AI is making human skills more valuable, not less. As chatbots become better at churning out first drafts, value is shifting to the people asking the right questions, spotting the mistakes and exercising judgement.

The QS World Future Skills Index 2027, drawing on responses from more than 92,000 employers across 89 economies, found companies report their biggest skill gaps in human cognitive skills and leadership. Universities are producing graduates with strong technical foundations, but what many employers believe is missing are the capabilities that are far harder to automate: judgement, communication and decision-making.

“The biggest change AI is bringing to employer expectations is the rising premium on distinctly human skills in an era of machine-generated content,” says Xue Zhou, Dean of AI at the University of Leicester in England. “Employers are shifting their focus from what graduates know to how they think, verify and collaborate with intelligent tools.”

She argues that students need domain knowledge to challenge AI and not simply accept its answers as gospel. They also need what she calls “metacognitive skills” – essentially the ability to think about their own thinking – so they can work alongside AI, design better workflows and generate new ideas, rather than simply consume machine-generated ones.

Andrew Crisp, a British higher education consultant, believes employers are now looking well beyond AI literacy. “Human skills remain just as important, and will continue to be so,” he says. That means graduates need to communicate clearly and tell compelling stories with data.

 “Employers are also likely to want agile graduates, those that can see there is more than one way to solve a problem, graduates who can live with and embrace uncertainty, and graduates who can imagine.”

Yesterday’s labour market

If the challenge is that graduates are losing the opportunity to develop judgement, then adding another AI module to the university curriculum will not solve it. The model of learning itself will need to change.

At IESE Business School in Barcelona, students begin learning AI before they even arrive on campus. Then, weekly “AI pills” run throughout their degree programmes. But the school has also doubled down on the things technology cannot replace.

IESE has introduced device-free classrooms to force students to think through case studies without relying on laptops or chatbots, alongside a communication bootcamp designed to strengthen the skills recruiters consistently rank among their highest priorities.

“Business schools should not just teach the tools; they should form the judgement and character to use them well,” says Isabel Estalella, Admissions Director at IESE.

The University of Leicester’s Zhou believes assessment also needs to change. Universities should stop judging students solely on the final answer and instead assess how they arrived at it. “The process of learning – making the use of AI transparent, intentional and efficient – is key,” she says.

Zhou also argues that universities need to create far more opportunities for students to tackle real business problems, where AI becomes one tool among many rather than the answer itself.

That means resisting the temptation to let AI become a shortcut around learning.

“Unfortunately, the ‘use genAI without learning the essential skills and core knowledge’ approach can only take our students so far before negatively impacting their ability to master their discipline,” says Sophie Rutschmann, Associate Provost for Digitally Enhanced Learning and Teaching at Imperial College London.

At King’s College, Bentley takes the argument further: universities should resist defining their purpose simply as producing graduates ready for today’s AI tools.

“If universities define their role purely as producing employable, qualified graduates for an AI-driven economy, they will end up teaching for yesterday’s labour market,” she says. “Employability is not the wrong goal, but it’s an insufficient one, and it’s not really the university’s distinctive contribution.”

She argues universities should instead create spaces where students openly debate what AI is doing to work, expertise and society, and argue about what good AI use looks like.

Seb Murray is a journalist and editor who writes often for the Financial Times and has written for The Times, The Guardian, The Economist, The Evening Standard and BBC Worklife. He focuses on higher education and global business. He also produces a wide range of content for a range of corporate and academic institutions. Seb is also a recognised expert on higher education and speaks at international conferences.

One score, two futures 

By Michelle Zhu

In brief

• China’s gaokao exam is evolving from domestic-only usage into a credential recognised by top universities worldwide.
• Record numbers of students are using results to enter UK and Australian universities, bypassing intense domestic academic pressures.
• This shift creates global mobility, but institutions must support these students through the resulting cultural and language challenges.

For over 10 million mainland Chinese students sitting for the gaokao each year, studying abroad was long treated as a fallback route should their results fail to secure them a spot in one of China's top-tier universities.

But increasing global acceptance of the gaokao has begun to erode that perspective, as one of the world's toughest college entrance examinations is fast evolving from a single-destination verdict into an international credential.

Nicole Yang, now 21, sat the gaokao in Shanghai in 2023 and described the experience as unreal – something she had been preparing for her entire life would simply be over in a matter of three days.

Though her scores secured her a spot at Shanghai Ocean University, she gave up that domestic path and moved to a polytechnic in Singapore. The reason, she says, was the competitive environment back home: “forced to work and study super hard just for a normal job and normal salary and lots of overwork”.

Staying on the domestic track felt like a waste of time, she says. "I also wanted to try new things and explore more possibilities in life."

Nicole's decision to walk away from a domestic university place would have been unusual a generation ago, but it reflects a wider rewriting of the old gaokao script: one that categorised the option of an education abroad as a "consolation prize" for those who fell short, or a privilege reserved for families wealthy enough to bypass the system.

The fallback that isn't

Amy, a performance manager who asked to be identified by her first name only, remembers how things looked in 2010 when she sat the exam in Hunan Province.

"Many tended to view studying abroad as a fallback option if the gaokao didn't go well," she says. "It was pretty rare for top-performing students in my circle to head straight abroad after high school. It was usually those who underperformed or knew they wouldn't get the results they wanted who chose that route."

Her husband Shalom, a college lecturer who grew up in Shaanxi province, remembers a different reality. In his circle, studying abroad was not a fallback for failure but "a choice made by the excellent students". Those who went overseas did so at the graduate or PhD level and this, in his view, placed them among the best.

Shalom, who sat the gaokao in 2012 and graduated from Xizang Minzu University, notes that even this pattern has begun to change. Studying abroad is slowly shifting from something only top students achieved into a more "normal choice", he says, though he cautions that it remains dependent on having the financial means.

Nicole, from a younger cohort than the husband-and-wife pair (both in their early thirties), describes a more crowded field of motivations.

"Some people still treat it as a fallback option. But also, lots of people now go overseas for a Master's degree, which helps their personal background. Students who do well in the gaokao but not as well as they hoped will also choose this path," she says. "It's a good way to challenge ourselves, expand our views, and obviously, practice English."

The gaokao, once the sole arbiter of a student's future, is now the credential that unlocks a menu of possibilities.

James, 36, has watched this change accelerate from the inside thanks to his work at an international student boarding business in Singapore. Having sat the gaokao in Shandong in 2009, he points to the rapid shift. “In recent years, China has implemented an educational streaming system. Roughly 50 percent of students are channelled into vocational colleges or junior colleges,” he says.

“Meanwhile, Chinese people have become more open-minded, leading more families to send their children to study overseas. This trend has risen markedly over the past five years.”

The numbers back him up. Recent survey data from EIC Education shows that 27.5 percent of current high school students are now simultaneously preparing for the gaokao while applying to overseas universities. A further 39.8 percent focus exclusively on studying abroad, and only 32.7 percent dedicate themselves solely to the gaokao.

Where the scores lead

The global acceptance of the gaokao is reshaping international university applications in real time. Chinese students now account for over a quarter of all non-EU international applicants. Data from UCAS shows that by the June 2025 deadline, a record 33,870 applicants from mainland China had applied to UK undergraduate courses, representing a 10 percent jump from the previous year.

Australia has moved even faster. According to EIC Education, the proportion of mainland Chinese students entering Australian universities directly through the gaokao climbed from 61.7 percent in 2023 to 73.7 percent in 2025, making it the primary undergraduate pathway from China.

Why are so many willing to look abroad? Perhaps part of the answer lies in the exam's uneven toll on those who sit it.

James describes a playing field that never felt level. While the admission score threshold for his university, Shandong University of Science and Technology, was 586 for Shandong students, applicants from other provinces needed only 530, a disparity he finds “deeply unfair”.

He is unequivocal about the cost: "I do not think the pressure and time I poured into the gaokao were worthwhile. Over the years, I have realised that life choices often matter more than sheer hard work."

Shalom, too, remembers the exam's weight. "I was always scared of failing, worried about my future even though I didn't know where it would lead or how things would turn out," he says. "The whole environment – studying, all the effort – served this one goal. Teachers, students, schools, families, everyone worked hard around this one target."

Yet for others, the system delivered on its promise. Amy, who entered Xiamen University on the strength of her gaokao results, believes her effort paid off as it allowed her to “get into a decent university”.

"That time investment really ended up providing a solid foundation for everything that came after,” she says. 

Shalom agrees: "For someone from a less developed area, like me, the gaokao was still a fair and clear path to higher education. I think the effort was worth it."

Nonetheless, even those who benefited from the old system now see the appeal of the new one.

Amy says that had widespread direct acceptance of gaokao scores existed in 2010, she would have applied to international universities herself. “And I believe it would have encouraged other high-scoring students to do the same," she adds.

Michelle Zhu is a former correspondent at breaking news desk at The Business Times in Singapore, where she mainly covered corporate announcements including financial earnings, mergers & acquisitions, and board changes. Prior to that, she was part of the editorial team at the Singapore arm of The Edge, a Malaysia-headquartered financial weekly. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in communications and new media from the National University of Singapore.