Entry-Level Is Breaking, What Should we do About it?

Something is collapsing at the foundation of our industry, and it’s worth unpacking rather then making another observation.

Senior people are staying in their seats longer. Some are taking junior roles just to stay employed. Schools are watching enrollment numbers fall while still charging tuition built for a job market that’s shifted under their feet. And the early-career role that used to exist precisely to turn a beginner into a professional — the one where you make your mistakes on someone else’s payroll and learn what the job actually is — is getting squeezed from every direction at once.

Had a chance recently to sit down and discuss the current state of entry-level hiring and career transitions with a small group of educators and career-placement professionals who work with this directly. People who watch hundreds of new grads try to get a callback every year, all saying some version of the same thing: the old path into the field is narrowing, and nobody owns the problem of what replaces it.

One detail that stuck with me: a community college ran a small program that paid students real money to work on real projects before they graduated. The result isn’t just a credential. It is graduates who are already job-ready, because they’d already done the job. That used to be how trades worked. You didn’t learn carpentry from a lecture. You learned it standing next to someone who’d let you ruin a board or two before you got it right.

Apprenticeship is underused as a model in our field, and I think it’s underused in a specific way: we’ve narrowed it to skills transfer when it’s actually something bigger. The thing you specialized in last year can be approximated by a tool this year. In a world where specific skills get democratized fast what holds its value is a way of thinking. And you absorb a way of thinking from proximity to people who have it, not from a curriculum that describes it. The apprentice doesn’t just learn the role. They learn the judgment. The mentor, the school of thought, the professional lineage; those become part of how they credential themselves and get their first real foothold. That’s harder to replicate with a course and harder to replace with a chatbot.

We’ve seen this pattern before, by the way. When the formal pipeline slows or breaks, something else forms to fill the gap — and it’s usually scrappy, community-driven, and slightly ahead of the institutions.

The bootcamp era was that, in part. Legacy programs couldn’t produce the workforce fast enough for what the industry needed, so the field formed its own schools. I instructed at one of them, partly because I wanted to teach, and partly because it was one of the best ways to find emerging talent and bring them into real work before the traditional hiring process even saw them. Those programs had their limitations. Some were better than others, and the model got diluted, but the instinct was right. When the credentialing system lags the actual work, the market and community fills the gap.

I connected with Refresh DC around 2008. It was genuinely fun. I used to offer our office space for events, and somewhere along the way I went from participant to volunteer. This professional group has been around for twenty years now, and it’s been through versions of this before. It existed through Web 2.0, just like 10 years prior in the dot.com bubble, most of the community lacked the job title for what we were all starting to do. It existed through 2008, when the economy gutted entry-level hiring industry-wide and a whole generation of careers got built sideways instead of up — through community, through people showing each other the ropes, because the formal pipeline had stopped working. Neither the schools nor the employers fixed those moments. The loose, informal, often unpaid network of people who simply showed up for each other did.

This shouldn’t read as romantic story. It’s a structural observation: schools move on academic calendars. Employers move on hiring freezes. A community can move at the speed of the actual problem — can convene the right people before anyone’s written a strategy memo. They can make an introduction that changes someone’s trajectory before any institution would have processed the paperwork. It’s the only piece of this ecosystem that can be fast and human at the same time.

I don’t think this problem gets fixed by waiting for institutions to catch up. I think it gets fixed the way it did the previous times: by people deciding, a little stubbornly, to be useful to each other while the bigger systems figure out what to do. We’re building that again, right now, through Refresh DC’s education initiative. If that sounds like the kind of thing you’d want to be part of rather than read about after the fact, well… that’s the actual point of this post. Let’s chat.

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