Gain work experience only after graduation? It may be too late.

Historically, new hires in an organisation were assigned routine, volume-heavy tasks: basic coding, drafting memos or preparing presentation slides.

Through work that provides repeated exposure to projects and organisational thinking, junior professionals absorbed institutional knowledge and gradually developed the professional judgment required for higher responsibilities.

This traditional, time-tested pathway enabled young employees to acquire foundational skills, build professional confidence and develop industry intuition.

Today, generative AI tools can execute these foundational tasks in a fraction of the time and often at lower cost. 

That a growing risk to entry-level employment has been flagged at the highest levels of government and state in Singapore should cause us all to sit up and take notice. 

At the DBS Asia Future Forward Conference in mid-October, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong expressed concern that artificial intelligence could undermine the “bottom rung of the career ladder”.

On the same day, President Tharman Shanmugaratnam noted that across the world, entry-level hiring was visibly weakening “at the first rung of employment”, particularly in AI-exposed sectors, in his remarks at the International Monetary Fund-World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok.

The paradox of the AI era is this: If AI absorbs all the entry-level tasks, how do young professionals acquire the deep domain expertise needed to become the leaders of tomorrow?

A co-pilot mindset 

Navigating this altered landscape successfully requires fresh graduates to approach work in a radically different way.

They must adopt a proactive, “co-pilot” mindset towards their daily work instead of sitting back and expecting instructions from their supervisors, who could otherwise ask AI to perform the task far more quickly. 

New workforce entrants – many of whom are digital or AI “natives” with an intuitive comfort with emerging technology – must leverage artificial intelligence as an equaliser to make themselves highly valuable from the get-go. 

They should step up and say to their bosses: “Look, this is what I have already analysed and built for you by leveraging AI.”

They should anticipate needs and propose solutions – such as new workflows that increase productivity, new ways to delight customers or new strategies to acquire market share – all without prompting. 

Admittedly, for graduates to add this kind of value, time spent at the university, polytechnic or Institute of Technical Education (ITE) must be intentionally focused on building up critical core skills for the AI age. 

These are the transferable skills – such as critical thinking, interpersonal interaction and adaptive self-management – that will help young people thrive in whatever sector or occupation they choose to enter.

Indeed, in the age of AI, the ability to build strong professional relationships and networks can help individuals remain relevant to their organisations and reduce the risk of displacement by technology.

This, in turn, requires developing emotional intelligence.

The preferences of corporate decision-makers, the internal politics of organisational ecosystems and the trust that underpins major business deals are rarely codified or accessible to large language models. 

Armed with these skills and a sense of agency, young people can put forward a strong case to be employed or launch business ventures of their own to take advantage of AI’s ability to lower overheads in administration, product development and marketing. 

Starting work younger

However, while these critical core skills are nurtured in the classroom, they are ultimately honed at the workplace, and this demands a shift in how we approach early career pathways. Ironically, in this changed world, what we may see is a reversion to the model of early pupillage as an entry point into employment. 

Just a couple of generations ago, it was common for many in Singapore and elsewhere to enter the workforce between the ages of 16 and 18, often taking up apprenticeships at low pay before slowly working their way up the career ladder.

From the 1990s onwards, as tertiary education became more widespread, additional years of schooling became a worthwhile investment, yielding substantial returns in lifetime earnings.

The spread of AI, however, may well shift the balance back towards practical workplace learning, potentially extending the period needed to acquire professional skills and judgment.

If firms find it more cost-effective to poach experienced workers than to train raw talent, and if it takes more years of real-world experience to acquire the judgment to contribute significantly alongside AI in an entry-level full-time role, workers in the early stages of their careers may need to be willing to start work younger and earn less in their early years of employment as they learn on the job and build up skills.

This calls for a greater emphasis on structured workplace learning, whether through internships, traineeships or work-study arrangements.

Already, some employers expect new hires to have gone through several substantive internships before they formally join an organisation. In response, the institutes of higher learning have expanded internship opportunities significantly, with formal curriculum time giving way to practical work experience. 

The Infocomm and Media Development Authority recently announced it would make available up to 3,000 year-long internships to students from the universities, polytechnics and ITE as part of their curriculum before graduation.

In tandem, Graduate Industry Traineeships of three to six months continue to be offered with government support for training allowances. There is also strong demand for work-study programmes where ITE and polytechnic students start employment concurrently with their studies.

The commentary by Associate Professor (Practice) Terence Ho, Executive Director, Institute for Adult Learning was first published in The Straits Times on 28 October 2026.