Today, Irish graduates enter the labour force carrying a proliferating list of concerns.
For a long time, if you were fortunate enough to make it to university, the path to professional life seemed straightforward. Of all the mutable factors now muddling that road, artificial intelligence (AI) might be the most highly charged.
In July, a Morgan McKinley Quarterly Employment Monitor report showed that graduate hiring in accountancy and related areas is now being significantly impacted by AI and automation. Earlier this year, in the UK, a report from job-search site Indeed suggested graduates there are facing the toughest job market since 2018, with a pause on hiring and the introduction of cost-cutting AI listed as contributory factors.
Coverage around AI tends to be dramatic, often exaggerating or catastrophising its impact beyond what is known. It is worth noting a reduction in graduate roles is also influenced by factors such as offshoring, the geopolitical landscape and, for the UK, Brexit. Major companies argue that jobs are not disappearing because of AI, but that the nature of work is changing.
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Alan Smeaton, a professor of computing at DCU and a member of the Government’s AI Advisory Council, broadly agrees with that sentiment, though he does warn against the damage of a widespread reduction in graduate roles. Smeaton cites futurologist Roy Amara, and more specifically Amara’s Law, which says that we tend to overestimate technology’s impact in the short term and underestimate its long-term impact.
“[We say] it’s going to change the nature of everybody’s jobs and there’s going to be loads of redundancies, but in the long term is where the real impact will be,” Smeaton says. “Amara’s law has been proven true time and time again. I think we’re still in the early stages of realising what AI can and can’t do for our jobs.
“It cannot replace people; it can help with tasks. Some people get scared about this because they’re scared of the change that it’s going to introduce. AI can’t automate any task that we do which requires us to make a decision, where we need justification, explanation and transparency. Where there’s any element of design or innovation or art or creativity or social interaction with others, AI can’t replace those. It can help with tasks.”
Traditionally, a graduate may expect to get their foot in the door somewhere and learn from experienced colleagues before being thrown into more specialist work. There will be less breathing space with AI, but as the labour grows more technical in lieu of menial tasks, there still needs to be a large supply of jobs available for people coming out of education.
“If you don’t have the lower rungs on the ladder, then people won’t learn how to climb up it,” Smeaton says. “But the thing about that is, a lot of the tasks that we do now and that we would do almost manually, will be automated or semiautomated in a way. We can look at the work that accountants do. Spreadsheets and calculators have replaced a lot of the work that accountants would’ve done many years ago.
“What that really does is it behoves a student who is coming out as a graduate to be familiar with AI. For their own career prospects and career development and for their own continuous learning. It doesn’t end when you do your final-year exams and walk out with a degree parchment. It’s lifelong learning.”
Marie Laffey is head of the career development centre at University of Galway. She echoes Smeaton’s words on automation and says that graduate roles had been moving away from routine tasks prior to AI entering the labour market.
“The current graduate roles [don’t consist of] menial tasks any more,” Laffey says. “They’re expected to contribute at a good level. They don’t want to [do menial work] either; they’re looking for a challenge. In terms of things like data entry or transactional and lower-level work, 40 per cent of the work that we all currently do will be automated. That’s according to the World Economic Forum (WEF).
“When you look at that, I think it’s going to make people work quicker and more efficiently. Think about someone that’s going to be working in accounting. Rather than doing the menial, low-level auditing tasks, they actually probably get more involved at a strategic level in terms of developing the business. That’s really interesting work for graduates.”
Some of the industries that are most impacted by AI do not, on the face of things, appear to be short of employment opportunities. Areas such as finance, tech, healthcare and pharmaceuticals are more dynamic now, but they still offer secure career prospects. To be highly employable is to be adaptable to the changes.
“One key thing is getting students to realise they’re self-agents in their career,” Laffey says. “They’re going to have to be. The biggest thing is career agility. If you look at it as a graduate and you think about the impact AI is going to make, you have the WEF saying 92 million jobs will be displaced by 2030, but, at the same time, it’s talking about 170 million being created.
“You have a net of 78 million jobs there. What do those jobs look like? For [universities], it’s about developing that creativity and self-agency so that it’s not just a case of ‘I’m done learning now’ [when they complete their degree].”
Laffey’s message for graduates, then, is to embrace AI in the right ways. It is her message for everyone in fact. Alongside a potential reduction in job opportunities, graduates now have to contend with a competitive field of prospective employees all wielding the same large language models. It can be difficult to stand out.
“Every single person should be looking at doing what I call their own personal AI resilience plan,” Laffey says. “What are the things that will be automated in my role as a graduate? Then look at what the key skills are. Critical thinking, analysis, problem solving, communication skills, adaptability and agility; that’s what employers are looking for. If I have a skills gap there, then I need to close it.
“If elements of my job are going to be automated by AI, what are the AI tools that are going to do that? Someone told me recently that their son got a job with a big employer, and was really surprised when the employer expected them to know how to prompt a language model with generative AI ... If you think about data analysis, one of the tools is [Microsoft] Power BI. Maybe I need to learn Power BI, be proficient at it and then be able to put it down on my CV for an employer.”
Also working at University of Galway, Justin Tonra is an associate professor of English and an academic integrity officer. His first piece of advice to students comes before graduation; if you are found to cheat using AI in university, it will have disastrous consequences for your employment prospects down the line.
In terms of impressing your own skills upon employers, human judgment and critical thinking are crucial assets in the shifting employment landscape. Personality and creativity too, particularly in a job application process, stand out as desirable traits.
“There are ways of writing that just communicate information and nothing more,” Tonra says. “But there are better ways of writing that have that flair and interest, and that are more appealing for people to read.
“I really do think that learning to write and embracing the human creativity, that’s what constitutes good writing. It’s one way of standing out above what an AI can produce in terms of text.”
