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Vocational Education and Training is built around preparing learners for the world of work. It equips them with the skills, knowledge, and the qualifications they need to step onto the first rung of the career ladder. But what if that rung is starting to disappear?

I have been reading a worrying newsletter, The Algorithmic Bridge, by Alberto Romero from Madrid. He paints a vivid picture of a structural shift happening in the labour market, a shift driven by Artificial Intelligence that has profound implications for the future of vocational education and training.

For generations, he says, there has been an unwritten rule in the workplace. Young people, the interns and juniors, would take on the less glamorous tasks - the grunt work - in exchange for the chance to learn from experienced colleagues and climb the career ladder. It was a form of paid apprenticeship, an onboarding into a profession. Romero argues that AI has “torched this contract.” Data suggest that routine, entry-level tasks are increasingly being automated. From big tech to law and accounting, entry-level hiring is falling fast. One survey even found that 37% of employers would rather use AI than hire a recent graduate.

This isn’t about technology replacing manual labour and low skilled jobs as we’ve seen in the past. This time, it’s different. AI is targeting the white-collar, entry-level jobs that have traditionally been the gateway to a professional career. The result, as Romero puts it, is that the traditional bottom rung of the career ladder is disappearing. This creates a huge challenge. If young people can’t get that first foot in the door, how do they ever gain the experience to become the senior professionals of tomorrow?

Romero describes the current trend as a “suicide model.” Companies, in a rush to cut costs, are replacing juniors with subscriptions to AI. On the surface, it looks like a huge saving. But this approach creates a hidden, long-term debt. AI is great at explicit knowledge – the facts, figures, and procedures that can be written down in a manual. What it can’t do is learn the tacit knowledge, the intuitive, embodied understanding that comes from experience. This is the craft of a profession, the ability to navigate ambiguity, to read a room, to know which questions to ask. When senior staff retire, there’s no one with this deep, tacit knowledge to replace them. The organisation has lost its institutional memory, and the pipeline of talent has run dry.

Romero proposes an alternative: a “new guild” model as a modern form of apprenticeship. In this model, AI isn’t used to replace juniors, but to augment both juniors and seniors. AI takes on the grunt work, freeing up apprentices to work side-by-side with senior mentors. They learn the craft of the profession not by transcribing interviews, but by observing how a senior journalist conducts a difficult interview. They learn judgment and taste by having their AI-assisted work reviewed and refined by an expert.

This vision of the future of work has huge implications for vocational education and training. It suggests that our focus needs to shift. While we still need to teach the explicit knowledge of a profession, we need to place a much greater emphasis on developing the tacit knowledge and the meta-skills that AI cannot replicate. We need to create learning experiences that are more like apprenticeships, where learners work on real-world problems with the guidance of experienced practitioners.

The challenge is to design learning environments that cultivate this tacit knowledge. It’s about moving beyond simply teaching learners how to use AI tools, and instead teaching them how to think, problem-solve, and collaborate in a world where AI is a partner, not just a tool. It’s about fostering the human skills of creativity, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence that will become even more valuable in an age of AI.

Romero’s article is a reminder that the role of vocational education and training is not just to prepare learners for the jobs of today, but to equip them with the resilience and adaptability to thrive in the world of tomorrow. As the world of work is reshaped by AI, the principles of vocational education and training - learning by doing, mentorship, and the development of practical wisdom - have never been more relevant. The future of work may not be about replacing humans with AI, but about creating new partnerships between them. And that is a future that VET is uniquely placed to help build.

About the Image

Silicon Landscapes is a collage of circuit boards interwoven with aerial photographs of water treatment facilities, agricultural lands, industrial sites and mining machinery. It represents the resource-intensive material realities of AI systems transforming the natural landscapes through extractivist processes.