What's about to disappear

Here's something most people aren't thinking about seriously enough when they pick a degree.

The world is changing fast right now. Faster, probably, than at any point in living memory. And the degree that looked like a smart bet three years ago might genuinely not be a smart bet anymore. So when you're picking what to study, you can't just be looking at what jobs exist today. You have to be looking, as honestly as you can, at what jobs are going to exist in four years, when you actually graduate.

Now, I want to be careful here, because nobody can actually predict the future. Anyone who tells you they know exactly which jobs are going to be safe and which ones are going to be wiped out is selling you something. So I'm not going to do that.

But you can do due diligence. You can look at what's already happening right now, and you can make reasonably honest guesses based on the patterns you're seeing.

The most obvious one, and probably the one most relevant to a lot of you, is what's happening with AI and the entry level coding world.

A few years ago, computer science was the safest, smartest, most obvious degree a smart kid could possibly pick. The jobs were everywhere, the salaries were absurd, and tech companies were hiring junior developers by the thousand. So a lot of young people poured into computer science programs.

That world is already gone, or close to it.

Right now, AI is eating the junior developer role from the inside. The kind of code that used to be a junior dev's first two years of work, the boilerplate stuff, the simple bug fixes, the routine feature builds, AI does most of that now, and it does it faster and cheaper than a junior dev can. Companies that used to hire ten juniors are hiring two, and giving them more senior tools to work with. The entry level door is closing, and that's the door you actually need to walk through to start a career.

So if you're sitting there in 2026 thinking about studying computer science, you really, really need to think hard about whether you're going to be able to find that crucial first job at the end of it. Because a degree without a path into the industry is a very expensive piece of paper.

This isn't just a coding problem. The same dynamic is going to play out, in different ways and on different timelines, in a lot of other fields. Legal research. Translation. Junior accounting. Customer service. A lot of administrative work. Anywhere where the entry level job is mostly about doing repeatable cognitive tasks, AI is coming for that job, and the entry level role is usually the first one to go.

That doesn't mean these fields are dead. Senior lawyers will still exist. Senior accountants will still exist. The problem is, you can't become a senior lawyer or a senior accountant without first being a junior one. So if the junior roles are disappearing, the whole career ladder gets harder to climb, even if the top of the ladder still looks fine.

The fields that look most resilient, at least for now, are the ones where the work is physical, or relational, or so high stakes that you can't really hand it off to a machine. Trades. Healthcare. Skilled in person services. Anything where being a real human being in a room with another real human being is the actual product. Those jobs are going to be much slower to be disrupted, if they get disrupted at all.

So the question I want you to sit with is, when you look at the degree you're considering, what does the entry level job at the end of it actually look like in four years? Is it going to still exist, in roughly the same form, with roughly the same opportunities? Or is it one of those jobs where the writing is already on the wall and most people just haven't read it yet?

You don't have to be a futurist to do this. You just have to be willing to look honestly at the field you're walking into, instead of assuming the world will look the same when you graduate as it does the day you enrol.

Because in this season of history, that assumption is probably the riskiest one you can make.

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Reflect: Take the degree you're currently considering. Now picture the actual entry level job at the end of it. Try to honestly describe what that job looks like in four years. Is it still there? Has it changed? Is it harder or easier to get? Sit with what your honest answer to that is.