Amazon Just OBLITERATED 600,000 Careers

6 a. m. You wake up, apply for a job… and get  rejected before your coffee’s even ready.   Not by a human… but by an algorithm that decided  your future in seconds. You tweak your CV, rewrite   your cover letter, hit send again… and again… and  again. Hundreds of applications. Hundreds of “we   were impressed…” followed by “unfortunately…” At first, you blame yourself… maybe you’re   not good enough. But what if the problem  isn’t you at all? What if the system is   filtering you out before anyone ever sees  your name? Because landing your first job   isn’t just hard… it’s fundamentally broken. I'm Josh and on today's episode of The   Infographics Show, we're explaining  how the entry level job is dead.

Millions of people are opening rejection after  rejection and realizing the brutal truth. It’s   not about education. It’s not about age,  or desired pay, or location or culture.   Instead, they’ve become victims  of the “Experience Paradox. ”  Companies don’t care about school. They  want… time, and they want 3 to 5 years of it.   Therein lies the paradox. Entry-level  by definition is not mid-level.   It’s a classic Catch-22. They want someone  experienced for an entry-level job,   but they won’t give you a chance to get that  experience. So how are you supposed to get hired?   This is becoming the norm in the western world. The current data shows that in the US,   around 60% of entry-level job offers  in industries like IT, marketing,   or finance all want years of experience…  but they aren’t willing to train anyone.   As an unhappy job seeker wrote on Reddit:  “What happened to growing into your role? ”  That’s how economic mobility works. Without it,  you’ll get millions of young people stuck at the   bottom of the corporate ladder with no way up. 20 years ago, economic mobility made sense.   But 20 years is a long  time… and a lot has changed.

More than ever, hiring managers now think  about risk when reading your applications…   or more likely, when their AI systems read your  applications. They’re not thinking about training.    They’re predicting viability, how fast you can  be doing something to enhance their bottom line.   They’re looking for a sweet spot: Too young,  not enough experience means high risk. Too old,   too much experience, and you’re too  expensive, too desperate, or too stubborn.   As another person wrote on  Reddit: “You literally can't win. ”  What companies are ideally looking  for is young, experienced but not   too experienced plug-and-play workers. As a  recruitment specialist said in an interview,   employees must now “hit the ground running. ” In other words, the first rung of the employment   ladder has been ripped away. It’s currently  smoldering on the bonfire of progress.

And it’s not just in the US. In the UK, StandoutCV. com   looked at almost 49,000 advertisements  comprising “43 popular entry-level jobs. ”  51. 3% of those jobs wanted experience  with an average of 2. 7 years. How is   that even possible when you’re starting out? One of the only solutions is internships.   These days, students sometimes find themselves  interning for months at a time, even a year or   more. They sometimes take on two or even three  different positions. According to Forbes,   when it comes to predicting how someone will  perform in an entry-level job, education,   references and interviews were much less reliable  than performance in an internship. The article   said hiring managers are, quote, “desperate  to avoid” lions on the CV and cats on the job.   But who can really afford to work for free?   Not everyone is blessed with a safety net.   Nonetheless, without an internship,  you’re stuck. Back in the 1980s,   only 3% of Americans did internships. Today, it’s closer to 50%.   And if you do an internship, you’re  likely to get a job afterward… at least,   that used to be the case. But what about the other 50%?   Where do they fit in? That’s why critics have been calling   internships unethical and unfair. Privileged  students with resources fare much better in the   landscape of job hunting and it’s not always  about intelligence, skills or dedication.   If you’re enjoying this breakdown of why getting  your first job is nearly impossible… make sure to   like, share and subscribe. It won’t fix  the problem, but it helps the channel.   So, with the bottom rung now taken away,  and internships now one of the only ways to   jump up the ladder, some young people are  being “locked out” of corporate careers.   But the fact is, even with an internship, these  days there’s no hard guarantee you’ll land a job.

Because entry-level jobs are disappearing fast. For US graduates aged 22 to 27, unemployment is   now 5. 7%, well above the overall 4. 4% rate.   And 40% of those graduates that are in work,   are doing jobs that don’t even  require a university degree.   Right now, aspiring to a  white-collar job… isn’t a great idea  But it’s going to get worse. The reality is a lot of firms are currently in   the process of removing most of their entry-level  positions. Part of the problem is outsourcing.

What’s the point in hiring an entry-level  American IT worker for between $36,000 and   $66,000 a year… when you can outsource the same  work to someone in India or Vietnam, someone   experienced who can hit the ground running? What would you do, if you owned a business?   In 2024, Forbes, writing about outsourcing in the  US, said that 37% of small businesses outsource   at least one IT process. It isn’t going away.   By 2029, global IT outsourcing is expected to  grow by $812. 7 billion. The same article said   that right now, “66% of U. S. companies  outsource at least one department. ”  That means something like 300,000 American  jobs are being outsourced every year.   If the foreign worker can speak English  well and has some very basic software,   they’re ready to go. Skilled. Experienced.   Hardworking. Low-maintenance. Helping to   achieve 24-hour productivity. It’s symbiotic perfection.   They’re hired through a third party, they usually  aren’t covered by U. S. employment law. They’re   employed under the vendor’s local rules. But for  young Americans who want to get on the employment   ladder, outsourcing means more competition. Globalization might work for owners and   investors but not always for the humble worker. Sure, it might mean you as a consumer receive   goods and services at a lower price, but  for many, that’s not a great trade-off.   That said, for smaller businesses, outsourcing  might be a matter of survival. Need a website?    A logo? Some video editing or digital marketing  and the global freelancer pool might very well   work in your favor. Outsourcing can  help companies get off the ground,   and better off the ground than a non-starter  because you might expand and hire more people.   But does Big Tech need to outsource so much? The same Big Tech that has recently been   issuing Return to Office (RTO) orders to aggrieved  American staff. About 46% of corporate employees   who received those orders said they were going to  quit. But it turned out that in surveys, 53% of   companies said they secretly hoped many of their  staff would leave, what’s known as “quiet firing. ”  Why? Well, they didn’t need them, but didn’t   want to go through the hassle of letting them go. Yet according to Gallup in 2023, at least 50% of   the U. S. workforce was “quiet quitting”, meaning  doing the bare minimum knowing they’d be fired. In   the UK, Gallup said 90% of staff were not engaged  with their jobs on their way to quiet quitting.   But now many of the jobs don’t even exist. They wanted to quit in a time of plenty.   And those days are over. The companies hold all the cards.   Either they can outsource your job… or  they can hire someone who is willing   to put in 24-hour shifts, never takes a  day off, and very rarely makes a mistake.

Artificial Intelligence is the new  golden child at the office. It’s the   main reason so many entry-level jobs  are going or will go, not outsourcing.   In 2024, 804 hiring managers at corporate firms  were asked some questions about AI. 78% said   their company expected to reduce hiring of recent  graduates because of it. Some said there’d just be   small cuts, maybe only around 3 to 10% of staff.   But others saw carnage coming down the pipeline.   Over a tenth said reductions  could reach 15 to 30%.   Some said as much as 30 to 60%! What would the office look like? And   some of those managers went as far as saying  they expected to lose 70% of their staff.   Bear in mind, these were predictions,  but lay offs were already happening.   It’s coming. And it’s going to get ugly. This is the cold reality: if you don’t have   strong critical thinking and problem-solving  skills, you’re competing with systems that can   already do more and more of the entry-level work. The good news? Only 7% of companies said they   were offering fewer jobs than in the  past. This was mostly because of AI,   but also for financial reasons or because  of a lack of faith in young graduates.   Companies now expect a lot more of their young  workers. Internships are becoming a thing of the   past. Seven out of ten companies said AI could do  the job of an intern. So, why bother with them?   But as you know, internships used to be one  of the ways to get on the corporate ladder.   The World Economic Forum in March  2026 said over the previous 18 months,   entry-level jobs in the US had fallen by a  staggering 35%. And that was mostly down to AI.   Cheap, reliable, obedient AI. And if Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, is right,   50% of entry-level white collar jobs will be wiped  out within the next few years. He warned that this   will bring “labor market displacement,  and concentration of economic power. ”  He thinks companies should “reassign employees… to  stave off the need for layoffs. ” The cozy human-AI   relationship in the workplace looks a lot more  like humans being told to clean out their desks.   The British Standards Institution in 2025  polled 850 company bosses in Australia,   China, France, Germany, Japan, the UK, and  the US. 41% said they’d already replaced   staff with AI. 43% said they were planning  to get rid of more humans in the year ahead.

At the end of the day, it’s all about productivity  and efficiency. The long-term consequences   of massive job displacement don’t seem to  concern the companies doing the displacing.   Take Amazon, one of the biggest employers in  the world with around 350,000 corporate staff   and a total global workforce of over 1. 5 million.   The New York Times reported that just in the US,   Amazon employs around 1. 2 million people  but it plans to replace a lot of those jobs.   The New York Times in 2025 reported that it  had accessed internal documents that said the   company plans to eliminate or avoid hiring  for approximately 600,000 roles by 2033.    AI is the reason. About 75% of  Amazon’s operations will be automated.   It’s already started in the office. Last year, the company laid off 30,000   of its office staff. That followed 27,000  corporate staff laid off in 2023. By 2027,   Amazon’s automation technologies will mean 160,000  staff in all kinds of roles not being hired.   It estimates savings of around $12. 6 billion. But  that’s tens of thousands or eventually hundreds of   thousands of jobs down the drain of progress. And let’s not forget Mark Zuckerberg,   the man who only ever wanted to  connect people with their loved ones.   In 2025, he laid off 5% of his staff. By  April 2026, he laid off 100s more as his   company tried to recoup losses after mistakenly  assuming people would want to spend all their   time in the Metaverse. It was a big bet.   One cost Meta an estimated $80 billion since 2021. The company has now turned to AI investment and   firing staff. According to Reuters, Zucks might  layoff 20% of the Meta workforce in total. He’s   also throwing $135 billion at AI with a focus  on superintelligence, the kind of AI that will   take away more entry-level jobs. The job-ocalypse is coming…  Whether you like it or not. Jack Dorsey knows. He recently   told shareholders he plans to lay off 4,000 of his  10,000 staff. He said that everyone else in tech   will do it, and he wants to be ahead of the curve. He’s right. In the cut-throat world of business,   if you lag behind, you go under. The so-called big four consultancy   firms – Deloitte, EY, PricewaterhouseCoopers  and KPMG – have also jumped on the AI bandwagon.    Collectively, they posted 44% fewer jobs  for graduates in 2025 compared with 2023.    PwC alone plans to cut US entry-level hiring  by nearly one-third by 2028. The firm axed   5,600 jobs in 2024 and more axing will follow. It’s all happened so fast. In the olden days,   2021, PwC announced that in the next five years  it planned to hire 100,000 new workers. Almost   the exact opposite happened. That shows how  much things have changed in such a short time.   With outsourcing - and increasingly AI  - entry-level jobs are becoming almost   obsolete. The few people who do get hired  will need to bring their absolute A-game…  All while young people are constantly told  they’re not ready for the corporate world.

But which jobs will go first? Recent estimates tell us 80% of   all call center work for common customer service  enquiries will be automated with chatbots by 2029.    All the jobs that went from the West to Asia  in the last 20 years won’t exist over there,   either. If they do, they’ll be few and far between  as the call centers adopt the “hybrid” model,   where a human steps in when required. Who else is up for the AI Guillotine?   Clerical and administrative work will be gone. AI  and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) are already   managing invoices, payroll, and basic bookkeeping.   Humans will offer oversight, so they might work as   AI Verification Specialists, but it’s highly  unlikely or near impossible that there will   be just as many overseers as there were staff. Some of the pundits are currently saying that jobs   will merely transform. For example, paralegals  will just become much better when they have a   robot assistant. This is the “Augmentation”  Argument, that says we won’t be replaced,   but will be given “superpowers. ” The problem with this argument is   it is based on a lot of… well, guesswork. A member of Anthropic’s economic advisory   council said in an interview in The Atlantic  that even the tech leaders don’t know what   will happen. He kind of said they were winging it. The same article said the same CEOs in 2025 would   openly talk about AIs effect on the job market.   Now they’ve suddenly gone suspiciously quiet.    Realists say companies do what’s good for their  revenue and their shareholders. What happens to   the populace is an “afterthought. ” To be sure,  politicians may have to introduce policies to   limit the carnage, but right now, there’s still no  xxxword about what those policies might look like.   The one thing we do know is the entry-level  jobs are already becoming the first to go.   Whether it’s engineering, basic  coding, data entry, scheduling,   basic architecture, SEO-type marketing, or  writing basic blogs, a computer will do it.   Routine. Rule-based. Digital. Low-risk. You should consider those jobs already gone.   To survive, you will need to not just have  impressive cognitive skills and originality,   but also AI literacy. One, without the other,  won’t work in this new demanding reality. But   this still doesn’t change the fact you can’t  get your foot on the bottom rung of the ladder.

And it’s worse right now because Gen  Z is having to scrap it out with all   the millennials who recently lost their jobs.   They, too, are going for entry-level positions.   During the years of the pandemic, E-commerce  expanded. Streaming surged. Remote work tools   advanced. In a nutshell, the digital world  exploded as we all settled in for the new   normal. It was the era of The Great Reset where  we would harness “the innovations of the Fourth   Industrial Revolution. ” The problem is the   future that was envisaged didn’t arrive. As the Metaverse flopped, growth slowed down   and interest rates rose. Suddenly big firms were  wheeling their chopping blocks into the office.   Growth turned into efficiency. Cut backs.   Apologies and excuses. That left Millennials   out in the cold. Gen Z rose up in this storm  of corporate chaos as Millennials were told   they were surplus to requirements. It should come as no surprise then,   that 43% of Gen Z workers are now participating  in the gig economy. That’s a rough estimate. It’s   the same with Millennials. Depending on the  source, either 38%, or 45%, or even up to 78%   of Millennials are now earning income from gigs. Some do it to supplement their income. Some love   the flexibility, but for many, it’s not a matter  of choice. In 2024, the LA Times said 38% of   all Americans had hustled in the gig economy  contributing $1. 27 trillion to the economy.    The article suggested the government has a  responsibility to make such work more sustainable.   Because right now, it’s not. There are very few protections for gig-workers.   So-called precarious work is becoming the  norm. We are told that more people are at   risk of exploitation. What’s called the “hustle  culture” doesn’t usually come with safety nets.    Workers can find themselves putting in 12-hour  shifts, working multiple jobs, just to get by.   It’s one of the reasons so many are moving  abroad. Young people, even middle-aged people,   are saying if they have to hustle, they’ll  hustle where it works best for them.   In 2025, according to the Digital Nomad  Forecast, 39% of Gen Z and Millennials   stated they were going to work abroad  in the next year. As a writer on the   topic said, “Gen Z is fast becoming the most  internationally mobile generation in history. ”  One of the countries which had been  hit the hardest is the UK, a country   where the media is talking about an “exodus. ” The BBC cited the Office for National Statistics   (ONS) in 2025 when it said 195,000 people under  the age of 35 had made the move abroad from the   start of the year to June. In another survey,  75% of young Brits said they’d consider leaving.   US data shows the numbers have been  increasing in the US, too. According   to an article in Quartz citing recent data,  the “new American dream is to leave America. ”  A recent survey said that 17% of Americans  are planning to leave and another 5% were   already on their way, each looking for a  better quality of life. A poll revealed   England is one of the leading choices, and it  looks like England could need them. Canada,   Italy and Australia were also favorites. Vietnam,  Thailand, Indonesia, Mexico, Spain, and Portugal   are also popular haunts for digital hustlers. So many young people leaving can lead to a brain   drain. Governments might not like it and may start  putting pressure on other countries or emphasizing   the dangers and pitfalls of living abroad. But these are the effects of globalization.    It’s what hustling looks like when gainful  employment at large companies is scarce. People   will go where they’re provided with the best life. But as the saying goes, the grass can look a lot   greener somewhere else. Living without safety nets  and constant insecurity isn’t for everyone. That   said, western countries, especially the  US and UK, are still hemorrhaging young   people… and it’s going to get a lot worse. A report said in 2023 there were about 35   million digital nomads with an estimated  18. 1 million from the US. But by 2030,   it’s estimated there will be 60 million. If corporations had their own way,   they’d employ as few people as possible. The  endgame is a billion dollar firm with a board   and some executives and a giant server farm of  AI agents. Maximum productivity. Minimal costs.   That’s the future. They don’t need you. They don’t want you.   So if companies don’t need people anymore…  where did all the jobs go? That’s exactly   what we break down in Why the US is Running  Out of Jobs. Or click on this video instead.