Stripe exec says she’s hiring new grads more than ever but she’s ‘sweating’ about the Gen Z talent pipeline—and warns the era of skills is at risk

“I’m actually hiring more new grads—now, they’re largely new grad PhDs—but more new grads than ever before,” Emily Glassberg Sands recently said on the Forward Future podcast. “Because they have the cutting edge skills, and they come in with fresh ideas, and they know how to think, and they know how to use the latest tools.”

The Stripe leader said she is concerned about the talent pipeline for traditional software engineering. Companies like Goldman Sachs and Salesforce have been replacing the essential role with AI, and Glassberg Sands questioned how undergraduates in the field will find opportunities they need to climb the ladder. Those entry-level jobs are most at-risk with AI agents and chatbots in the picture—and some leaders like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Google X’s former chief business officer Mo Gawdat have warned that the advanced tech will trigger a white-collar jobs armageddon. Glassberg Sands is holding out hope that frontline employees will be safe from the cull, but as more human skills are targeted for automation, there could be drastic effects on the careers of recent grads. 

“On the lower end, there’s a set of jobs that we will always want humans to do. There are [a] set of service-oriented things that are very human in nature,” Stripe’s AI executive continues. “On the white collar side, the part I’m sweating is: What does entry level look like? How do people get the experience to work their way up?”

“I’m most worried about mentorship development. It would be unfortunate if we woke up in 10 years with no pipeline.”

The era of skills is under threat of AI 

Billion-dollar companies like Workday and JPMorgan have switched to skills-based hiring in order to find top talent with the most advanced expertise, regardless of college degrees. But with AI in the picture, leaders are ringing the alarm bells that the era of skills may be over—and Glassberg Sands is seeing the shift first-hand. 

“Why does design exist, data science exist, engineering exist? Those functions exist because they required specialized skills,” Glassberg Sands explained in the podcast. “But increasingly, a bunch of these specialized skills are augmentable or doable by AI.”

The CEO of LinkedIn—one of the world’s largest employment platforms—has also warned Gen Z that it’ll get even tougher to make it in this evolving labor market. Ryan Roslansky cautioned that instead of chasing candidates with Ivy League degrees or traditional skills, employers will be on the hunt for AI-savvy talent with the adaptability to keep up with the new ways of working.

Roslansky predicted the job applicants most likely to land a job and succeed in their roles won’t be the ones relying on their traditional skillset. Knowing how to code, crunch financial figures, draft slideshows, or balance a tax sheet is no longer the ticket to landing a six-figure job. Instead, he said those who succeed will be “the people who are adaptable, forward thinking, ready to learn, and ready to embrace these tools…It really kind of opens up the playing field in a way that I think we’ve never seen before.”

Meanwhile Bill Winters, the CEO of $40 billion bank Standard Chartered, agreed that AI has had a major impact on the relevance of skills. Now that chatbots can compile documents, create meeting slideshows, and even write code, many hard capabilities like software engineering skills once seen as a career gold mine are now being rendered redundant. Even though the chief executive has multiple degrees—including an MBA from Wharton Business School—the business abilities he was taught have been losing their relevancy in an increasingly AI-driven world. 

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“I learned how to think at university, and for the 40 years since I left university, those skills have been degraded, degraded, degraded,” Winters told Bloomberg in a June interview