Founder's Take: Career Diversity Could Halve by 2035. Here's What Young People Need Instead
By Alex Dobricic, co-founder of MyPathfinder. A decade in careers.
This week the BBC published a survey of 2,000 teenagers aged 13 to 18, asking what schools should teach them about work, and the answers will be familiar to anyone who has spent time in careers - more work experience (44%), help managing money (43%), guidance on how to apply for jobs (42%), strategies for stress and mental health (39%) and better communication skills (38%) (BBC, Survation for Radio 5 Live and Bitesize). More than half of the teenagers surveyed said they had never done any work experience, and nearly a third (32%) said school was preparing them badly for a future of work shaped by AI.
I want to be honest that none of this is a new story, I have read near enough the same headline for my entire career and for as long as I can remember before it. In 2012 a CBI and Pearson survey found around a third of employers were unhappy with the basic skills of school and college leavers, a figure that had barely moved in ten years, and 42% said they were running remedial training for new starters (Recruiter). This month Reed's survey of more than 2,000 employers found 34% say young applicants lack an understanding of the working environment (People Management). The world develops, governments and education struggle to keep pace, businesses arguably don't do enough to bring young people in, and the younger generation carries the cost.
What I believe is different this time is the speed. The internet and the computer changed how we work over decades, whereas AI is an exponential threat that compounds on itself, and I don't think the list of skills teenagers are asking for goes far enough given where work is heading.
What do I mean by career diversity?
Career diversity is about having roles for everyone across a range of markets and a range of activities, globally. Everyone talks about the importance of biodiversity, the idea that an ecosystem is healthier and more resilient when there is a wide spread of life in it, and I think work is the same. A labour market with a wide spread of roles has room for people with very different strengths, interests and starting points, and it gives people somewhere to land when one part of it shrinks.
My view is that by 2030 we will have at least 30% less career diversity than we have today, and by 2035 it will be closer to 50%. I want to be clear that these are my best estimates rather than the output of a model, but they are not plucked from nowhere either. In the UK, around a third of workers sit in the occupation groups most exposed to automation - roughly 10% in elementary occupations, 10% in administrative and secretarial roles, 8% in sales and customer service and 6% as process, plant and machine operatives (ONS Annual Population Survey, via gov.uk). The picture in the US is similar, with office and administrative support alone accounting for 11.4% of all employment, and food preparation, sales and production adding roughly another 23% between them (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2025).
Exposed does not mean every one of those jobs disappears, and I don't think the change will be linear or limited to one level. Jobs will be affected on every axis, it's just that entry-level and process-driven roles are the easiest for companies to automate first, so that is where it shows up earliest.
Is this already happening?
Yes, and the data is starting to show it. Of UK businesses with 10 or more staff that use AI, 38% told the ONS that administrative and clerical roles are the most affected, up from 29% in December 2025 (ONS). Graduate vacancies hit a record low of 8,383 in July 2026 according to Adzuna, while the Institute of Student Employers now reports 141 applications for every graduate role (ISE). The ONS release on 20 October showed vacancies at the smallest businesses falling by more than a fifth in a single quarter (ONS), and 52% of finance chiefs at major UK companies expect AI to reduce headcount in their own business within a year (Deloitte).
The pattern I expect is simple automation first, in entry-level, graduate and white collar admin and processing roles, followed by teams and whole systems that are built to be AI native from day one and run by a fraction of the people they would have needed before. We cover what employers are actually saying about this in is AI really behind UK job cuts?
What happens to purpose when work becomes optional?
This is the part I find hardest to answer, and I think it is the part that gets talked about least. For most people, the reason to get up in the morning is to earn a wage, so they can support a family, put food on the table and occasionally spend money on something they enjoy. That need to work for what is essentially survival has shaped almost every life for as long as we have records of jobs at all - the oldest known list of occupations was written on a clay tablet in Uruk, in what is now Iraq, around 5,000 years ago (History of Information). Before specialised jobs, people still worked to survive, they just did it together, hunting, farming and making what they needed rather than trading their time for a salary.
A barrier I don't think we have properly considered is what happens to money, and our relationship with it, in a world where work is close to optional. If the need to work for survival starts to disappear, a lot of people lose more than an income, they lose the feeling of contributing to something, and that brings a wealth of other wellbeing issues with it.
The positive view is something close to utopia, complete leisure and the freedom to explore our interests, while the negative view is that many people will struggle to engage with life from a completely different perspective. Nobody knows which way it falls, but I believe the way we earn will change long before work becomes optional, and the first place we'll see it is the 'high street'.
What will the high street look like?
I think it will look a lot more like a traditional market. A small number of mega corporates will capitalise on automation and AI, hyper accelerating their market share in areas like groceries and consumer goods, and once they realise how easy it is to enter new markets with their technology and market connections, they will keep expanding. Boards measure success on profit, and that will certainly not change.
On the other side, people will almost be forced into finding new ways to interact, earn and contribute, and I believe that is where core physical skills and creative work become popular again, with people providing their own services directly to others the way a market stall or a local trade always has. Companies that fail to develop and keep pace will fall away, while small businesses running with a tenth of the workforce they once needed become better, faster and more efficient than they have ever been.
Are more people already working for themselves?
I pulled the numbers from LinkedIn Talent Insights, and they are the clearest early signal I've seen. Out of around 32 million professionals on LinkedIn in the UK, the number using the job title "founder" is up 10% in a year to 276,405, an increase of 25,865. "Co-founder" is up 5% to 120,065, an increase of 6,225, while "self-employed" is up a more modest 1% to 89,314.
The difference between those titles matters. Calling yourself a founder is a tech norm, the growth in founders compared with self-employment almost certainly reflects people starting businesses that are AI and technology enabled. Across the European Union the trend is almost exactly the same, with founders up 9% and co-founders up 5% over the year. The fact that so many people now want to be seen as building something of their own is a shift in itself.
Is the corporate world already moving in on education?
It is, and this is where my picture of the future starts to sound a little dystopian. In July, Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced technical education routes from age 14, linked to local jobs and starting in September 2028, alongside bursaries of up to £4,500 to help teenagers from Universal Credit households take up an apprenticeship (ITV News). It is a great idea, and getting young people closer to work earlier is something I believe in.
I can see that before long more and more companies will run what are essentially private apprenticeships, hiring talent on its way into further or higher education, or absorbing young people entirely into a form of corporate home schooling. That sounds far-fetched until you look at what is already happening in America. In 2025 Palantir launched its Meritocracy Fellowship for school leavers who chose not to go to university, selecting 22 from more than 500 applicants for a four-month paid placement that could lead to a full-time job, and advertising it with the line "Skip the debt. Skip the indoctrination." and the promise of "the Palantir degree" (Fortune). I believe this will become more of the norm, not less.
What should schools, colleges and universities do about it?
I think institutions have three jobs to do, and none of them replace the academic work they already do well.
The first is to teach money and self-employment alongside employability. The teenagers in the BBC survey already asked for help managing their finances, and in a world where more of them will work for themselves, understanding tax, pricing, cash flow and how to sell a service becomes as important as writing a CV.
The second is to make work experience include working for yourself. Shadowing someone in an office for a week is valuable, and the students in the BBC piece clearly got a lot from it, but young people should also experience running something of their own, even something small, with real customers and real consequences.
The third is to work with employers on early talent before the private model arrives on its own terms. If companies are going to reach into schools and colleges for talent, I would much rather institutions shape how that happens than find themselves replaced by it.
What would I tell a 16 to 19-year-old right now?
I'd start with building at least one physical or creative skill alongside whatever you are studying, because those are the skills I believe will hold their value longest. Then it would be about learning how to sell and practising oracy, whether that is selling yourself to an employer in an interview or to a customer at a market stall, because the ability to explain your value is going to matter in any version of your future. Finally, you need to get real experience as early as you can, paid or unpaid, in someone else's business or your own, because almost every survey in my decade in careers says employers want proof that you understand how work works. If you're 18 to 24 and not sure where to start, our guide to the routes open to you this winter is a good first step.
Why are we building MyPathfinder?
We started MyPathfinder because the problems in that BBC survey are the ones we saw again and again on both sides of the hiring table - young people who don't know how to apply, how to present themselves or where they fit, and a system that hasn't kept up with how quickly work is changing. The platform helps people build their CV, find roles that suit them, practise interviews and track their applications, but the bigger ambition is to help people prepare for whatever work becomes. One of the ideas we're exploring is a safe space for young people to try running something of their own, develop it, see a real return in a low-risk environment and then scale it with the financial support and backing of MyPathfinder.
In the next 10 years, I believe work will change more than it has in the last fifty, and young people asking for work experience deserve to be prepared for a world where they might need to create their own.
Start your own path at mypathfinder.uk