By Dr Toye Sobande

A quiet crisis sits beneath the AI headlines, and it is not about which jobs get eliminated this quarter. It is about which leaders never get made.

For most of the last century, careers moved up a pyramid. You started at the bottom (the mailroom, the call centre, the junior analyst desk), and the sheer volume of entry-level roles meant there was always room for a beginner to learn by doing, fail cheaply, and rise. That pyramid is collapsing. A new industry report from the talent research firm Seramount describes what is replacing it as a “career diamond”: a shape with a narrow bottom, a wide middle, and no shortage of demand for experienced talent, but far fewer doors for anyone trying to get in.

The numbers back up the shape. Recent college graduates now face an unemployment rate of roughly 5.7 to 5.8 per cent, for the first time in decades higher than the unemployment rate for the workforce as a whole. LinkedIn’s own research on the graduating class of 2026 puts entry-level hiring down about 7 per cent year-over-year and still below pre-pandemic levels. Employers say they will hire barely more new graduates this year than last. Put simply: the first rung of the ladder is being sawed off, one automated workflow at a time.

It is tempting to file this under “AI took the jobs” and move on. That misses the more important story. Entry-level jobs were never really about the task: answering the phone, drafting the first version of a memo, reconciling the spreadsheet. They were about the apprenticeship hidden inside the task. That’s where a 23-year-old learns to read a room, absorb a rebuke without collapsing, watch a senior leader manage a crisis, and slowly build the judgment that no onboarding module can install. Strip out the entry-level task, and you don’t just strip out a job. You strip out the training ground where leaders used to be grown.

Joe Infantino, who led the Seramount research, put it plainly: “With fewer entry points and learning opportunities, (employees) face less predictable paths to advancement. Organisations need more deliberate, evidence-based approaches to identify future leaders and develop the capabilities they need to navigate complexity, uncertainty, and change.” That is a polite way of saying the old system is broken, and nobody has finished building the replacement.

I have spent a career moving between institutions that have thought hard about exactly this problem, because they had no choice. The military cannot afford to discover, three years too late, that it failed to develop enough sergeants and captains, so it builds deliberate leadership pipelines into the structure itself, with stretch assignments, mentorship, and evaluation built in from day one rather than left to chance. The pulpit and the classroom operate the same way: nobody hands a twenty-five-year-old a congregation or a classroom of freshmen without some form of supervised apprenticeship first. Business spent a generation assuming the market would supply enough entry-level reps to sort itself out. It won’t anymore.

So, what do organisations do with a diamond instead of a pyramid? Seramount’s own answer is a start: build deliberate stretch assignments that let junior people work real problems (return-to-office policy, AI adoption itself) alongside senior colleagues, rather than waiting for a traditional rung that no longer exists. Stop assuming every strong performer wants to manage people and build parallel tracks that reward deep expertise as seriously as supervisory rank. Most of all, stop treating leadership development as something that happens automatically through years of low-stakes task work, and start treating it as a designed system, the way the best militaries, seminaries, and universities already do.

The companies that get this right won’t just avoid a talent shortage. They will have a real advantage over the ones still waiting for a pyramid that isn’t coming back. The ones that don’t will wake up in five years having automated their way out of a generation of leaders, and by then, the diamond will look a lot more like an hourglass with nothing left to hire from.

Dr Toye Sobande is a professor of management, strategic leadership expert, executive coach, public speaker, and award-winning author. He is CEO of Stephens Leadership Consultancy LLC, a strategy and management consulting firm that offers creative insights and solutions to businesses and leaders.