Forbes education contributor Michael T. Nietzel examines why the traditional first rung of the career ladder is disappearing — drawing on Cadient data and an interview with Cadient CEO Bill Mastin.
Cadient's analysis of 7,984 salaried job openings across a stable set of employers found that postings requiring no prior work experience have fallen roughly 73% over four years. They now account for about one in 50 salaried openings.
The shift is not confined to technology. Employers in healthcare, government, utilities and transit have all become more reluctant to hire candidates with no prior experience, while postings that ask for several years of it have grown.
That leaves new graduates in a bind the article sets against a 5.6% unemployment rate for recent graduates aged 22–27, above the 4.2% rate for workers overall: if employers stop hiring people who lack experience, those people have no way to acquire it.
Bill Mastin's point in the piece is that the framing is wrong. Entry-level work has not vanished so much as been redefined — employers now expect experience to arrive with the candidate, and applicant tracking systems that screen on job-title history will filter out internships and other early-career work that ought to count.
Whether an internship satisfies an experience requirement is decided company by company, which makes how the screening is configured — not the graduate's résumé — the deciding factor in many cases.
