The Career Ladder Is Gone. My Kids Will Get a Diamond Instead.

Why AI Eliminating Grunt Work Might Be Breaking How We Build Experts

The ink on my last post about school having two jobs, building a mind and building marketable skills, was barely dry when a conversation with a PhD student yesterday sent me down a new rabbit hole. As a parent with two kids in college and one in high school, I’m constantly thinking about the bridge between their education and their first job. We were talking about AI's effect on careers like consulting, law, and investment banking, the classic apprenticeship fields.

And it hit me. We’re not just changing the tasks people do; we’re fundamentally breaking the structure that has defined these professions for a century. The career ladder isn't just getting new rungs. The entire traditional apprenticeship pyramid is collapsing, and something else is taking its place: a diamond.

The Pyramid is Dead. Meet the Diamond.

Think about how it used to work. In any major consulting firm, investment bank, or law firm, the model was a pyramid. You’d hire a massive class of bright, hungry 22-year-olds at the bottom. Their job was "grunt work": endless spreadsheet formatting, sifting through mountains of documents for due diligence, making slides pretty at 2 AM. It was a grueling apprenticeship. Most would wash out after a few years, and the few who survived moved up to the narrower levels of the pyramid.

That pyramid is gone.

AI is automating the absolute bottom of that structure into oblivion. Why pay a first-year analyst to spend 80 hours pulling data when an AI agent can do it in 8 minutes with fewer errors? JPMorgan's COiN tool has been saving hundreds of thousands of legal work hours for years now by reviewing commercial credit agreements in seconds. Goldman Sachs automated a huge chunk of the IPO process. McKinsey's internal tool, Lilli, can do the work of a team of junior consultants, scanning over 100,000 documents in an instant.

The result is a new shape: the diamond. The wide base of entry-level workers is gone, narrowing to a point. Companies are hiring far fewer people straight out of school. Instead, new hires start one or two rungs up the old ladder, where their job isn't to do the grunt work, but to manage the AI that does it. The middle of the organization swells: a thick band of experienced professionals who can use these powerful tools to be incredibly productive. The top remains a small, strategic group. Fewer at the bottom, a lot in the middle, and a few at the top. A diamond.

But Here’s the Terrifying Part: The Experience Gap

This all sounds wonderfully efficient, right? Fewer boring jobs, more meaningful work from day one. But as a manager and a parent, one question haunts me: If you never do the grunt work, how do you ever get good?

The old pyramid model, for all its flaws, was an incredible machine for forging expertise. Those late nights weren't just about making slides; they were about developing what the military calls tacit knowledge: the intuition, the gut feelings, the pattern recognition that you can't learn from a textbook. You learn how a business really works by building the financial model from scratch, not by having an AI spit out a finished product. You develop judgment by reading thousands of pages of discovery documents and learning to spot the one sentence that matters.

When we remove those foundational experiences, we create a massive "experience gap." I see it in my clients' organizations already. Young managers who are brilliant at orchestrating AI tools but have never truly understood the granular details of the work their teams are doing. They lack the credibility that comes from having been in the trenches. How can you mentor an employee through a tough analysis when you've never done one yourself? How do you call BS on an unrealistic timeline if you don't know what the work actually entails?

This isn't a small problem. This is a crisis of competence and credibility waiting to happen.

So, What’s the Play Here? (Some Advice for Parents and Students)

I don't have a perfect answer, but I refuse to just stand by and watch. We have to change the game because the game has already changed. The conversation at my dinner table has shifted, and maybe yours should too.

For Parents: The prestige of a degree from a certain school isn’t the moat it used to be. The real differentiator is proof of experience. Start asking colleges different questions. Forget the fancy recreation center. Ask them how they are integrating real-world, AI-augmented work into their curriculum. Look for schools with mandatory co-op programs or robust internship placements that go beyond fetching coffee. Encourage your kids to build a portfolio of actual projects, not just a high GPA. A community college degree followed by a transfer, stacked with industry-recognized certifications, might be a much smarter, cheaper, and more effective path today than a four-year degree from a private university that is still operating in 1995.

For Students: Your mission is to become the person who knows how to use the tools, not the person who is replaced by them.

First, get literate. In every field. If you’re a history major, learn how to use AI to analyze primary sources. If you're in finance, master the tools that automate modeling. This is non-negotiable.

Second, build something. Anything. A sales prospecting workflow for a local business, a data analysis project for a non-profit, anything that shows you can apply your skills to a messy, real-world problem. Document your process: the prompts you used, the edits you made. That's the new "showing your work."

Third, find mentors who have lived the experience. The transfer of tacit knowledge is now more important than ever, and it only happens through human connection.

Companies are scrambling to adapt, creating new training models that use VR and advanced simulations to try and compress ten years of experience into eighteen months. Some of it will work. Much of it will be a clumsy substitute for the real thing.

The world my kids are entering won't have a clear ladder to climb. It will be more of a scramble up the side of a diamond. It will be faster for some and more confusing for others. It demands a new kind of preparation, one focused less on accumulating knowledge and more on the demonstrated ability to create value with incredible new tools. The pyramid is already a relic. It’s time we started drawing them a new map.