For decades, junior employees learned their trade by doing the unglamorous work nobody else wanted: the research, the data cleanup, the first-draft memos that a manager would mark up in red pen. That grind was never just busywork. It was how instinct got built, one corrected mistake at a time.
New research from McKinsey warns that this quiet training ground is being dismantled, not by a single sweeping layoff, but by AI systems steadily absorbing the very tasks junior staff once used to learn the job. The routine work that built careers is disappearing first, and the consequences are already showing up in employment data.
