Gen Z Did Everything Right. The Job Market Changed the Rules.

Gen Z did everything right. And now they're entering a market where the entry-level roles that were supposed to be waiting for them are quietly disappearing.

The advice most young people receive was written for a different economy. Work hard at school. Get a degree. Get a job. Specialise. That formula made sense when knowledge was scarce and access to it was the advantage.

AI has collapsed that advantage. The knowledge that once took years to acquire is now available to anyone with a laptop. What's left isn't knowledge. It's judgment.

So what advice should we actually be giving them?

Prioritise learning curve over job title. The specific knowledge you build today will depreciate faster than any generation before you has experienced. What matters more is how quickly you can absorb a new context and adapt. Choose the job where you'll learn the most, and where you'll learn to learn.

Seek what Luis Garicano calls "messy jobs" - roles that resist routinisation. Work that requires reading the room, navigating relationships, and executing when nothing goes to plan. AI owns the defined end of the work spectrum. The messy end remains stubbornly human.

And learn AI. Not as a tool you use occasionally, but as a working environment you operate in every day. The advantage won't go to people with a degree in AI. It will go to people who know how to direct it, challenge it, and apply judgment to its outputs. That's not a technical skill. It's a thinking skill.

And what about the degree?

My kids are still in primary school. But when the time comes, I won't just point them at university and call it a plan.

I'll tell them a degree isn't the answer. It's one option. And it's worth asking what it will actually give you before you commit three years and significant money to find out.

For some fields - medicine, law, engineering - it's still the path. But for a growing number of careers, it's a decision made on what worked for the generation before. Trades and vocational paths are genuinely underrated. So is getting into the workforce early, building real context, and learning how to direct AI while your peers are still sitting in lectures.

The question worth sitting with isn't which jobs AI will replace. It's whether what you're building your career on will still matter in five years.