When AI Does the Entry-Level Work, Who Trains Your Next Manager? A Plan for Small Employers

Redesign the first-year role so a junior employee attempts the work before the AI does, then compares the two versions with a manager. Capture how your best people decide, assign a senior mentor, and pay for all of it as work time. A company too small for a training department can still build a bench this way.

I am Mac Malbrough. I hold a J.D. and an MS-HRM, I am not an attorney, and I write for owners and managers. My piece on disappearing entry-level jobs speaks to the person looking for that first role. This one speaks to the owner or manager who is deciding what the first role should be now that software can do much of the work that used to fill it.

What is the hollowing-out risk for a small employer?

The risk is a gap in about five years. If a tool drafts the first version of every report, reconciles the data and summarizes the meetings, nobody in their first or second year is making the thousands of small calls that become judgment. You still hire seniors from outside for a while. Eventually you notice that no one inside the company has seen enough cases to decide a hard one, and the people who could have learned it left because their jobs were boring or never materialized.

Small companies are more exposed than large ones. A big employer can buy a graduate program and absorb a weak cohort. If you employ 40 people and your two junior analysts are the only pipeline into your management roles, a thinner first year leaves nothing behind it.

What does the research say?

A July 14, 2026 McKinsey Quarterly article by Bryan Hancock and Charlotte Seiler argues that AI is absorbing the routine work, such as research, data cleanup and preliminary analysis, through which junior employees have built judgment, and that employers should not assume the informal apprenticeship will survive on its own. A few figures from that piece:

• Pessimism among graduating seniors about starting a career rose from 46% to 62% in two years, according to Handshake data.
• The unemployment rate for recent U.S. college graduates was about 5.7% in the first quarter of 2026, and about four in ten were underemployed.
• In a Strada survey of about 1,500 executives and talent leaders, those who expect AI to increase entry-level hiring outnumbered those expecting a decrease by nearly three to one, and a third of employers said AI had already reduced the foundational tasks juniors learn from.

The article also notes that the cause of the entry-level slowdown is contested, since remote work and a cooling hiring market may play a part alongside AI. I mention that because the right response does not depend on winning the argument. Whether AI is the cause or the accelerator, the lost reps are real in the jobs where it takes over the routine work.

What does a junior employee actually learn from the routine work?

Three things that never appear in a job description, and all of them are what economists call tacit knowledge, meaning know-how that people carry but have not written down.

• What normal looks like. After a few hundred invoices, you can feel a wrong number before you find it.
• Why the rule exists. Doing a process by hand shows you what it protects.
• Who to ask. Routine tasks send juniors across the company, and that is how they meet the people who later become their network.

When a tool does the task, the output arrives and none of those lessons come with it. Your job is to put the lessons back on purpose.

How do you redesign the first-year role?

McKinsey describes an “answer-key model” that works well for a small team. I would run it this way:

1. The junior does the task first, without the tool, on a real but low-risk piece of work.
2. The tool does the same task. The manager sees both versions.
3. They compare the differences together. The conversation is about why the junior chose one thing and the tool another, and who was right.
4. The junior writes a two-line note on what they would do differently next time.

You will not do this for every task. Pick the three task types that teach the most in your business, such as quoting a customer, reconciling an account or drafting a policy answer, and run the answer key on those. The rest can go to the tool. My 30-60-90 onboarding kit gives you the first-90-days structure to hang those exercises on.

How do you capture what your best people know?

Ask your two most experienced people to record how they decide. Not what the process is, but how they would handle the odd case. A 20-minute recorded conversation with a manager asking “walk me through the last time this went wrong” captures more than a handbook page.

• Keep the result as a short “how we decide” file the junior can search.
• Update it when the tool gets something wrong, so the file records the exceptions too.
• Put it in company systems. The notes belong to the business. They are not a duty to do unpaid knowledge transfer after someone leaves, and California’s ban on non-competes, which I cover in my non-compete guide, means you cannot restrain a departing employee from using their general skill. Capture it while they are here.

How do you build a bench without a training department?

Three low-cost structures work in a company of 20 to 150 people:

• A named mentor for every junior employee, with 30 minutes a week on the calendar. McKinsey’s piece describes a “preceptor” model in which senior staff mentor juniors, borrowed from medical training. My guide to finding a mentor at work explains the relationship from the junior’s side.
• A rotation. Move juniors through two or three functions in the first 18 months, so they learn how the pieces connect and who makes the calls.
• A path with real steps. Tell juniors what the next role requires and when you will review them. McKinsey’s piece warns that AI-skilled employees are highly mobile, so retention depends on a visible future. My article on managers as a retention strategy makes the same point.

What does California require when you train junior employees?

A few rules matter before you launch a program.

• Pay for the time. Time an employee spends in training you require is generally time worked, and for a non-exempt employee it counts toward overtime. Do not schedule a “learning hour” off the clock.
• Do not treat a junior role as unpaid. An unpaid “apprenticeship” that does real work for the company is a wage claim waiting to be filed.
• Watch the exempt line. When a junior is promoted to a judgment role, the job is exempt only if the duties and the salary both qualify. The 2027 salary floor is $72,384 a year, and the details are in my exempt salary threshold guide. A title change alone does not make a role exempt.

How do you know the program is working?

Pick four measures and review them every quarter. They do not need a dashboard, only a shared sheet.

• Time to independent work: how many weeks until a junior handles the three core task types without review.
• The gap between the junior’s version and the tool’s version: McKinsey suggests tracking how that gap narrows as evidence that judgment is developing. A junior who catches what the tool misses is ready for harder work.
• Twelve-month retention of the people in the program, compared with the people who joined before it.
• Internal fills: how many open supervisor or manager roles went to someone you trained.

If the numbers do not move after two quarters, change one thing: the tasks you chose, the mentor match or the pace. Do not abandon the structure. A bench takes years to build and a few bad choices to lose, so the point is to keep the habit of deliberate learning while the tools change.

What should you do this week?

Name the three task types that taught you the most in your own first year. Check which ones a tool now handles. Pick one and run the answer-key exercise with your next junior hire or a current employee, and schedule the first mentor session before the week ends. Then ask your most experienced person for the 20-minute recording.

If you want help designing the role ladder and the pay levels around it, that is a good fit for my fractional HR work.

For a related angle, see the manager skill of AI judgment.

Sources

• McKinsey Quarterly, Building expertise in the age of AI: who trains the next generation, July 14, 2026, read October 31, 2026
• DIR, 2027 exempt salary threshold announcement

McKinley holds a J.D. but is not a licensed attorney. Articles here are general information, not legal advice. For your specific situation, talk with an employment attorney.

Data current as of October 2026. Sources are linked where each figure appears.