The career killer for Gen Z isn’t AI. It’s remote work.

My first sense that recent college grads are in hell is when I realized the job hunt process is totally broken. Kids use AI to write their resumes, screen ads, and fill out applications. Meanwhile, AI is sorting resumes for companies, and the AI sorters prefer AI-written resumes, so kids are sending out thousands of applications before getting a single interview.

Duolingo received 10,000 applications for one internship and pulled the listing weeks before the deadline. TikTok said they hire the first good resume that comes through, so apply fast. Think about the explosion of college applications that happened with the Common App. That’s what AI did to job hunting.

But this doesn’t explain why recent college grads have higher unemployment than the overall workforce.

The first jobs AI squashed were entry-level jobs in fields like writing, teaching, and research, and roles that measure corporate productivity: low-level accounting, marketing analytics, and consulting. Internships followed, because what’s the point of an intern pipeline when there are no entry-level jobs at the end of it?

The hottest startup out of Stanford right now is Extern, a platform where Fortune 500 companies list projects for kids to do from home, using AI to simulate a job they’re not getting paid for. It’s the apocalyptic version of the gig economy.

But young people were already working from home before AI ate the entry-level jobs. And working from home is where careers go to stall because the entire learning curve of early careers depended on proximity to people you can annoy — people who eventually take you under wing so you stop irritating them. That apprenticeship is gone. There is no remote version of it.

People-skills jobs are not going anywhere. But people skills are defined by the specific culture of a specific office, and younger workers have never been to an office. And kids can’t learn these skills from professors who went into academia specifically to avoid having to learn corporate ropes.

I got an email from Extern recently. The pitch was about personal branding — how you build it by attaching yourself to a big company name, which you can do by working for them for free. I was struck by how this hijacks what personal branding used to mean: being known for your new ideas. Now it means borrowed credibility from companies that won’t hire you.

The person who sent the email included her LinkedIn profile. When I clicked it, I got an error message. I told my son and he said: “Mom, we hate LinkedIn. We do it because this is a crisis and we will play by any rules in order to be employed.”

This is not the internet with reckless Gen X subverting everything they can. Gen Z grew up in Covid. They don’t want a revolution — they want an office. They want someone to let them inside an institution and show them how work works.

Gen Z doesn’t need to worry about AI taking jobs because they didn’t even have those jobs. The real problem for new college grads is the disappearance of mentoring.

Young workers used to learn by being physically near older workers: overhearing meetings, asking inappropriate questions, watching how decisions got made. In one of my first jobs, I agreed to be the CEO’s beach volleyball partner just to get more time around him. That led to him funding my startup. Today remote work removes the proximity we need for knowledge transfer.

So now parents hire coaches, pull strings for internships, and pay for simulated work experiences because companies stopped providing an initiation into adult working life.

The post The career killer for Gen Z isn’t AI. It’s remote work. appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.