The Disappearing First Rung

I started in this game in 1998, answering phones, mislabelling CVs and getting yelled at for putting a candidate forward who once listed “Microsoft Word (advanced)” as a core skill. It was humbling. It was also the only reason I ever got good. Everyone in this industry climbed a ladder, and the bottom rung was always the same: a junior role where you were allowed to be a bit useless while you learned. That rung is now quietly being sawn off.

The figures landing this month are blunt. Entry-level roles in Australia’s digital advertising and ad tech sector have fallen to around one per cent of all vacancies, while roughly half of open roles now demand more than six years of experience. In early 2026, 8.5 per cent of Australian employers on Indeed had at least one ad mentioning AI, up from 5.8 per cent a year earlier. Meanwhile nearly 40 per cent of agencies reported layoffs in the past year. AI Engineer, for what it’s worth, topped LinkedIn’s Jobs on the Rise list with about 150 per cent growth. So the top of the pyramid is on fire and the bottom is being bricked up. Lovely.

The logic is easy to follow. Why hire a graduate to draft ad copy, pull a report or build a first-pass campaign when a tool does it in seconds? It feels efficient. It also eats your own seed corn.

Tell ‘em they’re dreamin’.

If you only ever buy six-plus years of experience, you are competing for the same shrinking pool as everyone else, and you are paying a premium for it. Sydney data and AI earnings now average around $157,000, with senior machine learning engineers commonly landing between $123,500 and $189,250, and AI directors near $236,000. Those numbers go up, not down, when nobody is growing their own talent.

The smarter move is to redesign the junior role rather than delete it. A graduate who is fluent with AI tools is not competing with the tool, they are supervising it. Hire for judgement and curiosity, give them the AI to amplify, and you build a mid-level operator in eighteen months instead of poaching one for a fortune in three years.

If you are early in your career, the bar has moved and pretending otherwise will not help. “I can use ChatGPT” is not a skill, it is a Tuesday. What gets you hired now is proof you can do the thing the AI cannot: think commercially, spot when the output is confidently wrong, and own a result. Build a small portfolio that shows judgement, not just tool familiarity. The candidates who treat AI as a junior teammate they manage, rather than a crutch they hide behind, are the ones still getting offers.

Sydney has seen one of the sharper drops in job ads of any metro, yet fintech, health tech and enterprise are still scrapping over the same senior people. That is the tell. We have a market that is simultaneously short of talent and refusing to make any. Add the projected shortfall of 370,000-plus digitally skilled workers by 2026 and you have a slow-motion own goal. The agencies and employers who keep a junior pathway open will, in three years, be the only ones with affordable senior talent. The rest will be on the phone to people like me, paying top dollar, wondering where everyone went.

For hiring managers: keep at least one junior pathway alive, hire for judgement plus AI fluency, and stop treating experience as the only filter. For candidates: show outcomes not tools, learn to catch AI’s mistakes, and get commercial fast. For founders: the cheapest senior hire of 2029 is the junior you train in 2026.

I have watched this industry kill the entry-level job before, every time a new tool promised to do it all. It never quite does. The dinosaurs who survive are the ones who keep teaching the young ones to hunt. If you want a hand finding people who can actually think, not just prompt, that is what we do at Big Wave Digital. The Digital Dinosaur stays free, because good sense should not sit behind a paywall.

Big Wave Digital is a Sydney recruitment agency for tech, AI, digital, data, product and digital marketing talent. Website: www.bigwavedigital.com.au . Connect with Keiran on LinkedIn, and follow Big Wave Digital on LinkedIn.