Stop Trying to Choose a Career. Choose Your Next Two Years
The first rung of the career ladder is being redesigned.
So what advice should we give Gen Z as they enter the workforce?
Entry-level opportunities are changing particularly fast in some of the professions graduates have traditionally been encouraged to pursue.
A June 2026 analysis by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and LinkedIn found that UK hiring turned negative in late 2022 and, in April 2026, was 14% down on the previous year. Of 38 entry-level occupations tracked, 30 were declining, including accountants, graphic designers and software engineers.
AI is also changing the nature of junior roles.
Some of the tasks traditionally given to new starters are being automated, while the Institute of Student Employers found in 2026 that 87% of employers expect AI to reshape graduate and apprentice roles over the next three years. The issue is not simply that jobs may disappear, but that the work early-career employees are asked to do is changing.
Against that backdrop, asking a graduate, “What career do you want?” starts to look like the wrong question.
It assumes a reasonably stable destination and a recognisable route towards it. Yet no one can tell a 21-year-old with confidence what many jobs will look like in five years, let alone across a 40-year working life.
For many graduates, simply getting a foothold is difficult.
Research from Prospects in 2026 found that one in five recent graduates had applied for more than 100 jobs. In that environment, finding the perfect long-term career may be neither realistic nor useful. The immediate aim may simply be to find a role that pays, provides experience and gives you something to build on.
A more useful question to ask a graduate is:
What is worth doing for the next two years?
That does not mean abandoning ambition or drifting from job to job. It means choosing opportunities for what they enable you to build: skills, experience, relationships and knowledge that increase the number of things you can do next.
A first job should be judged partly by its ‘option value’. What will you know in two years that you do not know now? Which skills will another employer value? Will you learn how AI is changing real work? Who will you meet? Will the role widen or narrow your future choices?
And think broadly about what you bring. Skills England reported in 2026 that young people develop valuable capabilities such as communication, resilience, teamwork and problem-solving through experiences including weekend jobs and caring responsibilities, but that these are often overlooked in recruitment.
Your value is not simply a degree and a narrow set of technical skills. Think about the whole of your experience, what it has taught you and what you can bring to an employer.
The same principle applies throughout a career. The World Economic Forum estimates that 39% of workers’ existing skill sets will be transformed or become outdated between 2025 and 2030.
The safest response is not to search for a supposedly future-proof profession.
It is to become better at adapting.
That means never treating education as finished. University is not the end of learning before work begins; it is the beginning of a working life in which learning, relearning and reskilling will be continuous.
It also means networking before you need something from your network. When formal career paths are less predictable, other people become an important source of information about new roles, changing skills and opportunities you may not yet know exist.
A career is often something that becomes coherent only in retrospect. Looking backwards, the moves may form a clear story. Looking forwards, they rarely do.
So perhaps Gen Z does not need better advice on how to choose a life’s career. It needs permission to stop trying.
Choose something useful to do now. Learn as much as you can. Build relationships. Pay attention to what is changing. Then ask the question again.
