Part 2 of a five-part series on technology workforce development in the age of AI
When Senna Titcomb graduated from college in 2023, she could not find a full-time engineering role. So she took a part-time analytics job, kept building her technical skills, and eventually relocated from Oregon to Seattle to be closer to the people hiring into the roles she wanted. She now works as an AI engineer at a healthcare startup, building conversational systems that interact with insurance companies. Her path — improvisational, networked, built around continuous learning rather than a linear climb — is now closer to the rule than the exception for early-career workers, according to reporting from LinkedIn News in its April 2026 Grad’s Guide.
Titcomb’s story, one of several profiled by LinkedIn, captures a structural shift that is not unique to Seattle or to her industry. In Atlanta, as in most U.S. tech hubs, the traditional first rung of the technology career ladder — entry-level analyst, junior developer, associate researcher — is disappearing faster than the second rung is moving up.
The data is unambiguous. LinkedIn’s seasonally-adjusted Hiring Rate for U.S. entry-level workers declined 6 percent between December 2025 and February 2026 compared to the same period in 2025. Middle-management hiring declined 10 percent over the same window. Thirty-eight percent of employers surveyed in Western Governors University’s January 2026 Workforce Decoded report said they are reducing entry-level hiring because of artificial intelligence, with the steepest cuts concentrated in information technology and financial services. More than 40 percent of the same employers said mid-career professionals — those with five to ten years of experience — are now their most in-demand hires.
This installment is the second in an Atlanta Tech News series examining how AI is reshaping the Southeast’s technology workforce. The first installment laid out the structural shift at a high level; this piece focuses specifically on what is happening at the bottom of the ladder, and what recent graduates and career-changers in metro Atlanta are doing about it.
Why the rung is disappearing
The mechanism is straightforward, even if the consequences are not. Many of the tasks that used to be assigned to junior employees — primary research, initial drafting, routine analysis, meeting coordination — can now be accelerated or partially automated by generative AI tools. Companies under cost pressure have responded by eliminating or consolidating the roles that previously performed those tasks.
“I think a lot of what companies are doing right now is an overreaction to the markets,” Christian Vasquez, who works on organizational structure, told LinkedIn News. “Companies doing layoffs are saying, ‘This is because we’re investing in AI.’ Their stock prices go up because of the messaging. They’re going to see those needs that they cut off too soon back in their company. You still need people.”
Whether Vasquez is right that the cuts are an overreaction is an open question. What is not in dispute is that the short-term effect, in Atlanta and elsewhere, is a compressed career ladder where the gap between the entry-level tier and the mid-career tier has widened. Employers are telling candidates they want five to ten years of experience, but the roles that used to produce those five to ten years are shrinking.
The Atlanta context
Metro Atlanta hosts roughly 13,000 technology companies and 135,000 technology workers. Median tech wages in the region — around $112,018 — run 124 percent above the broader metro median. That wage premium has historically made Atlanta one of the Southeast’s most attractive tech job markets. But because information technology and financial services are the two sectors where WGU’s research shows entry-level cuts are sharpest, and because both sectors are disproportionately large in Atlanta’s economy, the regional effect is more concentrated than a national average would suggest.
Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta research from the Center for Workforce and Economic Opportunity offers additional texture. In 2024, nearly 628,000 U.S. job postings required at least one AI skill — about 1.7 percent of all postings, up from roughly 0.5 percent in 2010. The demand is not evenly distributed. Higher-education postings — those requiring a Ph.D., a master’s, or a bachelor’s degree — are showing the steepest AI-skill demand increases, at roughly 5.3 percent, 5.0 percent, and 4.7 percent of postings respectively. In other words, AI skills are increasingly a requirement at the tier above entry-level, not at entry-level itself.
The Gen Z response
The response from workers at the bottom of the ladder has been adaptive rather than passive. According to LinkedIn survey data published in the Grad’s Guide, more than half of Gen Z job seekers globally report having shifted their focus from traditional full-time roles to freelance or contract work — a higher share than any other generation. Sixty-eight percent of Gen Zers in the U.S. say they are considering starting a business. New “founder” profile additions on LinkedIn rose sharply in 2025.
“We’re seeing a lot of new grads turning to more alternative types of employment, whether they do gig work or work in retail or a restaurant,” career strategist Hanna Goefft told LinkedIn News. “There’s more scrappiness in Gen Z and more visibility online of people taking different paths.”
Goefft’s observation maps onto a pattern the WGU data corroborates. Seventy-eight percent of employers now say work experience is equal to or more valuable than a degree — which creates an opening for workers who can demonstrate skill and ship work, regardless of how they arrived. The challenge is that the structural infrastructure for that path — apprenticeships, well-designed internships, portfolio-building early roles — remains underdeveloped in most Atlanta employers.
The preparation gap
Higher education institutions are responding unevenly. Jeff Selingo, a higher-education strategist, told LinkedIn News that “colleges are moving into an era of, we’ll let the faculty decide, which leads to a very uneven experience for students because some faculty are really into AI and other faculty are not.” The uneven experience shows up in hiring. Only 37 percent of employers in the WGU survey say they believe higher education is preparing graduates with the skills they need.
For the recent Atlanta-area graduate trying to break in, the implication is practical: the degree itself is no longer the ticket it once was. What employers want, according to the WGU data, is evidence of applied skill — critical thinking, adaptability, emotional intelligence, and demonstrable AI fluency — regardless of where that evidence came from.
The open question
If the entry tier continues to contract while the mid-career tier continues to consolidate, the math of the career ladder becomes difficult. Where, exactly, will the five-to-ten-year mid-career professionals of 2031 come from if the roles that produced that experience were cut in 2026?
That question does not have an answer yet. The next installment in this series examines how employers and workers are adapting what they ask and offer — specifically, the rise of the “readiness portfolio” as a replacement for the traditional degree-and-résumé package — and why the credential check is now less about what a candidate has earned and more about what they can prove they can do.
Atlanta Tech News will continue ongoing coverage of Technology Workforce Development across the Southeast. Visit atlantatech.news for the full series and additional reporting.
