10-year trajectory of jobs accessible to graduating undergrads · Click cards to reveal each role category
Sources: FRED/Indeed ·
BLS OOH ·
Burning Glass/Lightcast ·
Mediabistro
Two things are true at once. The declines began with the early-2022 correction, months before ChatGPT (Indeed's own analysis is explicit about this). What gen AI changed is what happened next: the AI-exposed categories never recovered while the rest of the market did, and one twist cuts the other way: software-dev postings have ticked back up since 2025, driven by hiring around agentic AI coding tools. AI is not simply deleting jobs; it is redrawing which ones exist.
The entire entry-level market has cooled — but the damage isn't evenly distributed. Coding has been hit hardest (down ~60% entry-level from 2022 peak, only 253 new-grad software postings nationwide), and traditional marketing — SEO, email, performance ads, content optimization — is also declining as AI automates exactly the "build to spec" work junior marketers used to learn on.
But the marketing category is splintering. As Mediabistro reported in March, the old "social media manager" job has fractured into specialized human-connection roles: influencer marketing managers, brand community managers, creator partnerships managers, social strategists. These relationship roles are growing fast — influencer marketing spend grew 55% year-over-year, creator economy job postings grew 38%, and 86% of marketing leaders plan to hire two or more new social roles in 2025 (per Sprout Social). Why? AI can write email copy. AI cannot build trust with an influencer, manage a brand community through a crisis, or craft a PR narrative that actually lands with human journalists.
Design thinking — the skill that underlies all of this relationship work — has grown over 1,200% since 2016 and 150% since 2020. It's the connective tissue: customer discovery, problem framing, hypothesis testing, iteration. This is precisely what experiential entrepreneurship curriculum teaches. Not a single job category, but the skill that makes your students stand out for the categories that are actually growing.