Two recently published reports – the Youth Employment Commission’s interim report on young people and work and Prospects Luminate’s Early Careers Survey 2026 – have alerted me to unconsidered complexities around the interplay between artificial intelligence and human skills.
The first of these reports is a stark account of how much harder it has become for many young people to gain a foothold in the labour market. The second adds a more specific picture of how AI is already shaping early career thinking, job applications and recruitment experiences.
Read together, the reports reflect a wider sense of unease about AI and the future of work. The Youth Employment Commission focuses on the weakening of entry-level routes, rising barriers to progression and the difficulty of establishing any kind of stable start in an uncertain economy. The Early Careers Survey asserts the very real anxieties that this dynamic produces, citing that 35% of respondents feel that AI is reducing their future opportunities.
Artificial intelligence runs through this picture both as a driver of labour market change and as a tool turned to by applicants and recruiters alike to help navigate that change.
During the recruitment process, young people are often expected to pass through automated screening stages, including recorded video interviews, before they have any meaningful contact with another human being. These systems can feel impersonal, and they may also influence which kinds of communication and self-presentation are treated as signals of potential.
The Early Careers Survey reinforces that concern: it found 83% of respondents opposed AI being used in recorded interviews and showed that discomfort is not evenly distributed, with neurodiverse learners more likely to feel uneasy.
This hits at an older and broader challenge seen in recruitment (and beyond). The objective vision of the ideal candidate and the skills they should embody is not always aligned with subjective expectations around how they should present themselves.
A young person whose parents understand professional recruitment practices, who knows how interviews work, who has benefited from work experience, and who feels comfortable presenting themselves in formal settings is likely to come across better than someone who has had fewer such opportunities. As the Youth Employment Commission report notes, these processes can “reward confidence, familiarity with recruitment conventions, digital access and the ability to navigate formal processes”.
The reports set off alarm bells for me.
A strong case has been made for placing greater value on human skills such as communication and interpersonal abilities – those which are traditionally assessed as part of an interview.
But what if we end up defining those skills through a narrow and biased lens? What if the labour market starts to prioritise performative proxies over genuine proficiencies: polish, confidence, fluency in interview-speak, a knack for buzzword bingo? These are displays more likely to reflect prior advantage than underlying capability. And what happens if those already skewed judgements about what counts as a strong human skill are delegated, at scale, to AI?
In that scenario, the problem is more than AI making imperfect decisions. It could also harden a narrow and already unequal understanding of human capability into something that appears objective and neutral. Traits that are easiest to detect or score may come to stand in for deeper qualities that are harder to observe: judgement, empathy, resilience, curiosity, potential. The result would be a system that mirrors existing biases and gives them new authority.
Although the tertiary education sector is not responsible for trends in recruitment practices, it can play a leading role in shaping how people come to understand ‘human skills’.
It can do that by being more precise about what those skills actually are, and by resisting the temptation to reduce them to what is easiest to observe or assess. Human skills are not simply matters of confidence or self-presentation. They include things like judgement, empathy, collaboration, persistence and ethical reasoning: capacities that tend to emerge over time, through sustained work, relationships and real situations, rather than in a single polished performance.
There is already plenty of thoughtful work across tertiary education in this space. The opportunity now is to build on that by being even clearer about what counts as a human skill and by giving students ways to demonstrate those capabilities without relying too heavily on superficial, easily coached heuristics. This is an area we intend to look further into in the coming months.
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