There’s a panic unfolding on engineering campuses, and it isn’t really about code.
It’s about something far more structural: the slow dissolving of the entry-level job itself. Engineering is simply where the collapse is easiest to spot, because AI automated the bottom rung first.
Debugging, testing, routine execution… the work juniors were supposed to learn by doing, is now handled instantly by machines that don’t need onboarding, mentoring, or patience.
If you’re in marketing and thinking, “couldn’t be us,” I am here to tell you honey, it very much is.
AI hasn’t replaced marketers, obvs, but it has kind of eaten up the apprenticeship layer.
Think about it this way: the assistant work, the coordinator tasks, all of the parts of the job that once gave you a safe place to observe, experiment, and mess up before being asked to make decisions that mattered. Those tasks still exist. But they’re now bundled into expectations of speed, output, and strategic thinking from day one.
The work is still there. The buffer, is not.
For a long time, marketing careers followed a fairly predictable rhythm.
You started by executing. You learned how briefs actually worked, watched how strategy was formed. You made mistakes quietly and usually off-slide. Over time, judgment arrived.
Now, new marketers are expected to show up already strategic, already commercially aware, already fluent in tools that barely existed when they enrolled. AI speeds up execution, so the assumption is that thinking should speed up too.
What’s happening isn’t mass job loss. It’s role compression.
Responsibilities that used to be spread across junior, mid, and senior roles are collapsing upward. Entry-level marketers are being asked to manage platforms, interpret performance, communicate with stakeholders, and justify decisions, often without the institutional support that used to make that learning curve survivable.
This is why so many marketers feel underqualified and overexposed at the same time. You’re expected to think like a strategist before you’ve been allowed to become one.
Education hasn’t caught up, and that’s not a moral failing. Degrees still teach theory in neat little boxes, while the industry now demands context, judgment, and taste.
Platforms evolve faster than curriculums and tools change faster than job descriptions.
Employers, under pressure themselves, are hiring for immediate usefulness rather than long-term development. The result is a generation of marketers who feel behind before they’ve even started.
I’m aware that this sounds very stressful, and if it’s giving you anxiety, stop, breeeeathe, hold my (virtual) hand. It’s going to be ok.
Marketing isn’t being automated in the same way engineering execution is. It’s being reshaped around the things AI is bad at.
Context. Cultural interpretation. Emotional intelligence. Knowing when something that looks good on paper will fall flat in the real world. AI can generate copy, analyse data, and suggest variations. It still struggles with meaning. It struggles with taste. It struggles with knowing when “technically correct” is strategically wrong.
That’s where marketers still earn their keep.
The market increasingly rewards people who can sit between systems.
Who understand how creative connects to commercial outcomes. Who can explain why a metric matters instead of just reporting it. Who can make calls when the data is messy, the brief is vague, and the stakes are real. Those skills used to develop slowly through exposure. Now, they’re expected much earlier.
It’s uncomfortable, but it’s also clarifying.
If you’re feeling stressed, (me too girl, me too), the answer here isn’t to out-AI the AI or to hoard tools like Pokémon cards.
It’s to make your thinking visible. Show how you interpret trends. Explain why you’d choose one approach over another. Demonstrate judgment, not just output.
Production is cheap now. Taste and decision-making are absolutely not. These are the things you must hold dear.
Careers are also becoming less linear, whether we like it or not. The old assistant-to-manager ladder is wobbling. What’s replacing it is lateral movement, skill stacking, and translation. The marketers who hold their ground in moments like this are usually hybrids. Creative and analytical. Cultural and commercial. Comfortable moving sideways before moving up.
This doesn’t mean marketing is doomed. It means the profession is growing up very quickly, without much hand-holding.
The collapse of entry-level engineering roles serves as a warning about a labour market that automated the starting line and forgot to replace it.
Marketers are feeling the same pressure, just wrapped in phrases like “be more strategic,” “own outcomes,” and “move faster.”
If you’re unsettled, I do not want you to think that’s a personal failure. It’s the sensation of standing in a profession whose shape is actively changing beneath your feet.
And if there’s one thing marketers have always been good at, it’s learning how to read the room before everyone else notices it’s shifted x
-Sophie Randell, Writer
Not going viral yet?
We get it. Creating content that does numbers is harder than it looks. But doing those big numbers is the fastest way to grow your brand. So if you’re tired of throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks, you’re in luck. Because making our clients go viral is kinda what we do every single day.