My Thoughts on the Entry Level Job Market
I have been sitting with this thought for a while and I need to put it somewhere.
AI is doing the transactional work now. Bank recs, invoice matching, journal entry coding, cash reconciliations, basic variance analysis. Tools are handling all of it faster and cheaper than any of us ever could. Offshoring took the first wave and AI is just finishing the job
That "low value" transactional work wasn't just busywork. It was how we learned. You did the recs, you lived in the numbers, you started noticing things that didn't add up. That's how junior accountants built the intuition that eventually made them good at the hard stuff. Technical accounting, SOX, complex close work, none of that makes sense if you've never actually gotten your hands dirty at the foundation.
People always bring up how the profession survived before. Spreadsheets were supposed to wipe out bookkeepers. They didn't, bookkeepers just evolved. ERPs were supposed to make controllers obsolete. Also didn't happen, controllers just moved up the value chain. Every time, accounting adapted and found its footing.
Tbh tho, AI is not giving junior accountants a chance to evolve into something new. It's just removing the floor entirely.
So yeah, accounting will probably survive. But I keep thinking about who is going to be doing the senior work in 10 years, and how exactly they learned it, if the bottom of the ladder just doesn't exist anymore.