New Grads Aren’t Entry Level Anymore

I’ve spent much of this summer bouncing between innovation events across Waterloo Region. At one of them, a student showed me digital twin replicas of mechanical robot arms they had built through a campus club. There was no assignment, no funding and no one asking them for it.

The pace students and new grads are moving at with AI right now outstrips what most organizations are asking of the people they hired to do this work. We’re not warming up. We’re already three laps in. The students and new grads I’m meeting now already have the instinct and the skill. They’re prototyping agentic tools and running technical work in days or hours that would have taken months to achieve two years ago.

What they do not have when they leave school and begin their careers is authority to act on what they know, or a clear path to apply it to something that matters strategically to the business.

The direction of adaptation has reversed

The traditional model of onboarding has typically run one way. A new employee arrived and adapted to the culture already in place. It was about learning “how we do things around here.”  It could take years to earn the right to have opinions about the business.

This approach was designed for a pace of change that no longer exists. A year ago is so much more than a year ago in AI time.

This is why I believe we need to flip the formula. Instead of asking how do we teach young talent, ask how do we give them a runway? How do we learn from them? How do we bring them closer to where decisions get made?

The organizations that are moving quickly are the ones who have accepted that the direction of adaptation just reversed. New talent is no longer being folded into an existing way of working. New talent is starting to shape what that way of working looks like, and leadership is doing some of the learning this time. Progressive leaders are setting ego and job titles aside, inviting new talent into the problems they’re working on, and remaining open about what they, as experienced leaders, can learn.

That adjustment asks experienced leaders to sit with a strange feeling: being onboarded by the person they just onboarded.

Closing that gap runs in both directions. Young talent needs to get genuinely fluent in the business, not just the tools. We need to know what problems the business is trying to solve and where the business is trying to go. At the same time, leaders need to remain open to embracing ideas and approaches that have not been their business norm.

The upside occurs when both sides start thinking bigger together instead of translating past each other or relying on faulty assumptions about one another’s value or ability.

Unconventional pairings

I’m a new grad and I work inside NorthGuide, so I get to see this from both directions at once. We’ve been testing a version of this approach by pairing senior experts who bring decades of sector experience with fast moving young talent. We run together on the same track rather than on separate tracks.

Upon arrival at NorthGuide, I was immediately thrown into the deep end, valued for my fresh ideas and considered an equal in strategic conversations. As a result, I grew my business fluency as I continued to grow my digital fluency. One of my first projects was finding a better way to monitor what our clients were doing. Before building anything, we needed to turn to the team members who had spent years working with these organizations to understand what kind of news was actually worth knowing. Once we had that direction, we could build AI workflows around it. The project has since evolved into a weekly client intelligence brief that our Business Development team runs.

Putting subject matter veterans and AI fluent new talent on the same sprint, working toward one working prototype, is where the real edge becomes evident. Unconventional pairings like this are where the biggest opportunities tend to hide, often because most organizations are not set up to try them. I believe this has been one of the keys to NorthGuide’s rapid growth and impact.

The old model of an organization looks like a pyramid. Decisions flow down from a narrow point at the top. That structure only works if the people at the base are executing a plan that someone above them already validated. AI breaks that assumption because now some of the best judgment and validation of what is possible sit at the base, not the peak.

So here is my advice. Somewhere in your organization right now, most likely in your “entry level” talent pool, someone with real innovation fluency is trying to run their ideas through processes your organization built for a different decade. Try posing challenges to them that your organization has been circling for months. Stay open to what comes back, including the parts that don’t look like how you would have done it.

They’re waiting to be trusted with work that truly matters. Go find them, and let them in.