Early careers and future-proofing talent pipelines

A disrupted labour market and accelerating technological changes are reshaping how people enter work. At the same time, AI and automation are pushing some organisations towards more diamond-shaped organisational structures, limiting traditional entry-level roles and prompting a redesign of pathways into work. For many businesses, this presents both a strategic and operational challenge.We went along to the CIPD Festival of Work to hear what a panel of talent and business experts from across the technology, engineering and legal industries had to say.

Panel

• Orianne Wightman, global talent director, ARM
• Gemma Tigwell, head of talent, BAE Systems
• Telisha Matthews, barrister and founder, The Guided Growth Network and Shiphrah Legal Services
• Moderator: Lizzie Crowley, senior skills policy advisor, CIPD

 

On future-proofing talent pipelines

Wightman: Whether you're a small organisation or a much larger employer, there is no disputing we are going through a very, quite uncomfortable period of change and not everyone has the answer.When we're thinking about how to build our talent model and thinking about entry-level individuals, we've really been having quite uncomfortable but honest conversations with ourselves on how we protect that entry-level route and how we make it strategic for the business.We’re thinking about the buy, build, borrow, bot model. For those that haven’t heard of this, ‘buy’ stands for buying skilled talent – that's your experienced hires, it’s coming in ready-made. Then you have ‘build’, which is your entry-level programmes, your investment. You then have ‘borrow’, which are your contractors, your short-term workers. And then you have ‘bot’, which is automation. There's a fifth one, ‘bounce’, but we're not covering internal mobility for now. So we’re having those strategic conversations around what the right levels for our talent model are. How much talent are we going to buy, build and borrow and also where can we automate?What’s clear is that if we stop building today and we all stop investing in those entry-level pathways, what is the effect going to be five years from now? Worse than that, if nobody is building the talent, where is the talent of tomorrow going to come from?

On the impact of AI on early careers, applications and skills development

Matthews: In the legal profession, there's a lot of jobs that would naturally be given to early talent professionals that are now being automated, whether that's research, finding legal precedents, or doing case summaries. So naturally, there's a lot of tension in people now entering the profession looking for paralegal jobs or legal assistant positions. What we're trying to do is take a different position. Instead of seeing it as a potential threat to lawyer positions, we're really focusing on the skills, as opposed to the tasks.So when we look at these particular tasks, such as drafting, it deals with persuasion and precision. When we look at legal research, that requires critical thinking and the ability to reason legally. So we're really focusing on the tasks, not from the sense of what you have to do, but rather the skills that are developed as we do the tasks.What that looks like practically for us in the field is focusing on reshaping early talent development on a daily basis. We’re not focused necessarily on the daily or admin tasks but rather strategic, intentional, daily curated situations where you can develop your skills such as the human skills that you need for negotiation, or say relationship building. Curating those particular types of situations is what will ensure that the next generation of legal professionals are not left behind.The mindset shift of realising that the tasks may be disappearing or changing, but the skills that you're going to develop through those tasks are going to be implemented in an intentional way throughout the legal sector, so much so that you don't feel as though you're redundant.Examples of this may look like AI literacy and being intentional with that. Not seeing AI as necessarily a threat to the legal profession but rather how you can work to integrate it with the legal profession. Or prompting, developing the skill of prompting and accepting that AI is a necessary unfortunate new reality of the legal profession and so thinking about how we incorporate that in a way that still encourages critical thinking. And evaluating exactly what we put out.Ultimately, if we don't focus on that, we run the risk of developing a new generation with the ability to generate answers but not necessarily the ability to develop the critical thinking skills to evaluate those answers.Unfortunately, that has been seen in a lot of AI hallucinated cases. I work in legal consulting, particularly in housing and employment law, and there have been cases that are AI-generated and simply do not exist. It does make you question, how did it get to that stage? But it all comes back to understanding the importance of insight and that human judgement simply cannot be replaced and that doesn't have to come at the expense of understanding AI and developing it.Tigwell: We’ve really had to react quite quickly to the fact that our applications have significantly grown. I think in 2023 we saw 26,000 applications which grew to 75,000 in 2025.  We've had to become more slick and streamlined in our hiring and selection processes and also how we’re engaging with early career potential employees to make sure they choose us.We’re also looking at what we’re doing with people once they join the organisation, building breadth and skills across the organisation and building them in sync with AI technology and how we do that together. We definitely don't have a strategy that's going to involve replacing all our people with AI, but actually working more in conjunction with it as an organisation to be more efficient for our customers.I think as organisations we also need to be thinking about what we can learn from early careers people who have grown up with AI and new technologies and can therefore offer different types of knowledge and perspectives.

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On what early careers might look like in the future 

Wightman: The honest answer is that nobody really knows what the future looks like and that means all we can do is focus on the things that we do have within our control. Now, some professions have better sight of it. They might know the skills they will need, their goals, and some are also less impacted by changes but for the vast majority they don't. So if we're not sure what young people are going to be doing tomorrow, or 10 years from now, what can we prepare them for?We know there's going to be a big reskilling and upskilling because the jobs of today are not the jobs of tomorrow. So, how are we building that agility into young people and helping them lean in with optimism rather than that resistance and fear?We also need to think about mental health and building in that grit and tenacity and resilience to adapt, lean into things and be able to handle what is thrown at them. There's some really simple things I would, myself included, argue that we are overlooking in our profession and we're not spending enough quality time thinking about. Don't worry about the future and what's coming in a crystal ball, focus on what you can still control. Think where can we as employers have the biggest impact to make sure that young people are prepared for whatever that future looks like?

On AI for retaining business expertise, knowledge and learning

Tigwell: One of our key focusses this year has been a result of some of our strategic workforce planning insights that have identified that we have a retiring workforce, or an ageing workforce, and within the next 10 years, a significant amount of those will have either retired or will be very near retirement.We have some very specialist and niche knowledge within our business, and so what we've done in order to support our early careers employees is actually develop an AI tool so that we can extract the knowledge from our critical people with those critical skills, and embed it within a bespoke AI tool, so that anybody in the future that wants to find out a way they can do something they don't know how to do, they can just search for it within this tool.It's bespoke to BAE too, so it's not something they're going to get instant responses from, it's really going to be from that deep knowledge that we've extracted from our people and embedded in that system. There are lots of benefits and opportunities to develop with it and it's been really exciting and rich for us as an organisation.

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