Which skills will pay the bills for entry level workers in 2026? (December 2025)

Dec 9

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Welcome to the December edition of the Career Futures newsletter. I’m grateful for all of you, and wish you a happy, healthy new year.

Which skills will pay the bills for entry level workers in 2026?

That’s the million dollar question, and it’s not so easily answered. There’s been quite a bit of recent research, analysis, and speculation into how skills might evolve (or not) as AI and other emerging technologies diffuse across industries and economies. Many skills taxonomies have been developed or revised. Many op-eds have been written.

One recent McKinsey analysis suggests that occupations have become increasingly specialized over the past decade: on average, roles now list more distinct skills than they used to, and there’s less overlap between occupations. At the same time, employers say they want new grads to have job-specific technical skills, according to Cengage’s annual employability report. Taken together, it makes sense to conclude that if you’re just starting out, you should invest your time and energy in mastering role-specific tools and tasks.

The wrench here is that, as roles become more specialized, the specialized skills themselves become less durable. The ‘half-life’ of technical skills is shrinking thanks to AI and other new technologies. Which puts a premium on the skills that do transfer across roles and contexts. “The speed of technological change raises the importance of transferable skills,” according to McKinsey (emphasis mine): skills like problem solving, strategic thinking, and leadership. There’s evidence for this. Though hiring has cooled overall, the hiring mix has tilted meaningfully toward mid- and senior-level roles. These roles almost always require more of these kinds of transferable skills than entry-level ones. New research from Burning Glass Institute shows that those skills often come with better pay, too.

So, great: invest in soft skills, then?

Not exactly. The truth is, entry-level workers will need the same combination of technical, specialized skills and judgment (decision-making) skills as they always have. What’s changing is that the bar starts higher for both technical and judgment skills:

You need more technical skills, and they change faster
You need higher-order judgment skills (think strategic thinking, risk analysis, decision-making, leadership) earlier, because more typical entry-level work is being automated

An example, from my line of work: say, for an entry-level marketing coordinator, the core task of scheduling social media posts and pulling reports gets automated. The coordinator’s new task might be to interpret what the data in those reports is saying and then recommend some action: continue, pivot, stop, etc. The ‘doing’ shrinks, the ‘deciding’ expands. Or imagine junior support reps handling difficult edge cases because a chatbot is fielding routine tickets. Or a warehouse associate making real-time calls about rerouting inventory when the automated system flags an exception.

For entry-level workers in 2026, the market isn’t just pricing what you know: it’s also quietly pricing how fast you can learn what’s next. Which means meta-skills start to matter more: adaptability, learning to learn, the ability to re-skill or upskill quickly. In a tight labor market (like the one we’ve been in), credibility signals also gain more weight. Degrees, certifications, internships, and referrals function as filters for employers receiving hundreds or thousands of applications for a single job.

Let’s just note, this is a lot to ask of any 18–24-year-old! And for any college or training program that has only so many hours with them.

But it at least sharpens the design challenge for those of us in workforce and postsecondary roles. The useful questions may not be “Are we doing this?” but “What are we really optimizing for with the time we have?” and “Which mix of skills, meta-skills, and credibility signals gives our learners the best shot at staying employable in a labor market we can’t fully predict?” (This is the other side of last month’s question about information design: once we have the data, what do we do with it?) Naming those bets is just the first step. The practical work is designing instruction, work-based learning, coaching, and credentialing so that learners actually leave with the skills, meta-skills, and signals you’ve chosen to prioritize (check out Bruno Manno’s recent article in Stanford Social Innovation Review for ten thought-provoking program/infrastructure design ideas).

We won’t get every bet right. But being explicit about them and then designing to that mix (rather than trying to do everything at once) is likely the most realistic way to help learners pay the bills in 2026 and beyond.

What’s new with Coach and CareerVillage.org

Coach v3 = enterprise grade feature set

Although we’ve been testing and rolling out enterprise features for Coach, the AI-powered career coaching platform, for the last six or so months, last month marked the *official* release of Coach v3. It’s a truly robust set of features and improvements, including a new leading-edge quality assurance platform and (my favorite) a useful new Insights dashboard for program admins and coaches. Take a look at the announcement here. There’s also a bonus sneak peek at what the team is building for v4.

Fun little promo teaser

Coach also won an award! The global education nonprofit hundrED.org included Coach in its list of the 100 most impactful education innovations for 2026.

Huge increase in learner questions on CareerVillage.org

Last month we had a 4x jump in the number of questions that learners asked on CareerVillage.org, and there are still hundreds of questions that need answers! If you have a few minutes, we’d be grateful if you’d consider heading over to CareerVillage to answer one or two!

Overall this year, nearly 2 million people came to CareerVillage.org in search of clarity, direction, or simply a starting point. Outside of last year (when Careervillage and other forum-style sites saw large spikes in traffic due to since-reversed changes to Google’s search algorithm), it’s the most traffic the site has ever seen.

LinkedIn Live event: Predictions for AI & Work in 2026

Our third and final Future of Career Navigation event will be a fun one. On December 12, CareerVillage.org Founder & CEO Jared Chung joins Aria Finger, Chief of Staff to Reid Hoffman, for a fast-paced, interactive conversation where they’ll trade bold predictions about how AI may shape jobs, skills, and the labor market in 2026.