AI is making career advancement a much steeper climb

Three strategies to remain competitive

Moving up in your career can feel like a game of musical chairs. Promotions, departures and reorgs open chairs up, and the music starts playing. When it stops, if you're talented, somewhat politically aware, and a little bit lucky, you'll probably find a good chair to land in. That seat will, ideally, help you get the experience and advanced responsibility you'll need to join the ranks of senior leadership.

And if you can't find a good place to land where you are now, you might just choose to move on to another company. Or, in the worst-case scenario, or sometimes the best-case, you might be forced to do it.

Either way, there have generally been enough open chairs to get the experience you need. Of course, as you move up the corporate ladder, fewer and fewer chairs are available, and the game of gathering experience and responsibility becomes increasingly competitive.

The pyramid shape of most org charts makes facing increasing competition on your way up unavoidable. Despite the competition, you've still generally been able to get the experience you need, especially if you’re in your early and mid-career. The fiercest competition hasn’t really kicked in until you’ve reached the VP level or its equivalent in your company or industry.

But that's changing.

Org Charts Will Have a Different Shape

Over the past year, we've all read or heard the stories about senior leaders at companies considering how their adoption of AI might allow them to eliminate positions and, more importantly, cut costs. And if senior leadership teams follow through, which they probably will, because they all want their bonuses, there will be fewer places to land when the music stops in the game of career musical chairs.

And it's not the most senior levels of the game that will become more competitive. After all, C-level leaders aren't likely to cut their own jobs. And they'll still need direct reports at the VP level to manage the business on a day-to-day basis, especially in larger companies.

So the chairs lost to AI will be further down in the organization. The disappearance of entry-level task-based jobs is easy to imagine, and it's already happening. Reductions at the manager and director levels can't be far behind. In just a few years, that pyramid-shaped org chart we’ve all grown accustomed to may look more like a skyscraper.

Pyramids are easier to scale. Skyscrapers, less so.

It’s Already Happening

According to the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report for 2025, "40% [of employers] anticipate reducing their workforce where AI can automate tasks." And that number is likely to grow as AI becomes increasingly sophisticated and capable.

Applying AI to replace entry-level roles is a foregone conclusion, and as AI’s capabilities continue to advance and senior leaders become more comfortable integrating it into their businesses, positions at the manager and director levels, those critical stepping stones to senior leadership, may very well become increasingly vulnerable. Mid-level engineers are already on the chopping block.

So if you’re an ambitious MBA or a rising professional targeting a role in senior leadership, how will you stay competitive? How will you get the experience you need to be a credible candidate at the VP and C-Suite levels?

I can't say I have all the answers. I don't think anyone does. Things are just evolving too quickly. But beyond learning to work with AI, here are three ways I can think of to stay in the game and be more competitive when you're competing against AI, at least for the time being.

Build Relationships Based on Trust

AI might excel at analysis and speed, but one thing it definitely hasn't earned yet is our trust. It goes without saying that AI still has a tendency to hallucinate. In other words, it makes things up. And if it's not managed carefully, it's also a terrible sycophant. At some point, I should write a whole post about my frustrating experience trying to get ChatGPT to be less of a brown-noser. A few weeks ago, I instructed ChatGPT to be more direct. So instead of telling me my ideas were all fantastic(!), it preceded every answer with, "Now I'm not going to sugar-coat this, Doug, so let's cut to the chase." It drove me nuts, and I instructed it to stop using those particular phrases. It did not comply.

Not ideal.

Trust and relationships still matter — a lot. Senior leaders and hiring managers tend to promote and hire individuals they know, like and trust. And if they don't know someone themselves, they rely heavily on candidates who are referred to them by people they do know, like and trust. Based on my experience as a recruiter, they don't want someone who will tell them that every idea they've ever had is insightful, or butter them up with an endless string of platitudes before sharing information or expressing an opinion.

Okay. There are a few senior leaders I've worked for who wanted that, and there are a few in circulation now who thrive on it, but those are the exceptions. And you probably wouldn't want to work for them anyway. Focus on becoming the person others can count on to be smart, informed, straightforward, and generally good to be around.

You can't go out for drinks after work with Claude or ChatGPT. Well, you could, but it would be awkward.

Forging strong human connections based on trust will be among your best competitive advantages in an increasingly automated and inhuman world.

Craft a Unique Positioning for Yourself

AI is a fantastic generalist. It can gather and process vast amounts of information, delivering reasonably competent work in most areas. But what AI lacks is the depth and nuance of understanding that comes from actual lived experience.

Consider how your lived experience — the unique combination of the work you've done, the places you've been, the people you've met, and whatever else you can think of — sets you apart from other people and from an increasingly competent and growing army of AI competitors.

I've thought about this a lot for my own executive and career coaching business. In my last post, I shared an article about the threat (or opportunity?) of AI coaches. After considering what it had to say, I think I've identified what sets me apart from a competent AI Coach. It's where I've actually been and the perspective that lived experience provides. I have an MBA from Wharton, a physical school I attended in Philadelphia with professors and fellow students; I worked my way up as a marketer and hiring manager in Fortune 100 companies, with living employees and varied corporate cultures; and I was an executive recruiter at an executive search firm, with skeptical clients and anxious candidate pools that challenged me every step of the way.

While AI can easily scrape everything I've written or said in public forums about my work and the perspective it provides, AI hasn't actually lived through that combination of experiences. I've been a student, a job candidate, a hiring manager, an executive recruiter and now a personal coach to thousands of people, including at Harvard Business School. Not many people can say that, and AI definitely can't.

Based on my fairly unique combination of experiences, I'm better able to understand, at a deep and instinctive level, what the people making hiring decisions value. I also appreciate the challenges candidates face when they're trying to communicate their personal narrative and their value. I'm the connector between those two groups of people. And that's how I might stand apart from (or serve as a complement to) an AI coach.

So what's your unique combination of experiences? How can you combine them in a way that creates a compelling personal narrative and offers a distinct point of value?

Be More Visible, Be Discoverable

Even if you have a compelling personal narrative and a value proposition based on your unique combination of lived experiences, it won't matter if no one knows about it.

In an era of influencers and thought leaders, visibility and discoverability are more important than ever. Many ambitious professionals, including the people I work with as an executive and career coach, shy away from even the most subtle self-promotion, mistakenly believing their work will speak for itself. I often criticize myself for making the same mistake.

But when AI can deliver increasingly competent work and serviceable insights, you need to give people a compelling reason to look beyond AI. You need to ensure that the people choosing between AI and a real human being are aware of you and your value proposition, and that they can easily find you.

Communicate your unique positioning through a well-crafted LinkedIn profile, produce content on LinkedIn or on other platforms that decision-makers in your industry pay attention to, and do it consistently enough that they'll remember you when they need a resource or are called upon by a colleague to make a referral.

Lean Into Human Connections for the Steeper Climb to the Top

As increasingly capable AI tools pull the chairs away at the entry, manager and director levels, reshaping org charts and steepening the angle of ascent to the top, your ability to stay competitive for positions of increasing responsibility will be dependent on your ability to connect with people at a very human level.

Cultivate working relationships based on a level of trust that AI just hasn't earned yet. Craft a narrative and positioning that emphasize your unique combination of lived experiences that AI just can't claim to have had. And remain visible across platforms where the decision-makers in your industry choose to spend their time.

The climb to the C-Suite might soon be like a steep ascent up a skyscraper instead of a more moderate climb up a pyramid. But if you focus on what's uniquely human, you'll achieve a more secure footing and have a better chance of reaching the top.