Insights from a roundtable with early careers & campus leaders
Ask a room of employers what they want from early careers talent and the answers are remarkably consistent.
People who can communicate. Work well with others. Think critically. Adapt. Take responsibility. Learn quickly.
Ask students what they want from employers, and the answers are shifting. Students want to know whether the career they are choosing will still offer opportunity as AI reshapes the nature of work, the skills employers value and the careers available to them.
That tension was at the heart of a recent AMS early careers roundtable, bringing together representatives from organisations such as A&O Shearman, Bank of America, BNP Paribas, Citi, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Morgan Stanley, Linklaters, Standard Chartered and UBS, alongside university representatives.
The conversation wasn’t simply about how to attract more graduates. It was about a more fundamental question: are employers hiring and developing early careers talent for the skills they will need?
Five clear shifts emerged from the discussion.
1. AI is changing what students look for in a career
Students are already thinking about what AI could mean for their first job – and the jobs that come after it.
For those in technology-related disciplines in particular, questions about the future of entry-level work are influencing career decisions. Students want to know whether the skills they develop today will remain valuable and how employers will help them continue to develop as roles change.
That is putting greater emphasis on career security, but not necessarily in the traditional sense.
Security increasingly means having opportunities to learn, develop and move. Salary remains important, but so do progression, international mobility, flexibility, rotations and visible career pathways.
For employers, there is a simple implication: don’t just sell the first two years. Show candidates where those two years could take them.
2. Students are looking beyond the job title
Many students are becoming less fixed on a particular sector, role or even location. Instead, they’re comparing the overall quality of the opportunity.
What will I learn? Where could I progress? Could I work internationally? How flexible is the organisation? What have other graduates gone on to do?
And finding the answers has never been easier.
Students can look at LinkedIn and see where someone who joined a graduate programme three years ago is today. They can see whether people have progressed, moved across the business or built the kind of career they want for themselves.
That makes the experience of your existing graduates part of your attraction strategy.
What happens after someone joins is increasingly influencing who wants to join next.
For employers, that means the promises made during recruitment need to show up in the reality of the programme.
3. Human skills are becoming harder to ignore
One of the clearest points of agreement around the table was that technical capability alone doesn’t determine who succeeds.
Communication. Teamwork. Critical thinking. Curiosity. Accountability. Resilience. Integrity. Adaptability.
As AI increasingly automates routine and technical tasks, employers are placing greater value on distinctly human capabilities such as communication, critical thinking, adaptability, judgement, collaboration and ethical decision-making. The challenge is that academic achievement doesn’t always tell us whether somebody has them.
Group work, for example, can sometimes mean dividing an assignment between four people and combining it before the deadline. That’s very different from working with colleagues who disagree with you, influencing a decision, asking difficult questions or taking shared responsibility when something goes wrong.
It means employers may need to look more broadly for evidence of potential.
Sport, societies, volunteering, part-time jobs and leadership positions can demonstrate communication, teamwork and resilience just as clearly as academic experience.
Students also need help recognising that. Being able to tell the story of what they have done, what they learned and what they could bring to an organisation is becoming a skill in itself.
4. Skills-based hiring is opening different routes in
Employers are also reconsidering what they use as evidence of potential. In recent AMS research, companies who do skills-first hiring well are more likely to achieve financial targets and more likely to be viewed by the employer of choice.
For some roles, degree discipline and academic achievement will always matter. But increasingly, organisations are looking at transferable skills, behaviours and whether somebody can demonstrate the capabilities required to do the job.
That is changing assessment.
Skills assessments, simulations, assessment centres and behavioural evaluation can reveal things that a degree classification or application form simply can’t. At a time when AI-assisted applications can make written submissions look increasingly similar, these more immersive assessment approaches may provide a richer view of how candidates think, collaborate and solve problems.
As organisations place greater emphasis on transferable skills and potential, traditional academic pathways may become less of a barrier. This has the potential to open opportunities for students from a wider range of educational, social and professional backgrounds.
Someone may not have the most obvious degree for a role, but they may have exactly the analytical ability, curiosity, communication skills or problem-solving capability the organisation needs.
Skills-based hiring isn’t about making selection easier. It’s about making it more relevant to the job.
5. We need to stop expecting students to know the unwritten rules of work
There was another important point raised during the discussion: employers often expect young people to understand workplace behaviours that nobody has actually taught them.
How do you contribute effectively in a meeting? How do you disagree professionally? When should you ask for help? What does accountability look like? How do you work with somebody whose approach is completely different from yours?
For someone entering their first professional environment, the answers aren’t always obvious.
This is where closer collaboration between employers and universities can make a tangible difference.
Universities can help students recognise and articulate the transferable skills they’re already developing. Employers can be much clearer about what good looks like in practice.
And both can create more opportunities for students to experience those expectations before their first day at work – through simulations, employer challenges, internships, work experience and closer engagement between businesses, careers teams and academic faculties.
The question isn’t just who can do the job today
Perhaps the most important takeaway from the discussion was that early careers hiring needs to look beyond immediate capability.
The graduate who joins an organisation today could be doing a very different job five years from now.
While the technical skills required in many roles will continue to evolve, the ability to learn, adapt, collaborate, communicate and exercise judgement is likely to become even more valuable in an AI-enabled workplace.
The ability to learn. To communicate. To work with different people. To think critically. To adapt.
Early careers hiring has always been about potential. The difference now is that we need to get much better at recognising what potential actually looks like.
