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The class of 2026 is walking into one of the most unforgiving job markets in recent memory \u2014 and HR leaders are increasingly worried that the traditional on-ramps into corporate America are buckling under the weight of AI, shrinking entry-level roles, and a generation losing faith in the system.<\/p>\n
At Fortune\u2018s Workplace Innovation Summit this week, a panel of executives and educators gathered for a session titled Beyond the Diploma: Skills That Actually Get Graduates Hired to confront the question head-on. Moderated by Fortune\u2018s head of video, Adam Banicki, the conversation featured Christina Mancini, CEO of Black Girls Code; Dr. Harry L. Williams, president and CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund; Debbie Dyson, CEO of SkillsRight; and Becky Schmidt, chief people officer at PepsiCo.<\/p>\n
The consensus is that the rules have changed, and nobody has fully figured out the new ones yet.<\/p>\n
The vanishing entry-level job<\/p>\n
Dyson framed the structural shift starkly. \u201cThe entry-level jobs have elevated. And so the new entry-level job is now what used to be the mid-level job,\u201d she said. \u201cBecause AI and theoretics have eliminated many of those jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n
That has consequences for how new workers learn the ropes. Dyson, who began her career in finance, noted that \u201cmy finance has nothing to do with what I do today. It got me through the door. But where I learned what I learned was on-the-job training. And so that\u2019s no longer the case.\u201d<\/p>\n
Williams, whose organization represents roughly 300,000 students across 57 historically Black colleges and universities, said the anxiety is palpable on campus. \u201cStudents are scared. And they\u2019re nervous with AI, because we don\u2019t know where it\u2019s going, right? Nobody can tell us where AI is going, and the speed of it is really, really crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Schmidt offered a counterweight from the employer side. \u201cAs a large employer at PepsiCo, we\u2019re hiring pretty much still in every country that we operate in. And we have intern programs, and we have a campus.\u201d But she acknowledged the experience has shifted: \u201cEven Big Tech is not going to places like the University of Michigan engineering anymore; those students have to apply online, they have to represent differently.\u201d<\/p>\n
The AI conversation nobody is having<\/p>\n
Mancini argued that the public discourse around AI has badly misled the people it most affects. \u201cThere\u2019s a conversation that\u2019s happening at the academia level, and then there\u2019s a conversation that\u2019s happening at the enterprise level, but there\u2019s no conversation happening for us, and so therefore there are people just not raising their hand saying, I don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n
She pushed back hard against the assumption that AI has rendered coding obsolete. \u201cSaying that coding is going away is incredibly premature,\u201d she said. \u201cI like to remind people that AI on these platforms is not rewarded for giving you the right answer. They\u2019re rewarded for giving you an answer. And so we are far from not having the need for, as my friend Paula Goldman says at Salesforce, a human in the lead.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her advice to graduates: \u201cDon\u2019t base your career on social media TikTok influencers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mancini was especially concerned about her own community pulling back from the technology. \u201cA big worry for me as it relates to AI, and the black community is the lack of raising your hand to say it\u2019s for me. There\u2019s too much of a negative conversation going on around it, and we need to fix that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Skills, not degrees<\/p>\n
Dyson\u2019s company works with large employers to hire based on demonstrated skills rather than credentials alone, and she described three dimensions employers now weigh. \u201cYou have the technical skills that you could argue that maybe you got through an education, or perhaps through trade, or what have you. Then you have these soft skills that I think are becoming much more prominent: problem-solving, critical thinking, communication, and so on. And then the third is the cultural one.\u201d<\/p>\n
That third dimension, she said, is increasingly the one that decides hires. \u201cWhen we\u2019ve worked with employers, and we\u2019re asking well what has made somebody successful or unsuccessful, it\u2019s that last dimension of the cultural fit that seems to be the knockout.\u201d<\/p>\n
Schmidt said PepsiCo is rethinking how it evaluates candidates beyond the r\u00e9sum\u00e9 line items. \u201cIf you\u2019re working in a facility and you\u2019re going to have everything from somebody who\u2019s doing sanitation, which actually is a certified job, all the way up to a highly skilled engineer or technician, what do you know beyond just what their job responsibilities are?\u201d<\/p>\n
Her example: \u201cYou may be doing this one job, but you fix cars on the weekends. That shows me you have aptitude.\u201d She added that PepsiCo would \u201crather focus on retooling people who are already a culture fit than starting new. I mean, there are huge costs to that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The interview gap<\/p>\n
Banicki raised what he was hearing anecdotally \u2014 graduates \u201capplying to 100 jobs a week. And if they\u2019re lucky, like a 1% success rate to even get a conversation.\u201d Williams said his students are facing a different problem.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m hearing they\u2019re getting the interview, but they\u2019re not closing the interview,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause they get stumped, because they can\u2019t talk to what\u2019s on the interview application, what they put down.\u201d<\/p>\n
The culprit, he suggested, is candidates leaning on AI to oversell themselves. \u201cYou look at how AI has helped you be something that you\u2019re not when that resume comes in, because you can really do a really nice resume, but when you come into the room, you cannot talk to the technical skills that you\u2019re talking about.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mancini described the same dynamic from the screening side. \u201cSome of the platforms that use AI to source through these resumes are\u2026 can be problematic, and they can automatically just kick out. There\u2019s no discernment.\u201d<\/p>\n
An audience member from the floor, an HR leader, warned that the cumulative effect is corrosive. \u201cThe issue we\u2019re seeing is kids who are smart kids from all backgrounds getting two, 300 rejections. And I think the issue of creating a cohort of people with very low self-esteem is starting to be something that we as employers need to really start to think about.\u201d She added, \u201ccertainly in Europe, you just look at graduate suicide and things like that. I mean, these are becoming really big issues. because people have lost hope.\u201d<\/p>\n
Banicki put the long-term question to the panel directly: \u201cIf you are skipping entry level, you build discernment\u2026 How do you build discernment if you don\u2019t get to fail? How do you get better at your job?\u201d<\/p>\n
Partnerships, internships, and the community-college rise<\/p>\n
Williams was emphatic about what works. \u201cInternships. These young people are even starting in their freshman year. I know some people don\u2019t want to mess with freshmen because you say they don\u2019t know anything, but they don\u2019t, but they need that internship, they need that exposure.\u201d<\/p>\n
He described place-based training events at HBCUs, including Shelton State, St. Phillips, and Drake State, where students spent three days on campus training directly with corporate partners. \u201cWe spent three days on the campus literally training with corporations and getting them ready for\u2026 internships, apprenticeships so that when they graduate they can go straight to work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dyson said community colleges are filling the gap quickly. \u201cCommunity colleges are on the rise. I mean, like, it\u2019s cheaper, it\u2019s faster, and a lot of employers are creating these micro-credential programs where they, so we\u2019re looking for X number of positions at an entry level, and so they customize a class.\u201d<\/p>\n
Schmidt described how PepsiCo has restructured its summer internships in response. \u201cOur summer internship program is not like you\u2019re going to go here, be here for 10 weeks, and do this task. Now we\u2019re like, okay, you\u2019re going to do two things because this is where I need you. They\u2019re short-term projects. You\u2019re going to have two supervisors, and you might be in two locations.\u201d<\/p>\n
The one skill that matters most<\/p>\n
Asked by an audience member to name the single skill graduates should focus on for the next five years, the panelists answered in quick succession.<\/p>\n
\u201cCritical thinking,\u201d Dyson said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was going to say the same thing, but being adaptive,\u201d Schmidt added.<\/p>\n
\u201cCommunication,\u201d Williams said.<\/p>\n
Mancini: \u201cI mean, storytelling\u2019s always queen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lois Alexis Collins, chief people officer for field operations at Chipotle, stood up to underscore the broader point about mindset. \u201c84% of the employees that we hire within Chipotle in management came from a crew level. They make over six figures at a GM level.\u201d She added, \u201cThe job killer is your attitude. If you come in and you\u2019re so fearful of it and you\u2019re not willing to pivot, maybe step back, maybe go lateral, I think, yeah, you\u2019re going to have a career problem.\u201d<\/p>\n
Disrupting the hiring machine<\/p>\n
The final audience question pushed on whether AI-driven hiring tools are screening out the very people companies say they want. Schmidt acknowledged the limits of her own visibility. \u201cWe are trying to make sure that every tool we use is human-centric. It has defined accountability, it is audited, and we do check things regularly.\u201d<\/p>\n
She described an agent PepsiCo now uses to redirect rejected applicants toward open roles they hadn\u2019t considered. \u201cIf you apply for a job and it\u2019s not open, the agent will tell you all the other jobs that are available. Well, that\u2019s not what people were doing in the past. So that\u2019s an additive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mancini urged buyers to ask harder questions of the technology itself. \u201cIf you\u2019re investing in software, if you\u2019re a manager, if you\u2019re a CEO, if you\u2019re using tools, I think it\u2019s really important to understand who built the technology. Understanding which inputs determine which algorithms that say I should meet with you is really important when you\u2019re talking about scale like this.\u201d<\/p>\n
She also worried the pendulum had swung too far away from human contact. \u201cI don\u2019t think that anything replaces meeting\u2026 I think we went a little too far, the pendulum swung too far, where technology was going to solve all these things, and now we have workforces that are homogenized.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reasons for optimism<\/p>\n
Banicki closed by asking each panelist for a reason to be hopeful.<\/p>\n
Dyson: \u201cWe\u2019ve got to talk about the EQ and the human intelligence. Because if we don\u2019t invest in this balance of heart and head, that\u2019s the optimism.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mancini: \u201cWe are far from not needing a human in the loop. We just opt in and understand what the technology is. And don\u2019t believe everything that comes through your feed. The algorithm is fed on what you click on.\u201d<\/p>\n
Schmidt: \u201cI think we should lean into this together. And it\u2019s going to take many people from many different organizations to create the future. So I\u2019m hopeful.\u201d<\/p>\n
Williams: \u201cThe biggest word that we use in higher ed is continuous improvement. Every single day, you\u2019re looking at how you do things better and better and better.\u201d<\/p>\n
The takeaway from the room was unmistakable: the diploma still opens doors, but it no longer walks anyone through them. The work of preparing the next generation now belongs jointly to universities, employers, and students themselves \u2014 and the panelists agreed that none of them can afford to wait for someone else to start.<\/p>\n
#diploma #Skills #graduates #hired<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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