Two significant dividing lines were crossed in 2025

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2025 marked my 37^th year in the recruitment industry.

It also marked the year in which my youngest child turned 18 and finished secondary school.

When he was absent for eight days, attending Schoolies, his mother and I were temporarily ‘empty nesters’.

After 26 years of being legally and morally responsible for at least one of my offspring, it was a rather unsettling experience.

Although I will always be an active parent, there a significant line crossed when your youngest child becomes an adult.

This year was also the year in which I threw myself headlong into researching the impact of GenAI on the world of work.

Hours each week have been devoted to reading the latest research and case studies.

It’s been stimulating, fascinating and, at times, confronting.

My year-end conclusion is that another dividing line was crossed in 2025 – the direction of travel in terms of GenAI’s impact on work and the labour market became unmistakable and unavoidable.

As is often the case, it’s the personal stories that have the greatest impact in seeing generational shifts, far more than aggregated data or research conclusions.

ABC News interviewed writer, editor and proofreader Cassy Polimeni for an article last month about the impact of GenAl on jobs in which she discussed her response to the near complete disappearance of freelance editing and proofreading work.

“While Cassy is not completely sure her former clients replaced her work with AI, what she does know is that the work began disappearing at the same time AI began sweeping through businesses.”

The same article also featured medical typist Trudy Schulte, who had also recently experienced a near 100% collapse in her billable hours.

“Trudy, 60, had spent 13 years typing for doctors when they began using AI transcription software i-scribe this year. In the space of a few weeks, Ms Schulte saw her weekly working hours drop from 24 to about one. “I had no complaints about my work, and I was accurate,” she says. “I offered to [check the AI transcripts] and no-one’s taken me up on it … Now I’ve been applying for other jobs. But it’s been hard.”

Unfortunately, both Polimeni and Schulte are at the frontline of those previously valuable and relatively well-paid jobs that have been rendered redundant in a matter of months, not years or even half-decades.

This blog post by U.S. tech journalist Brian Merchant, published last week, includes a number of personal stories from copywriters about how their work flow declined, then stopped completely, as they were replaced by ‘good enough’ GenAI.

These types of workers are the collateral damage in the first realisation of the GenAI era – the technology doesn’t need to be brilliant; it just needs to be good enough to replace a large part of what a human used to do.

Consider that research, published less than two months ago, concluded that “….AI agents complete tasks 88% faster at 90-96% lower cost than humans but with 32-49% lower success rates.”

Those results were achieved in less than three years (ChatGPT was released on 30 November 2025). Can you imagine how much improvement there is to come in just another three years?

Every worker whose current skills are in the areas of HR, legal, project management, banking & finance, IT, insurance, administration, communications, marketing and accounting will be (or should be) looking very closely at how replaceable by GenAI their skills are.

The forward-looking workers are acting quickly. In 2023, online higher education aggregator and course provider, Coursera saw one enrollment per minute in generative AI courses. In 2024, it was eight, and this year it’s fourteen. The rate of acceleration is already clear.

Author, Carmen Van Kerckhove, encapsulates the reality, the dilemma and a recommended response to this new world of work, bluntly, accurately and perfectly in her latest post (I highly recommend you read her whole post).

Your job title has already stopped protecting you: The prestige you spent years accumulating is evaporating in real time. The industries laying people off aren’t struggling sectors or dying companies. They’re profitable corporations replacing entire departments with AI tools that barely work. The most critical skill you can develop right now is learning how to build an identity that exists independently of your employer. Because when the title disappears and the role vanishes, the people who survive with their sense of self intact are the ones who saw this coming and prepared for it psychologically.

Linear career paths died and nobody told you: Most of us were taught to think of our careers like a ladder. You climb rung by rung, each step bringing a better title, higher salary, more prestige. But ladders only work in stable environments, where the rungs stay in place. That’s not the world we’re in anymore. The traditional markers of success might still look impressive on paper, but they don’t always tell you whether you’re building something that can last. When the terrain keeps shifting, direction matters more than speed.

Flexibility beats prestige when the ground keeps shifting: The jobs that impressed people five years ago are disappearing. Entire industries are being restructured in real time. Meanwhile, new roles are emerging in spaces that didn’t even exist a few years ago, and no one’s handing out a map. In this kind of chaos, the people who thrive are the ones who move early, adapt fast, and know how to combine skills in ways the old system didn’t account for. A single impressive job title doesn’t offer real security anymore. Multiple income streams do. Transferable skills do. Portfolio careers used to sound unstable. Now they’re the closest thing to stability.

I have been listening to The Future of Talent Institute founder, Kevin Wheeler, speak about the future of work for nearly two decades. He is proven right, far more often than he is proven wrong. Here’s how he articulated his latest thinking, at the 2025 ATC, less than two months ago.

Professional value is shifting from credentials and experience to immediate, demonstrable capability and the specific problems an individual can solve.

This rapid transformation will displace many workers, and current regulatory and educational systems are unprepared to support them, creating significant social and ethical risks

To remain relevant, individuals must continuously acquire skills, with a focus on foundational liberal arts abilities like philosophy and history that enable learning and adaptability in a nonlinear world

The traditional model of a long-term, stable career is obsolete; believing one’s current job is safe is a very bad idea in this unpredictable environment.

Or, said another way by, Success Story podcast host, Scott D. Clary.

“….the brutal truth about expertise now (is): it has a half-life.

It’s not how smart you are. Not how well you work with people. It’s how fast you can see your expertise losing value and rebuild before it’s too late.

Intelligence gets you hired. Emotional intelligence gets you promoted. But adaptability determines if you’re still here in five years. Still relevant. Still building something instead of defending something that used to matter.

Because expertise doesn’t compound anymore. It depreciates. And the rate of depreciation is accelerating.

The only question is: can you see it happening and let go before it’s too late?”

I’ll leave you with the advice of Carmen Van Kerckhove to consider over your 2025 summer break.

You don’t have to have it all figured out to start moving differently. The system is shifting beneath everyone’s feet, and no one has the perfect map. What matters is choosing to respond with clarity instead of panic, with intention instead of resignation.

Start where you are. Build something small that matters. Protect your time. The next step will become clearer once you’re in motion.

A 2011 prediction of a key employee in 2020 – how right was Kevin Wheeler?

2017 ATC Summary: How to avoid being AI-ed out of your job or career

The stakes for AI-improved recruitment just got raised (by A LOT)

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