The job market is brutal for recent college graduates trying to break into fields such as technology and finance.
The flip side: It’s a good time to be a more seasoned white-collar worker, with employment by some measures climbing for people who are over 35.
There’s little agreement on what’s driving the trend, but it dents the assumption that experienced workers can be at risk of being cast aside for fresher faces. Some evidence suggests that artificial intelligence is helping turn experience into an advantage, because it may supercharge workers’ existing skills.
Since ChatGPT debuted in late 2022, employment for Americans 30 or younger has dropped in a collection of office jobs such as software development, sales and accounting that are considered highly exposed to AI because tasks can be done more efficiently with the technology, according to a Washington Post analysis of data from Stanford University and the payroll firm ADP. For people 35 and older, employment has climbed more than 7 percent in those same occupations.
Census Bureau data for an array of technology sectors shows employment holding up for workers 35 to 54 from early 2023 to the most recently available figures in late 2025. For workers under 35, employment in those tech industries tanked over that period.
Employers appear to be explicitly seeking more experience when hiring. Job postings for tech, business and legal jobs have been gravitating toward those with six or more years of experience and away from those with fewer than three, according to the labor research nonprofit Burning Glass Institute.
It may be that experienced white-collar employees are thriving as AI automates away entry-level roles, a shift that could hollow out the future job market. Other experts have alternative explanations for trends that may predate recent AI advances. One is that white-collar employers may be leaning on experienced employees as a way to get more work done with the same or smaller staffs.
“If you’re hiring fewer people, you need people who are operating at peak productivity,” said Matt Sigelman, president of the Burning Glass Institute. “That tells us why experienced workers are having a moment and gaining the upper hand in his labor market.”
The trajectory for more experienced workers shows how pandemic-related changes to work, the rise of AI and other economic gyrations are scrambling what we know about jobs in America. The unemployment rate and layoffs are historically low but it feels tortuous to land a new job and paychecks are going backward relative to inflation. There’s little evidence so far that AI is denting the U.S. job market, but many people believe it is or will soon.
Everything about how AI may be shaking up the labor market is hotly debated. But one emerging theory among economists is that AI may be both augmenting jobs and wiping them out.
Depending on occupation, experience level and other factors, the technology could be helping some employees do more with less effort but eliminating tasks or roles entirely for others.
The chief executive of Grindr, the gay and bisexual dating and health company, says AI is at least partly the reason it has overhauled its workforce into a smaller, more experienced staff with higher average pay. “We’ve dramatically shifted to much more senior people,” George Arison said in an interview.
He said that only about 4 percent of the company’s staff are in roles considered below mid-level. The staff has shrunk from about 223 people in 2022 to about 172 today, while annual revenue has nearly tripled.
Arison, who has previously acknowledged that he’s agitated some of his employees by pushing for more use of AI, said “there’s no way” Grindr could have become leaner and more productive if it had stuck with the less experienced workforce it had a few years ago.
Other employers and economists have said that the shift to more experienced workers is more pronounced in software coding and other technical jobs.
That may be because AI assistants that can take actions on a computer, known as agents, have leaped forward in the past year, particularly in writing software. Some employers and coders have described their programming jobs morphing into quasi-managerial roles, with experienced workers conducting an orchestra of AI agents that perform tasks they previously would have done themselves or assigned to junior employees.
Anthropic, which makes the Claude chatbot, is a striking example of that pattern. The company said last month that junior workers accounted for about 9 percent of recent hires in its technical departments, down from more than 25 percent in early 2025. (Anthropic’s figures appear to show little change in hiring patterns for nontechnical departments, including sales, recruiting and clerical work.)
Anthropic didn’t detail hiring patterns for more experienced workers, and declined to respond to questions from The Post. But its executives have previously said that the start-up is gravitating toward more experienced workers with different skills.
“The value of more senior people with really, really well-calibrated intuitions and taste is going up, and the value of more junior people is a bit more dubious,” Jack Clark, an Anthropic co-founder, told a New York Times podcast earlier this year.
Across the economy, it’s become de rigueur for larger companies to talk about transforming their workforces into faster-moving, smaller teams in which each employee has more hands-on responsibility. Some companies say that AI is driving this change.
Companies in that mode may need more experienced workers, who can be more self-directed and exercise expert judgment, said Joel Hron, chief technology officer of Thomson Reuters.
“When you create smaller teams that have more autonomy, it requires you to elevate seniority and expertise,” said Hron, whose company operates a news service and also makes software for legal research and other professional services.
The outperformance of older workers might be temporary. Sigelman of the Burning Glass Institute said it may not be viable in the long run for businesses to tilt their staff to more experienced workers that earn higher pay.
Remote work could be another possible explanation for the changing composition of the white-collar workforce. A research paper this year from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said that because it’s harder to train younger workers if staff aren’t together in person, employers are showing a preference for experience.
“Employers have shifted from ‘building talent’ — hiring inexperienced workers and training them — to ‘buying talent’ — hiring experienced workers who likely need little training,” Natalia Emanuel, a New York Fed research economist and lead author of the remote work paper, said in an email.
Some executives, human resource professionals and labor market experts worry about the long-term consequences of the American workforce shifting from a pyramid shape — a large base of inexperienced workers with fewer workers at the middle ranks and top — to more of a diamond with relatively few entry-level workers and the bulk of employees in mid-career.
“It’s impossible to have a profession where everyone has to have three to five years of experience but you don’t give anyone three to five years of experience,” said David Wong, chief product officer of Thomson Reuters.
Grindr’s Arison is also worried about choking off opportunities for young people just starting their careers, but he said it’s up to educational institutions and larger companies than his own to give young workers more on-the-job experience. “We don’t have the luxury,” Arison says, “to be the teaching hospital for staff.”
The post The job market is tough for younger workers. This group is thriving. appeared first on Washington Post.
