If AI does more of the junior work, how do juniors become senior?

Earlier this year, we rebranded from Examfly to Acuru. The expansion of our offering from professional exams reflected how we're now thinking about the problem we're trying to solve. Over the next six months, I'm going to write once a month about some of our thinking: what we're seeing change inside professional services firms, what firms are worried about in terms of training and development, and what they are doing about it. The starting point is a fairly simple question.

Professional services firms have always relied on people learning by doing. You join with some or no technical knowledge and very little experience. The exam path takes care of the technical knowledge. In terms of experience, you start with simple work but, over time, you get exposed to harder problems, more senior people and more complicated client situations. Eventually, through enough repetition and exposure, you start to develop judgement.

A lot of the work that's now being automated sits at the beginning of that process: reading documents, checking information, preparing first drafts, incorporating feedback and bringing something to a workable conclusion. Little pieces of context, pattern-recognition and, eventually, judgement are picked up along the way. In time these accumulate into your professional skills toolkit - the mix of knowledge and judgement can be adapted for any new problem in your domain.

On the face of it, removing repetitive junior work is a productivity gain, however it also strips out part of the way people learned. The junior work was never just useful because it needed to be done. It gave people context and repetition, and a feel for what happens beyond the textbooks. It put them close enough to more experienced professionals to see how decisions were made, how different options were weighted in grey-areas and so on.

Firms are beginning to face a difficult question. It makes no sense to keep giving people work that technology can do faster and cheaper, but they still need those same people to become experienced professionals capable of handling the difficult work later in their careers.

That gap is what interests us. If the old development model starts to weaken, firms will need to become much more deliberate about how they build judgement, pattern recognition and experience in their future leaders.

This is what I'll explore over the coming newsletters.