Understand the shift in early-career hiring and plan around it

The clearest labour market signal so far concerns people starting out. Stanford Digital Economy Lab's "Canaries in the Coal Mine?" paper uses payroll data on millions of US workers. Its August 2026 update finds no economy-wide job loss from AI, but employment of workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed occupations, a group that includes software developers, is 19% below where it would be had it kept pace with less-exposed peers. The gap works mainly through fewer young people being hired, and declines concentrate where AI substitutes for tasks rather than complementing workers.

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, a survey of over 1,000 employers in 55 economies, expects 170 million jobs created and 92 million displaced by 2030, a net gain of 78 million, and lists software and applications developers among the fastest-growing roles in percentage terms.

Both are US-heavy or employer-expectation data, not a forecast for every country. But together they say: the field is growing, the entry point is harder, and early-career developers need to show more real, finished work than before.