Tech Job Postings Are Asking for 25 Percent Fewer Skills. Deep Experience is the Future Gap.

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Something strange is happening in tech hiring. Companies want people with more experience, while requiring fewer specific skillsets. 

An a16z analysis based on Revelio Labs data covering 75 million job postings, found that the average tech job now requires 21 skills, down from roughly 30. At the same time, requisite experience has climbed to 4.8 years. 

All this is happening as entry level opportunities are disappearing. Stanford economists found a 13% employment decline among workers ages 22 to 25 in jobs most exposed to AI. 

For experienced workers, this may be good news. 

For employers, however, it creates a future problem: if companies automate entry level jobs, who then develops the depth of experience they will need a few years from now? 

Why Experience Is Becoming More Valuable 

When I wrote my book, Experiential Intelligence, AI was just emerging on the scene. What’s transpired since reinforces the idea that our human judgment based on experience, is a key individual and business competitive advantage. 

And that may be our only differentiation in a world where knowledge becomes a commodity due to AI. 

Revelio’s findings show that jobs that mention AI also require fewer individual skills and more years of experience. That makes sense. 

When the work itself is changing, employers can’t simply hire against a skills checklist. They need people who can make good decisions when things change fast and answers are unclear. 

That’s the difference between a skill and what I call experiential intelligence. Skills help you perform tasks you already understand. Experience gives you judgment to navigate a situation that’s messy, new, or ambiguous. 

AI can give someone access to enormous intelligence instantly. It can’t give them years of lessons from making decisions, seeing what works, getting things wrong, and adjusting. 

The Problem With Automating Entry-Level Work 

Nobody starts a career with ten years of experience. People earn it by doing the work, including the routine work that may now look easiest to automate. 

Salesforce is one example. Since early 2025, the company has reduced its customer support organization from about 9,000 people to 5,000. AI agents now handle roughly half of customer conversations. Marc Benioff has said the company needs “less heads.” 

The immediate economics are easy to see. The longer-term talent implications are harder to gauge. 

Customer support teaches people how to deal with frustrated customers, use judgment to solve problems on the fly, and figure out solutions when the script doesn’t fit the situation. Remove enough of those jobs and you also remove the place where young talent learns to become managers, and leaders. 

The Experience Premium 

It won’t be long until we see a talent supply problem. Experienced workers are already limited today, and companies can’t manufacture more of them overnight. 

Stanford’s tracking suggests the entry-level decline has continued, increasing by about half a percentage point a month through April 2026. Employment among older workers in the same fields held steady or increased. The researchers point to tacit knowledge, the lessons people acquire through experience that never make it into formal training or even resumes. 

The irony is that companies automating junior work may be contributing to their own future shortage of experienced people they increasingly want to hire. 

Rebuild the Entry-Level On-Ramp 

Here’s how to automate work without automating away the experiences that develop your future talent: 

• • Redesign junior roles. Give new hires AI oversight, client contact, and participation in strategic decision-making from day one. 
  • Provide experiential learning. Give new hires “learning challenges” that combine solving real business problems with learning opportunities led by experienced leaders. 
  • Diffuse experience with scalable mentoring. Identify seasoned workers and pair them with groups of new hires to create focused “master classes” where learning can be diffused and scaled. 

This Week 

Pick one entry-level role you are considering automating or leaving unfilled. Identify the judgment people have historically learned in that job. Then decide where future employees will gain that same experience once the underlying tasks disappear. 

Your current automations may be inadvertently creating your future talent crisis. Fill it with human experience before it becomes a gap and you’ll thrive in tomorrow’s AI world.