{"id":44967,"date":"2025-07-07T03:21:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-07T03:21:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/44967\/"},"modified":"2025-07-07T03:21:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-07T03:21:09","slug":"on-the-job-learning-upended-by-ai-and-hybrid-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/44967\/","title":{"rendered":"On-the-job learning upended by AI and hybrid work"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jamie Dimon is unequivocal about the impact of remote working on training new bankers. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t work in our business,\u201d\u00a0the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase\u00a0told Stanford\u2019s Graduate School of Business this year. \u201cYounger people [are] left behind.\u201d <\/p>\n

He has previously spoken of the importance of \u201cthe apprenticeship model\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009which is almost impossible to replicate in the Zoom world\u201d.<\/p>\n

In many workplaces, that apprenticeship model is as simple as sitting near a more experienced colleague or joining a client meeting to watch how it is done, while also learning the ropes by taking on often more repetitive and basic tasks.<\/p>\n

But on-the-job learning is now facing the double threat of hybrid working, which means junior staff spend less time observing and listening to more senior colleagues, and generative AI, which is making obsolete many of the routine tasks that have long been building blocks of professional knowledge.<\/p>\n

The effect has been noted across professional industries, from auditors and law firms to the big investment banks. Last year, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board reported<\/a> that the pandemic and remote and hybrid work had affected audit firms\u2019 \u201capprenticeship model for on-the-job training, dissemination of culture, and professional scepticism\u201d.<\/p>\n

Others see the format as ripe for reform, anticipating that greater changes will come from generative AI.<\/p>\n

Employers are investing heavily in AI to assist with working practices. Tools such as those rolled out by law firm A&O Shearman<\/a> to deal with antitrust and contracts or Goldman Sachs to summarise complex documents and analyse data, are designed to enhance productivity. AI start-up Rogo<\/a> aims to automate some of the laborious tasks done by junior investment bankers. However, some argue that by eliminating repetitive tasks, junior recruits will fail to develop muscle memory, which is essential for critical analysis, as well as the ability to identify mistakes in AI.<\/p>\n

The changes may mean employers have to be more structured and deliberate in the training opportunities they offer junior staff, while working out how to get the best out of generative AI to free up time for their employees to do more valuable work.<\/p>\n

\"\"Yolanda Seals-Coffield, chief people and inclusion officer at PwC\u2019s US division, says hybrid working means that there needs to be a much more proactive approach to on-the-job training <\/p>\n

Navid Mahmoodzadegan, the newly appointed chief executive of boutique investment bank Moelis & Co, says<\/a> he hopes junior bankers will be rewarded with more \u201cintellectually stimulating\u201d work. Patrick Curtis, chief executive and founder of Wall Street Oasis, an online community catering to the financial services industry, predicts \u201cthis shifting more dramatically in the next 24 months as these [junior] roles start leveraging AI more, with some getting displaced outright\u201d.<\/p>\n

To maintain the apprenticeship model, leaders at some companies have followed Dimon in mandating five days of office attendance a week. Others, including Citigroup<\/a>, are continuing with various hybrid working arrangements. Clare Francis, a partner at Pinsent Masons, a law firm that does not mandate days, says that while \u201cjunior lawyers benefit from office attendance,\u201d some work, such as research, can be more effectively done at home. She adds that \u201ceveryone learns in different ways\u201d and the reality is that many meetings are held on Teams so juniors \u201ccan see how they work\u201d just as easily outside the office.<\/p>\n

Yolanda Seals-Coffield, chief people and inclusion officer at PwC\u2019s US division, believes hybrid working means \u201cwe have lost a little bit of that\u201d tacit knowledge. She sees the solution in junior and senior staff being \u201cfar more intentional\u201d about mentoring and debriefing. \u201cWe have to be [in] a world post-Covid where people are hybrid, you\u2019re no longer sitting next to someone in an office or on a client side or at a meeting.\u201d Staff, including trainees, at PwC US are required to be on-site half of the time. The arrangement means new recruits need to be clear about saying, \u201cI want to actually shadow this particular behaviour\u201d, she says. This might mean a junior associate sits in on a virtual client meeting or reviews a recorded walk-through of a technical process, followed by structured debriefs to reinforce the learning.<\/p>\n

Rather than \u201ca passive experience\u201d, says Seals-Coffield, it requires bosses to think about modelling behaviour such as through guided questioning and peer feedback. AI could start to help with this by, for example, flagging to a team leader that a scheduled interview might provide a shadowing opportunity for a graduate employee who has indicated they are looking for this skill.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m optimistic that the tools will enable juniors to think about the material critically<\/p>\n

\n

Staff still need to be able to provide critical judgment to evaluate the work that AI might be producing<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

New graduates might also be more fluent in AI than their supervisors, potentially opening up new responsibilities for them to take on. Patrick Grant, project director of legal tech and innovation at the University of Law<\/a>, says they have developed courses to encourage students to use tools such as ChatGPT critically and ethically in assisting with research, organisation and editing, and to spot \u201cerrors or hallucinated references\u201d. They encourage students, for example, to compare drafts of clauses with AI outputs to understand the tools\u2019 lack of nuance.<\/p>\n

Francis points out that junior lawyers using generative AI for research is not that different from past generations switching from books to the internet. \u201cToday, the workflow of junior lawyers is not yet fundamentally different [from] how it was before AI was a tool at the disposal of legal teams. Lawyers at the outset of their training continue to learn by verifying results.\u201d The role will \u201cadapt and evolve\u201d alongside AI.<\/p>\n

Some argue that by eliminating repetitive tasks, juniors can progress more quickly by taking on more sophisticated and creative work earlier. Francisco Morales Barr\u00f3n, a partner at Vinson & Elkins law firm in New York, is sceptical about the traditional model. \u201cA lot of older generations will say you learn so much from reviewing thousands of contracts\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009somehow magically you learn through the process of repeating it hundreds of times. I\u2019m optimistic that the tools will enable juniors to think about the material critically.\u201d Francis agrees: \u201cHow much do you learn from a monotonous task?\u201d<\/p>\n

Seals-Coffield says employers need to get to grips with the desired outcomes of graduate training by separating the task from the skill: \u201cIf they\u2019re not [going to] have the opportunity to do that task 50 times, they still need to be able to evaluate it, they still need to be able to provide the critical judgment and independent thinking that is important to evaluate the work that AI might be producing.\u201d<\/p>\n

This could include simulations in training, says Francis, \u201cto develop, test and challenge the lawyer both on legal expertise as well as on soft skills such as communication and negotiation\u201d.<\/p>\n

Others suggest that any freed-up time will not be spent on more creative tasks, but on additional grunt work \u2014 or cutting the number of junior jobs.<\/p>\n

According to Oxford Economics, a consultancy, \u201cthere are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates\u201d.<\/p>\n

But in some organisations this could be a while off. \u201cAnalysts in my class are in a relatively favourable position in which we will have the aid of AI without it replacing us just yet,\u201d reports one investment banking analyst.<\/p>\n

Additional reporting by Anjli Raval and Sujeet Indap<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jamie Dimon is unequivocal about the impact of remote working on training new bankers. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t work in…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":44968,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[64,420,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-44967","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-jobs","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-jobs","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114809804131269106","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44967\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}