The labor market today is undergoing a rapid technological revolution with the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In 2025, more than 100,000 employees were affected by AI-driven layoffs, and more than 30,000 employees have already been impacted this year. These layoffs have emerged as AI automates tasks previously handled by humans.
As a result, some entry-level positions that once served as training grounds for recent college graduates are shrinking, creating a job market that can be harder for young professionals to enter.
In response to these changes, Matt Kuchar, senior associate director of employer and alumni engagement at the Center for Careers and Internships (CCI), encouraged students to prepare strategically for an evolving workforce.
“Most organizations are incorporating AI into their workstreams,” Kuchar wrote in an email to The Campus. “Integrating AI into your work is not dissimilar to integrating Excel, PowerPoint, or Python. The stronger you are as a user, the more marketable you become as a candidate.”
In a recent CCI Newsletter sent to students who opted in, Kuchar advised students to “network like crazy” and to evaluate their resumes and stay active in professional student organizations.
Kuchar encouraged those entering the job market, whether for a full-time position or a summer internship, to understand the extent of AI usage among hiring organizations.
Some Middlebury students have already tried to get ahead of the curve. Research conducted by Assistant Professor of Economics German Reyes found that about 80% of surveyed students utilize AI to augment rather than automate. According to Kuchar, organizations are looking for students capable of combining AI use with their own critical thinking skills. Middlebury recognizes the potential changes AI poses to both the liberal arts education and the job market for graduating students, and organized the Clifford Symposium on AI in September.
AI has also led to the growth of some industries, spurring increased hiring of college graduates.
“We’re also seeing AI-enabled industries growing tremendously. Healthcare and life sciences, information technology, and financial services have all scaled up AI-hiring. Startups and app development have also grown,” said Kuchar.
For students searching for jobs, AI-hiring has become more commonplace.
“I had to complete many AI interviews. The process was done through a website that would present a question and ask you to respond within a set time frame,” Rivinka de Silva ’26 said in a message to The Campus. “It was sometimes difficult to express myself or gauge whether my answers were actually on the right track. When you are speaking with a real person, you can often read their reactions and adjust your answers accordingly.”
Maddy Russell ’26 also completed an AI interview for a job this past J-Term.
“They were receiving a lot of applications, and this was another step that they were using to differentiate and kind of eliminate people,” Russell said in a message to The Campus. “It did feel very dystopian to just be talking to myself, especially when it also seemed like here's a slightly more humane way of using AI to weed you out as opposed to just using an AI analysis tool to analyze your résumé and decide whether you move onto an interview stage.”
Some students are wary of using AI, citing ethical or environmental reasons.“I feel nervous mostly because I am generally a pretty anti-AI person, mostly for its ethical and environmental concerns,” Talia Chang ’26 said.
Last summer, Chang interned at a client-facing civil rights nonprofit law office that frequently handled cases involving mass incarceration. She did not use AI during her time there.
“The whole office was very cognizant of the fact that AI internalizes the biases of the team that coded it, and also if you are thinking about mass incarceration, it is obviously skewed because it is a heavily racialized phenomenon, so it just did not really serve our purposes in the office,” Chang said.
“It feels like it went from 0 to 100 in such a short period of time,” Isador Shalev ‘28 said.
Shalev noted that learning how to use AI in the classroom might be beneficial when entering the job market. “It is very common for AI use to be incorporated into certain parts of the classroom now. Although policy on usage differs across classrooms, I find benefit in gaining exposure to it if it has become such an in-demand skill in the job market,” he said.
Kuchar thinks that Middlebury students should use AI to augment their human intelligence, rather than completely ignore it as a potential tool
“The more adept students are at incorporating into their work, the better off they’ll be in this market,” Kuchar wrote.
Editor’s Note: Managing Editor Yuvraj Shah ’26 contributed reporting to this article
