The graduates we are designing out

Today’s graduates have grown up with AI a tap away – it’s the world they inherited. But it raises an uncomfortable question for employers: what happens when we need them to think critically, and to know when the machine is wrong? writes Amy Stanley.

Who’s doing the critical thinking? It’s a question I grapple with on a daily basis, and one brought sharply into focus recently as I reflected on the 30 years that have passed since I graduated from the University of Western Australia.

Presenting an honorary doctorate at the university’s historic Winthrop Hall, where so many West Australians have completed examinations and attended graduation ceremonies. I thought about my own university days: handing assignments into a physical drop-box (not Dropbox!), hours spent sourcing 10¢ pieces to photocopy as much of a journal article as I could without breaching copyright, and hours spent at the university Tavern and famous Oak Lawn pulling apart threads of ideas until we worked out what we actually believed in. Or so we thought!

Those experiences weren’t incidental to my education – they were my education. The friction, the debate and the contest of ideas is what led us to those formative opinions, which we carried forward into our first ‘real’ jobs.

Compared with today’s uni experience, it feels like light years ago, but three decades is merely the blink of an eye. And the change has been supercharged, primarily through the transformative effects of AI.

As chief people officer at HBF, a not-for-profit health insurer with more than 1 million members, I’m helping lead our AI transformation. The approach is human-centred and ethical. AI can summarise and predict, but it cannot own risk judgement or member trust. Someone must remain accountable, and that someone will always be a person.

Just when we most need people who can interrogate AI, we are quietly dismantling the entry points where those capabilities are built. Graduate job postings nationally fell almost 15 per cent in 2025 and are down 35 per cent from their 2023 peak. Data presented at the AICD WA Forum, drawn from 245 million job postings, showed junior roles declining while senior roles grow. Western Australia has fared better, but we will not be immune unless we act.

AI is not replacing whole jobs overnight; it is changing the task mix inside them, alongside broader economic and hiring pressures. But the direction is clear enough to act on.

I understand the business logic. When AI can do in minutes what a junior analyst did in weeks, a large graduate intake is harder to justify. But entry-level roles have never been just about output; they have been about formation: learning that data can mislead, that stakeholders have competing interests, and that a confident-sounding answer is not the same as a correct one. They are also where people learn to work as part of a team.

Eliminate that crucible and we hollow out our own leadership pipeline. In 10 years, we’ll ask where our thoughtful, accountable leaders came from, and the honest answer will be that we designed them out.

The Commonwealth Bank’s CEO recently drew a distinction every employer should hold onto: there’s a difference between building a stronger organisation and simply making it smaller. Mercer ranks talent scarcity as the top workforce concern for executives globally. Cutting entry-level roles for short-term savings risks a long-term capability catastrophe.

This is not just a university story. It applies equally to TAFE, apprenticeships and every pathway into work. HBF’s workforce reflects that breadth, and the risk of hollowing out entry-level opportunities does not discriminate.

All too often, industry expects fully formed graduates, critiques curricula it hasn’t invested in, and withdraws when things get inconvenient. That is not a partnership, and I hold HBF to the same standard. I see three things employers must do.

1. Design curriculum together. Critical thinking must be built deliberately, not assumed. That means coursework where AI hands students an answer and they must decide whether to trust it, challenge it, or improve on it. Industry belongs at the design table, not commenting on course outlines afterwards.
2. Modernise work-integrated learning. A placement that looked like work five years ago looks nothing like work today. Students should practice being the human in the loop, accountable for a decision where AI supplied the analysis, before they reach our organisations.
3. Rethink the productivity dividend. If AI creates efficiency, who captures the benefit? CBA has committed $90 million to a Future Workforce Program. What is our equivalent, for our own people and for the students coming through?

At HBF, we are in early conversations with a university about a capability platform linking learning to live organisational projects. Our commitment is to put our people into the design process, not just our logo.

So here is the question for you to ponder: when was the last time you made a consequential decision without AI? One where you sat with real uncertainty and arrived at a judgement you were prepared to own?

Today’s graduates have grown up with AI a tap away – it’s the world they inherited. But it raises an uncomfortable question for employers: what happens when we need them to think critically, and to know when the machine is wrong?

The students starting out in Western Australia today will run our organisations and shape this state in 2040 and beyond. Whether they can think, question, judge and lead is being decided right now, by the choices we make. The window to answer with intention rather than reaction is fleeting – we must act, or be left behind.

Amy Stanley is the chief people officer at HBF.

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