Jamie Dimon is clear about the impact of remote working on training new bankers. “It’s not going well in our business,” the JPMorgan Chase chief executive told Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business this year. “Young people are left.”
He previously talked about the importance of “apprentice models.” This is almost impossible to replicate in the Zoom world.”
In many workplaces, the apprentice model is as easy as sitting near a more experienced colleague or attending a client meeting to see how it is done.
However, on-the-job learning now faces the dual threat of hybrid working. This means that junior staff will spend less time observing and listening to more senior colleagues and generative AI.
This effect has attracted attention across specialized industries, from auditors and law firms to large investment banks. Last year, the public company’s Accounting Oversight Board reported that the pandemic and remote and hybrid work had an impact on auditing companies’ “on-site training, cultural widespreading, and apprenticeship models of professional skepticism.
Others believe this form is ripe for reform and expect greater changes to come from generative AI.
Employers have invested heavily in AI to support their work practices. Goldman Sachs is designed to increase productivity for law firm A&O Shearman deployed to deal with antitrust and contracts, or for analyzing data by summarizing complex documents. AI startup Rogo aims to automate some of the laborious tasks performed by junior investment bankers. However, some argue that by eliminating repetitive tasks, junior recruiting fails to develop muscle memory. This is essential for critical analysis and its ability to identify AI mistakes.
This change may mean that employers must make it more structured and discreet in the training opportunities they provide to junior staff, but list ways to make the most of generative AI to free up time for employees to do more valuable work.
Navid Mahmoodzadegan, newly appointed CEO of Boutique Investment Bank Moelis & Co, says he hopes junior bankers will be rewarded with more “intellectually stimulating” work. “This will shift more dramatically over the next 24 months as these (juniors) roles begin to take advantage of AI more and some are evacuating,” says Patrick Curtis, chief executive and founder of Wall Street Oasis, an online community that caters to the Financial Services industry.
To maintain the apprentice model, some company leaders are following Dimon in mandating five days of office attendance per week. Others, including Citigroup, continue to arrange work for various hybrids. Pinsent Masons partner Clare Francis says it is a law firm that does not require days. She adds that “everyone learns in different ways,” and in reality, many meetings take place in teams, making juniors easy to “see how they work” outside the office.
Yolanda Seals-Coffield, chief people and inclusion officer for the US division of PWC, believes hybrid work means the tacit knowledge that “we lost that little.” She considers the junior and senior staff solutions to be “more intentional” about mentoring and debriefing. “We must be in a world after the world where people are hybrids. You are no longer sitting next to someone at the office or client side or at a meeting.” Staff, including trainees at PWC US, should be on-site half the time. The arrangement means that new recruits need to be made clear that they “want to actually cover this particular action,” she says. This may mean that junior associates will either sit at a virtual client meeting or review recorded walkthroughs of the technical process, followed by a structured report to enhance learning.
Seals-Coffield should think about modeling behaviors such as guided questions and peer feedback, rather than “passive experiences.” AI can begin to support this by, for example, flagging team leaders that the scheduled interview could provide shadow opportunities for graduate employees who show they are looking for this skill.
I’m optimistic that the tool will allow juniors to think critically about the material.
Additionally, new alumni could be more proficient in AI than supervisors, potentially opening up new responsibilities for them to take on. Patrick Grant, project director of legal technology and innovation at the Law College, says he has developed a course that encourages students to use tools such as Chat GPT critically and ethically in supporting research, organizations and editorials, and to use “references to errors or hallucinations.” For example, students encourage draft clauses to compare AI outputs, and understand the lack of nuance in the tool.
Francis points out that junior lawyers using AI generated for research aren’t that different from past generations switching from books to the internet. “Today, junior lawyers’ workflows are not fundamentally different before (how it is) AI is a tool for disposing of legal teams. The first lawyer in training continues to learn by checking the results.” This role “adapts and evolves” with AI.
Some argue that juniors can progress faster by eliminating repetitive tasks and taking on more refined and creative pieces faster. Francisco Morales Baron, a partner at Vinson & Elkins Law Firm in New York, is skeptical of traditional models. “Many older generations will say they learn a lot from reviewing thousands of contracts. Somehow you learn magically through the process of repeating it hundreds of times. I’m optimistic that the tool allows juniors to think critically about the material,” Francis agrees: “How much do you learn from monotonous work?”
Seals-Coffield says employers need to grasp the desired outcomes of graduate training by separating tasks from skills.
This could include training simulations. Francis says “to develop, test and challenge lawyers with both legal expertise and soft skills such as communication and negotiation.”
Others suggest that freed time will be spent on additional growl jobs rather than more creative tasks, or reduce the number of junior jobs.
According to consultant Oxford Economics, “there are signs that entry-level positions are being expelled by artificial intelligence at a higher rate.”
But in some organizations, this can take some time. “My class of analysts are still in a relatively advantageous position, still with the help of AI without replacing us,” reports one investment bank analyst.
Additional reports from Anjli Raval and Sujeet Indap