How to break into tech when entry-level roles are shrinking

Breaking into the technology industry is becoming increasingly difficult. Entry-level tech hiring has been on the decline since the COVID-19 pandemic, dropping by 50% at big tech companies and 30% at startups. 

When Pluralsight reached out to its community of 2,500+ expert authors for our 2026 Tech Forecast, by far the most common concern was around AI replacing junior-level jobs, and how this could create a future shortage of experts. In some fields, such as cybersecurity, this shortage already exists.

Why the decline? There’s a confluence of contributing factors:

• AI taking over the routine tasks that used to be entry points for newcomers

• Shrinking tech budgets for new hires

• Perception issues about Gen-Z employees and their teamwork and motivation

• Overwhelmed, risk-averse leaders who want staff who can hit the ground running

But hope is not all lost. Entry-level tech roles will not altogether disappear, but they will change, forcing new graduates and career switchers to adapt. 

Here are some tips to improve your chances of landing an entry-level tech role in these strange times.

1. Prove your skills with projects 

Today’s overwhelmed and risk-averse leaders prefer tech professionals who can hit the ground running. Yes, even entry-level roles will often expect at least some practical experience. Fortunately, that experience doesn’t necessarily have to be associated with an actual job. Employers want to know you can apply the knowledge listed on your resume, and it helps to prove your capability before you’re even hired with a portfolio of projects. 

Portfolios can take many forms, from GitHub to your personal website or blog. Each project in the portfolio should showcase how you solved a specific problem. If you can, tailor your portfolio to your field or technology domain of interest. For example:

• If you’re interested in cybersecurity, you could create an incident response case study, build a detection rule portfolio, or create a mini-environment and secure it end-to-end.
• You may showcase your skill with AI by automating a real workflow, like a log analysis, resume screening, and so on.
• Highlight your cloud architecture skill by designing and documenting a scalable cloud solution for a realistic business case (e.g., global e-commerce or media streaming platform.)
• If you’re getting into data, build a model to predict house prices or rental rates, then upload it to GitHub. Use real datasets from Kaggle to get started.

This is your chance to show off that your creative problem-solving skills go beyond the words on your resume.

(If you need more ideas for projects, check out our domain-focused career roadmaps.)

2. Aim for adjacent roles

Like many careers, pathways into and through tech are rarely linear. Try not to see your way into tech as a ladder but more as a map with several possible routes to your destination. If entry-level roles in your field of interest appear to be shrinking, focus instead on the transferable skills that you can develop in adjacent roles. For instance:

•  Technical support could set you up to transition into engineering

• QA could be a path into development work

• Data analysis could transfer into engineering

As you develop these skills, you’ll build experience within your domain of expertise, you’ll likely work close to production systems, and you’ll prove your reliability and communication and problem-solving skills (powerful abilities AI can’t replace).

Those career roadmaps linked above also discuss the various entry points and promotion pathways for the roles in each domain.

3. Learn how to work with AI, and showcase that skill

Pluralsight’s AI Skills Report found that 95% of organizations check for AI skills during the hiring process, with 70% of them considering those skills “mandatory” or “highly preferred.” 

As with any skill, the key is to showcase how you can use AI to create business value while also enhancing your value. Yes, you should include in your resume how you’re versed in prompt engineering (and if you’re not, you should learn). But you should also highlight how you enhance the value of AI, such as:

• Using AI to accelerate your work

• Validating AI outputs

• Integrating AI results into real systems (e.g. set up automated alerts following security log analysis)

• Analyzing data and applying to specific business problems

Employers want to see how you use AI as a tool like any other, and that you do so mindfully, centered on business value. Show them that AI supplements your value, not replaces it.

Check out this course on leveraging AI agents for productivity for a deeper dive into this topic.

4. Tell stories with your skills, grounded in business context and impact

It’s more than likely that the skills you highlight on your resume are the same as (potentially) hundreds of other candidates. What makes you stand out actually aren’t the skills themselves, but the story you tell with them. How you tell those stories, and showcasing how you solve problems with your skills, distinguish you both from other candidates and from AI.

One of the factors in entry-level roles diminishing is that organizations want to replace low-impact and low-leverage work with AI. It’s up to you to show how your value goes beyond, for example, boilerplate code, simple data cleanup, or basic QA. Learn how organizations make their money, understand the pain points of both the business and their customers, and speak to how your technical work can produce business outcomes that solve for those pain points.

Even lacking work experience, you can practice this storytelling in how you frame your skills on your resume, as well as how you describe and contextualize your projects. 

Conclusion

Yes, breaking into tech is more difficult than in the past, but the door isn’t closed. We’re in an awkward transition period where the fate of many roles across many industries are a mystery. On the bright side, AI is actually forcing us all to highlight qualities that are timeless: value realization and problem solving. 

Check out Pluralsight’s 2026 Tech Forecast for more on the trends, challenges, and opportunities shaping tech this year, so you can tailor your learning and resume to exactly what organizations are prioritizing.