(Image: Newsquest Media Group)
There is nothing particularly mysterious about this week's announcement of a further 275 job cuts at Nationwide, but what stands out most in the current environment is that it seemingly has nothing to do with artificial intelligence.
AI is scrambling the professional career pathway of old, where new starts did much of the boring stuff while gradually acquiring the judgement and experience to take on bigger responsibilities. Ironically, some employers now appear to want that judgement and experience much earlier, even as technology begins to remove some of the routine work through which previous generations acquired it.
In a recent analysis of 2.4 million entry-level jobs in the US, accountancy group PwC found that junior roles most exposed to AI were seven times more likely to demand skills traditionally associated with more senior employees, including leadership and strategic thinking. While we should be wary of assuming precisely the same thing is happening here, PwC's wider UK findings point in a similar direction, with skills requirements changing much faster in occupations most exposed to AI.
The intriguing prospect is that the entry-level white-collar job does not necessarily disappear. Instead, "entry level" begins to mean something altogether different. Against that backdrop, Nationwide's announcement looks almost reassuringly old-fashioned.
Britain's biggest building society said the latest losses come as it continues to integrate Glasgow-headquartered Virgin Money, the bank it acquired for £2.9 billion. The jobs affected span areas including retail and mortgages, human resources, customer operations, communications and finance, and come on top of 600 cuts announced in June.
Nationwide has been clear that the reductions are not being driven by AI. Bringing two large organisations together inevitably results in overlapping functions, and eliminating some of that duplication is among the oldest rationales for corporate takeovers.
For Scotland, however, the consequences deserve particular attention.
Virgin Money itself incorporated the former Clydesdale Bank, one of the historic names of Scottish banking, and had a significant workforce when Nationwide completed its takeover. So there is an obvious local interest in how the enlarged organisation evolves.
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But the question is no longer simply how many banking jobs remain, but rather what kind of jobs remain. Nationwide may insist AI has nothing to do with its latest cuts, but elsewhere the technology is playing an explicit role in reducing headcounts.
Barclays announced last week that it expects to shed around 5,000 jobs globally this year, with about 60% of reductions arising from second-half restructuring affecting support functions, including developers. The bank has referred to organisational simplification and technology efficiencies driven by AI.
Not every redundant office job is being lost to AI. Instead, the technology is accelerating a much broader transformation of the professional workforce.
Takeovers eliminate duplication and streamline processes. AI allows people to perform some repetitive tasks more quickly and potentially increases the amount an individual employee can accomplish.
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Together they create a squeeze on the traditional white-collar employment model, with potentially profound consequences for those at the bottom of the career ladder.
Young accountants did basic calculations and assembled spreadsheets. Junior bankers processed information. Trainee lawyers undertook research.
None of this was glamorous, and much of it could be mind-numbingly dull. But relatively straightforward work provided somewhere to start.
Younger workers watched their more experienced colleagues, made mistakes when the consequences were relatively contained, and gradually accumulated the knowledge and judgement necessary to take on greater responsibility.
But research, basic analysis, the manipulation of information and the production of first drafts are exactly where AI is being deployed across most organisations, overlapping considerably with the work traditionally handed to people starting out in their careers.
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For an experienced employee, the potential productivity gain is obvious. Spend less time on repetitive work and more becomes available for the things humans supposedly do best: exercising judgement, dealing with clients, thinking creatively and making difficult decisions.
For the 22-year-old arriving on their first Monday morning, however, there is a problem. How do you acquire judgement if, as the PwC research suggests, employers increasingly expect you to possess it before you have the requisite experience?
It's not a straightforward story of machines simply replacing humans. The jobs themselves are changing.
There is little economic sense in retaining repetitive tasks purely so graduates have something to do. Nor should businesses be criticised for adopting technology that allows employees to become more productive.
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But companies cannot eliminate large chunks of the traditional learning process and simultaneously complain that younger employees lack the experience required to exercise judgement. Simply put, employers can't have it both ways.
If the old route to acquiring those skills disappears, businesses will have to build a new one. That could mean more deliberate training and mentoring, with junior employees given earlier exposure to clients, complex problems and decision-making instead of spending years graduating almost by osmosis from routine work to greater responsibility.
There could be considerable upside. Few young workers will mourn several hours of drudgery being reduced to several minutes with the right technology, but removing drudgery is not the same thing as creating expertise.
Which brings us back to Nationwide and Virgin Money.
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The 275 jobs being cut are not, Nationwide says, the casualties of AI. They reflect the traditional economics of putting two large organisations together and identifying work that no longer needs to be done twice.
But they come as technology is forcing employers to ask another version of essentially the same question: what work actually needs a human being to do it?
For Scotland, where Virgin Money carried forward the legacy of Clydesdale Bank, the answer matters beyond the eventual headcount at Nationwide. The questions are what white-collar jobs will look like in future, how people will get into them and, crucially, how they will gain the experience necessary to progress.
The white-collar career is not necessarily headed for extinction, but some of its first rungs are being removed and nobody yet seems entirely certain what will replace them.