What the Job Makes of the Person

By Jennie Glazer
CEO, Center for Talent Innovation

Day five on a new job, I got on a plane.

It was the dot-com days, and I was 24. Until then, my client experience had been with small businesses in Vermont. The client waiting for me was a global multinational, and they had been promised me. That promise was part of what allowed the project to get started with our agency.

My account manager was as new to the company as I was. Between us, we were supposed to scope the work, set goals, negotiate timing and costs, and motivate the team.

So we did.

I learned an extraordinary amount that week. Some of it was about managing clients and projects. Much of it was about myself. I learned I could walk into a room where I knew very little, ask questions, listen carefully, and figure out what to do next. I learned how to make decisions without having all the information. I learned that people would trust me with responsibility, and that I had to earn that trust.

I want to be precise about the experience because I didn't come up through a formal apprenticeship program. I grew up as an outsider finding my way in, without the benefit of the carefully structured development opportunities some of my peers enjoyed.

I had senior leaders who mentored me, colleagues willing to help, and an organization prepared to give me real responsibility before I had much experience.

The work was the teacher.

I've since seen what well-designed formal development programs can do for people's careers. They create access, relationships, and opportunities that might otherwise be difficult to find. I've also seen how unevenly those opportunities have been distributed.

Today, as organizations rethink jobs around AI, I keep returning to that first week. What experiences are we creating for people? What are they learning? And how will they develop the judgment and expertise we'll need from them later?

Those questions matter at every career stage. Twenty-five years into a career, I'm still learning things I didn't know I needed to learn. Disruption has a way of making beginners of us all.

A very different first assignment

Our recent research at the Center for Talent Innovation surfaced a story about another young person given extraordinary responsibility.

A 20-year-old lands an ultra-competitive internship on Wall Street.

Traditionally, interns at this firm received a desk, a mentor, and a rotation through the bank's major businesses. They learned how the organization worked by participating in it.

This internship is different.

On his first day, he starts building AI agents to trade a pool of company money. The agents research markets, execute trades, and work around the clock.

He watches. Occasionally he intervenes. Mostly, he supervises.

In the emerging language of the AI era, he's the "human in the loop."

He grows restless, bored, and worried. He starts taking anxiety medication.

By every measure the firm rewards, he's a huge success. The bank makes money. He makes money.

Bring in the next cohort.

This is a true story, and I haven't stopped thinking about it.

I wonder what that young man will take from the experience.

He may be learning capabilities that will prove enormously valuable. Building and supervising AI agents requires technical fluency, and the responsibility he's been given is remarkable for someone at the start of a career.

But what is he learning about markets, clients, professional judgment, collaboration, and himself? Where does he encounter the situations that teach him to recognize something the system doesn't? Who is helping him understand what good judgment looks like?

I don't know the answers. I wonder whether the firm does.

What work teaches us

In our report, Borrowing from Tomorrow, we describe this internship as a Rorschach test for modern leaders. Different people see different things in it, often shaped by their own experiences and assumptions about work.

What strikes me is how much responsibility both this intern and my 24-year-old self were given, and how different those experiences appear to be.

My early assignment required constant interaction with other people. I had to interpret what the client needed, navigate disagreements, make judgment calls, and work through problems I hadn't encountered before.

I made mistakes. I asked for help. I had to explain myself when something didn't go as planned.

Those experiences shaped me.

The intern is also doing consequential work, but much of his day is spent supervising technology that performs the underlying tasks. Perhaps he'll develop exceptional judgment about when to intervene. Perhaps he'll learn to recognize patterns that earlier generations of bankers took years to see.

We should find out.

Because an enormous amount of human development happens through the experience of doing a job. We build judgment by exercising it. We develop relationships by working with people. We learn to recognize problems through the accumulated experience of encountering them, including the ones we didn't handle particularly well.

These capabilities matter long after we've mastered the technical requirements of a role.

And they're difficult to measure.

We can count transactions, productivity, revenue, and time saved. We have a harder time seeing how a job is shaping the person doing it.

The cost we may discover later

In Borrowing from Tomorrow, our 2026 research report, we surveyed 173 organizational decision makers and interviewed 50 leaders, practitioners, and experts to understand how organizations are navigating transformation.

One risk we explored is what we call a Human Talent Deficit: the gap between the human capabilities an organization will need to create value in the future and what its current operating model enables people to develop, sustain, and contribute.

Think about the knowledge people acquire over years of working together. The relationships that make collaboration possible. The confidence to challenge a decision. The judgment to recognize an exception before it becomes a problem.

Organizations depend on these things, even when they have no obvious place on a dashboard.

AI can create remarkable opportunities to rethink how people work and learn. Some tasks that once consumed enormous amounts of time can be done far more quickly. People may gain access to sophisticated tools and responsibilities much earlier in their careers.

We're still learning what those changes mean for human development.

And we're making decisions about work right now, often before we understand their longer-term consequences.

An organization might eliminate an entry-level task because it can be automated. That task may have been tedious. It may also have been where someone learned to distinguish a routine case from an unusual one.

A company might remove a management layer to make decisions faster. That layer may have created unnecessary bureaucracy. It may also have connected people to mentors, carried institutional knowledge, or helped inexperienced employees navigate complicated situations.

The consequences of removing those experiences may take years to become visible.

We don't yet know how widespread a Human Talent Deficit might become. Our research identifies the risk and the organizational conditions that could produce it. The choices that matter are already being made.

Designing development into work

I don't want to romanticize the way people learned in the past.

My early career worked out well in part because someone gave me an opportunity I might easily have missed. Plenty of talented people never received that kind of trust or support.

Formal apprenticeship programs have their own histories of uneven access. Informal learning often depends on who knows whom, who gets noticed, and who has a manager willing to invest in them.

We have a chance to do better as we redesign work.

That means taking human development seriously as part of job design.

Before eliminating a task, we can ask what people learn by doing it. Before automating a decision, we can examine how employees will develop the judgment needed to evaluate the system's output. Before removing a management layer, we can find out what relationships, knowledge, and guidance it provides.

And when we discover that an old way of working helped people develop something valuable, we can decide how that development will happen in the new one.

It may involve new assignments, mentoring, simulations, rotations, deliberate practice, or opportunities to work alongside experienced colleagues. The right approach will depend on the work and the people involved.

I would start by asking the people closest to the work what the numbers don't show.

Where did you learn to do this well? What experiences taught you the most? Who helped you? What would a new colleague miss if this part of the job disappeared?

These seem like reasonable questions to ask before redesigning the work itself.

And they apply just as much to senior leaders as to people starting their careers. Our jobs are changing, too. We're learning to make decisions alongside technology, question outputs that look convincing, and lead organizations whose future structure is still taking shape.

We need experiences that develop those capabilities throughout our careers.

What the job makes of us

I think back to that flight when I was 24.

I remember the uncertainty. I remember how much I didn't know. I also remember being trusted to figure things out, with people behind me who wanted me to succeed.

That experience gave me more than an early career achievement. It changed what I believed I was capable of doing.

I hope the young Wall Street intern comes away with something equally valuable.

His firm has good reasons to care about what he produces. I'd like to know what the experience is making possible for him.

Somewhere in your organization, a job is being redesigned right now. Someone is deciding which tasks will remain, which will disappear, and how much responsibility people will have.

Those decisions will shape what the organization can accomplish. They'll also shape the experiences through which people learn, develop relationships, and become capable of doing things they couldn't do before.

The next time you're making one of those decisions, ask what the job makes of the person who does it.

This essay draws on Center for Talent Innovation (2026), Borrowing from Tomorrow: How to Fight the Hype and Design the Future of Work on Purpose. The report combines a survey of 173 organizational decision makers with 50 interviews and qualitative research. Its findings are exploratory and should not be treated as nationally representative.