By Lily Lin, CEO, Excellence First Enterprise Consultancy (EFEC)
I spent some time reading the Government's new Life Sciences Jobs Plan recently.
It is a substantial piece of work. It recognises many of the pressures employers have been talking about for some time: the need for more people, better coordination between education and industry, and a workforce that can adapt as AI reshapes the sector.
Reading it, I realised it was describing something I had been hearing repeatedly: from employers, school leaders, university colleagues and innovation organisations. Different conversations. Different contexts. The same underlying question.
The workforce evidence includes an observation many employers will recognise immediately: there is a persistent gap between what a newly graduated BSc student knows and what companies expect on day one. MSc graduates are generally seen as more work-ready. The gap is not simply about academic knowledge. The Plan points first to hands-on laboratory skills, but also to communication and an understanding of the commercial environment in which the work sits. Employers are left choosing between hiring inexperienced graduates and accepting the upskilling cost, or hiring people who already have that experience and are therefore older, scarcer, and more expensive.
That gap has always existed to some degree.
What's changed is what used to close it.
Where judgement used to come from
For most of the last few decades, early-career roles did two jobs at once. They produced output, and almost as a by-product, they built the judgement of the person producing it. A graduate joined a team, made small decisions under supervision, got them wrong sometimes, watched how an experienced colleague reasoned through a genuinely unresolved problem, and slowly accumulated the pattern-recognition that no course could give them directly. Nobody designed this. It was simply what happened when junior people did real work alongside senior people, repeatedly, in a live organisational context.
AI may be changing parts of that arrangement. Many of the tasks that used to be assigned to juniors, such as drafting, first-pass analysis, summarising and routine problem-solving, can now be done faster by a senior person prompting a model than by delegating to someone learning the ropes. That's a genuine productivity gain. It's also, almost as a side effect, altering the informal training ground that used to exist inside the job itself.
The Jobs Plan points to this. It backs a new Early Careers Jobs Alliance specifically to work out how AI is reshaping entry-level work and to develop practical approaches that protect and expand routes into employment. It is a significant acknowledgement that entry-level work is changing faster than established routes into employment can easily adapt.
Why this isn't simply a skills gap
It's tempting to read all of this as a training problem: teach the AI skills, teach the commercial awareness, close the gap with a bootcamp or a module. Some of that will genuinely help, and the Plan is right to invest in it.
But what employers often describe isn't a lack of knowledge. It's something harder to define. The ability to interpret context, weigh competing considerations, recognise uncertainty, ask better questions, and make sensible decisions when there isn't an obvious right answer. Those qualities develop through experience, but they are not simply a by-product of time. They depend on the environments people spend time in.
If AI is changing the informal apprenticeship that used to build this, including the small decisions, the failed first attempts, the correction from someone more experienced, then the question isn't only "what should young people learn?" It's "where, now, does judgement actually get formed?"
What the Plan doesn't quite ask
The Jobs Plan identifies many of the right pressures: work-readiness, AI adoption, stronger employer engagement and better routes into the sector. Reading it, though, I found myself wondering whether these pressures come back to the same thing: not just what people need to learn, but whether the environments that used to build judgement are quietly changing shape.
These questions have been shaping our thinking at EFEC. Through our work with employers, schools and innovation partners, we are exploring whether capability can be formed more intentionally before employment, through repeated engagement with authentic organisational questions and problem spaces, structured reflection, and evidence that makes a young person's thinking visible. This thinking has informed the development of CognateUK, which is currently being tested through small, evidence-led activity.
We don't claim to have the answers. But we have become increasingly convinced that AI is changing not only what people need to learn, but where professional judgement is formed in the first place.
That is a question worth asking now, before we assume the old answers still apply.
Disclaimer: This article reflects EFEC's perspective on skills, workforce and industrial strategy, informed by engagement with employers, schools and innovation partners across the UK life sciences sector. It is intended to contribute to wider discussion about AI, early-career capability and workforce design.
