Apply Now: Entry-Level Position, Five Years Experience, Magic Powers Preferred
Today’s entry-level job listings demand experience because training is dead. Degrees aren’t enough, and the workforce is left to figure it out.
Every few months the internet has a spiritual awakening about entry-level job listings asking for experience. A screenshot of a job post circulates. The same five jokes are recycled. Influencers furrow their brows. LinkedIn declares yet another moral crisis. This is not a revelation. This is performance art.
Let’s make something very clear: entry-level does not mean “no experience.” It never has. It means “the bottom rung of our ladder, which we’d like you to already know how to climb.” This is the business equivalent of a restaurant hiring dishwashers who have already worked in three other kitchens, because the manager can’t be bothered to explain how a sponge works again.
It’s not a conspiracy. There is no elite underground of HR professionals plotting how to ruin your life. There is just an industry-wide aversion to training and a workforce desperate to believe in the comforting fiction that words always mean what they’re supposed to mean. They don’t. Especially not in corporate job descriptions, which are more aspirational than real estate listings.
No need to clutch pearls. This isn’t a betrayal. It’s just business with the training wheels removed.
We Regret to Inform You That Companies Are Not Daycares
Once upon a time, companies invested in people. Not just with salaries, but with structured training programs, onboarding timelines, and mentors who were contractually obligated to pretend to care. You’d graduate, land a job, and spend your first year being gently herded through the wild pastures of corporate life. You learned the ropes, often slowly, while someone explained what an “action item” was and reminded you not to reply-all. This wasn’t charity. It was just how things worked.
That era, for the most part, is over. Training programs have gone the way of the office fruit basket. Now, most companies don’t even pretend to offer structured development for new hires. If there’s an onboarding process, it probably limited to a Google Doc from 2018. You are expected to arrive pre-trained, pre-formed, and pre-exhausted.
The reality is, companies today are optimized for now, not eventual. They’re running lean. They’re moving fast. They don’t have time to teach you what a CRM is or why "per my last email" isn't as subtle as you think. The modern workplace assumes you’ve already been broken in somewhere else. And if you haven’t? Good luck.
So when that “entry-level” job requires a couple years of experience, it’s not some betrayal of workplace ethics. It’s a practical shortcut. Hiring someone whose former employer already took on the cost of turning them into a passable employee is just good business. It's lazy, sure. It's cynical, definitely. But it's not a mystery.
You’re not being excluded because you’re unworthy. You’re being excluded because someone else didn’t have the budget to train you and neither does the company you're applying to now. Welcome to the conveyor belt.
The Mass Delusion of “Entry-Level = First Job”
Let’s clear the fog: “entry-level” is not a synonym for “we’ll take anyone with a pulse.” It is a context-dependent, company-specific designation that tells you precisely one thing. This is the cheapest rung on their ladder. That’s it. It’s not a promise of mentorship, nurturing, or on-the-job learning. It is, more often than not, a cry for someone with just enough experience to do the job without asking too many questions or breaking anything expensive.
Yet, somehow, vast swaths of job seekers (and particularly fresh grads) continue to believe that “entry-level” means “first job ever.” This delusion isn’t entirely their fault. They've been marketed a fantasy. University brochures, career advisors, and endless LinkedIn carousel posts have sold them a vision: get your degree, show some enthusiasm, and a world of meaningful, decently paid work will open up. It won’t. At least not automatically.
Most degrees today are abstract credentials, not direct tickets to employability. Employers know this. That’s why they look for internships, volunteer work, freelance gigs, bootcamps. Anything that proves you can survive in an actual workplace without being micromanaged into dust.
So when graduates see a job requiring “two years of experience” and react with moral outrage, they’re misunderstanding the real betrayal. It’s not that job postings are unfair. It’s that the system that was supposed to prepare them never actually did. The university-to-workforce conveyor belt is broken, and in its place is a vague, unmarked chasm.
The job title isn’t the lie. The lie is that anyone’s responsible for helping you cross the gap.
The Death of the Training Program: A Brief Eulogy for the Thing That Would’ve Helped
There was a time when companies understood that new hires needed to learn. Not just “learn the ropes,” but actually be taught how to function in an office without accidentally replying all. You’d arrive, slightly overdressed and wildly unprepared, and they’d hand you a binder the size of a small dog. You’d shadow someone. You’d go to sessions on time management and active listening. It was deeply unsexy and profoundly effective.
But that’s mostly gone now. Training programs have quietly been retired. In their place, we have “just-in-time learning,” which is code for “Google it and hope for the best.” You get a laptop, and a login.
Why did this happen? Because training costs time, and time is money, and many companies are operating on financial fumes. Taking a chance on someone junior now feels risky. The ROI isn’t immediate. The ramp-up period is inconvenient. So instead, companies wait for someone else (read: a previous employer) to eat the cost of development. Once you're pre-baked, they’re suddenly interested.
So when people rage at job postings asking for experience in an “entry-level” role, they’re aiming at the wrong target. The villain isn’t the phrasing. It’s the hollowed-out pipeline that used to get people from classroom to competence. Until that gap is rebuilt, we’re going to keep circling the same tired outrage, wondering why no one wants to train the willing.
Time for New Words: Can We Retire 'Entry-Level' Already?
At this point, the term “entry-level” is so battered, misused, and misunderstood that it deserves a quiet retirement and a gold watch. If people keep misreading it as "first job ever," and companies keep redefining it to mean "mid-level output for low-level pay," then maybe the issue isn’t comprehension, it’s vocabulary.
It’s time for a new language. A shared understanding. A little truth in advertising.
Let’s call roles for fresh graduates exactly what they are. Maybe Foundational Role, where the job actually includes structured training and someone explains why you shouldn’t reply-all. These are the rare unicorn positions that treat inexperience as a starting point, not a liability.
Or how about Pre-Competent Tier? Brutally honest, sure, but at least no one’s pretending you’ll be running strategy sessions on day three.
For those already singed by the fires of underpaid internships, there’s Junior-But-Already-Burnt-Out, the role for candidates who bring experience, trauma, and an eye twitch from three summers of being everyone’s digital assistant.
Then there’s Plug-and-Play Pretend Entry Level, the favorite of startups and "fast-paced environments." No real training, no real support, just the expectation that you’ve already done this exact job somewhere else, under a different title, for less money.
Or maybe we just flip the script. Before anyone complains about "entry-level" job posts asking for experience, they need to complete a ritual: 60 job applications, 20 ghostings, one panic career pivot, and at least one moment of wondering if they should’ve just learned to code. Only then may they rage tweet.
If we can’t agree on what “entry-level” means, maybe we stop using it entirely. The word is broken. Let’s build better ones.
If you're angry about the state of early-career hiring, your frustration is valid. The system is bleak. But the outrage over the term entry-level is misfired energy. Companies aren’t pulling a fast one. They're telling you, quite plainly, that they want someone who already knows the ropes, just at a bargain price. It’s not deceptive. It’s depressing. But it’s also been the norm for years.
The actual scandal is the systematic breakdown of the path from education to employment. We've dismantled training programs, turned internships into unpaid labor pipelines, and now pretend it’s shocking that so many people are stuck in limbo between “qualified on paper” and “hireable in practice.”
So yes, be mad. But be mad at the right things. Be mad at the institutions that pushed a degree as the golden key without mentioning it opens exactly nothing by itself. Be mad at the companies that want professional output without investing in development. Be mad at the collapse of a whole career-building infrastructure.
But stop acting like the term “entry-level” is the betrayal. It’s just the neon sign hanging over a much deeper void.
At StratEx - Indonesia Business Advisory we partner with clients to build innovative graduate recruitment strategies. If you're interested in how to attract the next generation of leaders, contact us for more info.