There is something wonderfully formative, and occasionally whimsical, about being early in a career. Almost everything is new: new people, new places, new environments, new acronyms and the magnificent discovery that organizations rarely operate quite as neatly as the induction slides implied.

Early career learning often happens through an unspoken bargain: Someone more experienced hands an employee an obscure task and explains just enough for them to begin. In return, they gain experience, feedback and the gradual transmission of all the things no one ever quite writes down.

We learn by attempting a task and sometimes discovering that the finished product falls short of our expectations. Senior colleagues build capacity, while junior colleagues gain experience. It’s an imperfect process, but for many years, it has been a remarkably effective form of apprenticeship.

AI Is Changing the Apprenticeship of Work

Talogy’s research report, “The leadership journey: Uncover effective leadership progression” suggests we may already be starting leadership development too late. Of the 821 leaders surveyed, 80% said they had needed to change their behavior when moving to their current level, yet only 36% had received formal leadership development at that transition, and just 38% felt fully prepared for the next one.

Artificial intelligence (AI) adoption is widening that gap. Research, analysis, drafting and presentation building — the staples of many early-career tasks — can now be handed off to technology. They were not always the most glorious assignments, but they provided valuable practice through which judgment, confidence and professional capability developed.

This is not an argument for preserving tedious work. Nobody became a better leader by spending three hours rearranging boxes on a PowerPoint slide. However, even when the task itself offered little value, something useful was often happening around it.

When developing the next generation of leaders, organizations need to become more intentional about the experiences people receive: stretch assignments, exposure to experienced colleagues, opportunities to form a view before consulting AI and challenges without an immediately obvious answer.

However, experience alone is not enough. We also need to become more targeted about what those experiences are developing. The roles people move through, the technology they use and the challenges they face will keep changing. So, we need to focus on developing the skills that are more enduring.

Essential Skills for Future Leaders

Our Future of Leadership research gives us a clue as to what that anchor needs to support. When employees were asked which leadership behaviors have the greatest impact on a positive employee experience, 52% selected empathy and compassion. Leaders showed a similar pattern, with 48% selecting the same behavior.

Those are visible behaviors, but beneath them sit deeper foundations: emotional intelligence (EQ) and identity. EQ shapes how we understand ourselves, respond to others and manage our impact; identity and values help explain why we lead the way we do. These are the anchors worth developing early.

They help people understand how they show up, why particular things matter to them and how their behavior affects others. And unlike the specifics of a job, a technology or a particular career step, they do not become obsolete so quickly.

This raises a slightly obvious question: If these foundations matter throughout the leadership journey, why wait until someone has “manager” in their job title before helping them understand them?

Building the Leadership Core

The leadership core has two parts — EQ that shapes the how and identity that shapes the why. EQ impacts how people respond under pressure, interpret situations, manage relationships and understand their impact on others. Identity and values shape what matters to someone, what they stand for and the principles they return to when the answer is less obvious.

Neither needs to wait for a management title. The starting point is helping people make these anchors more concrete. EQ, values and identity can otherwise remain fairly abstract ideas. They are things people may recognize in theory but struggle to see in themselves.

Learning and development (L&D) can help by giving people greater self-awareness of how they respond under pressure, what tends to trigger them, how others experience them, what they value and what motivates their choices. Assessment, feedback, coaching and reflection can all make those patterns more visible. But awareness is only useful if people can deploy it. The next step is helping them practice using that insight in real situations, adapting how they communicate with different people, recognizing when emotion is shaping a decision or making choices that are more consistent with the values they say matter to them.

The aim is not to teach people a fixed leadership style. It’s to help them understand the core they are leading from and become more deliberate about how they use it.

AI will keep changing the “what” of work. Roles, tasks and career paths will continue to evolve. An enduring anchor helps people adapt to these changes while staying grounded in how they want to show up and who they want to become.