If you’re just starting your career, your boss may expect to see you in the office more often than your colleagues.

British financial technology company Revolut recently said that starting in 2027, interns and participants in a recent graduate program will be expected to work in the office at least three days a week. The company will continue to allow other employees to choose whether to work remotely or in-person.

Revolut says the change reflects the value of real-life learning for workers early in their careers.

“You don’t learn just by your manager telling you what to do. You actually watch other people do their jobs,” said Queenie Li, the company’s director of talent programs.

Researchers generally agree that early-career employees benefit from in-person mentoring and informal learning.

However, while companies like Revolut draw distinctions between junior and more experienced workers, labor market observers remain divided over the relative roles that remote work, artificial intelligence and other factors might play in employers’ willingness to hire entry-level employees in the first place.

It’s an important question because, for decades, college graduates in their early 20s generally had a lower unemployment rate than the workforce as a whole. That is no longer the case. Since late 2018, these workers have often faced a higher unemployment rate than the workforce as a whole, according to the New York Federal Reserve.

The effect of remote work

Peter John Lambert, a postdoctoral researcher at the London School of Economics and the University of Warwick, and a colleague recently concluded that remote work better explains the decline in initial hiring than AI.

Lambert and Yannick Schindler of the UK’s Ellison Institute of Technology examined hiring and job posting data in several countries, including the United States, before and after the arrival of ChatGPT and the pandemic-driven shift to remote work. They found that the proportion of entry-level hires fell by as much as 29% in recent years, while hiring for management positions increased by more than 5%.

One reason it’s easy to conflate the impact of AI with that of remote work, Lambert said, is that both are associated with desk jobs that can be done from afar.

Lambert said remote work is the most likely reason for the drop in the share of new entry-level hires because the slowdown began before GenAI tools emerged, when the technology was still too limited to significantly affect hiring decisions.

“It’s only when you compare these things together that you start to see a stronger relationship between working from home versus generative AI,” Lambert said.

Researchers at the New York Federal Reserve came to a similar conclusion about the effects of remote work. Researchers said this setup makes it difficult for managers to train and orient new employees. They studied an undisclosed Fortune 500 company and found that when colleagues drift apart, “feedback decreases dramatically.”

“The loss of feedback is more pronounced for younger workers, who miss out on constructive feedback that stimulates their development,” they wrote.

Not everyone who studies remote work sees it as such a simple explanation. Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University, said remote work, artificial intelligence, pandemic-era learning losses and a broader hiring slowdown that has been particularly hard on tech jobs are plausible explanations for the weak job market for college graduates. However, Bloom said, current data cannot determine what factors are driving the trend or to what extent.

The AI ​​effect

In recent research, Mark Ma, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Business, found that companies with AI in job titles or descriptions reduced overall hiring, with the largest declines in early-career positions.

Ma said that suggests that as companies increase spending on AI or hire workers with AI skills, they need fewer entry-level employees.

“They are getting rid of these junior positions because junior-level work could be more easily replaced by AI,” he said.

Ma said that because remote work rates were higher a few years ago than now, recent graduates should have had a tougher time then than today. However, he said, “the problem is getting worse now.”

At the same time, companies with more remote job openings increased, rather than reduced, hiring for junior positions overall, Ma said.

“Those companies are actually growing faster, so they need to hire more people,” he said.

Make learning happen

For those who do get jobs, many appreciate at least some in-person work. A 2025 Gallup poll found that only about a quarter of Gen Z workers who could do their jobs remotely wanted to do so full time, compared to about a third of previous generations.

Hybrid setups, where workers spend at least some of their time in the office, can be a “happy medium” and an effective way to ensure that early-career workers get the mentoring they need and often say they want, said Brad Hershbein, senior economist at the WE Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, a think tank.

Remote workers, especially those early in their careers, don’t necessarily realize all the things that will make them just as productive unless they’re in the office to witness them, he said.

“In some cases, they end up being unhappy because they just don’t learn some things,” Hershbein said.

Making apprenticeships a reality was part of what drove the thinking behind Revolut’s requirement for office-based internships and some early-career workers, Li said. The firm plans to add about 500 interns and graduate program participants in 2027, up from 300 this year, he said.