Sheryl Sandberg tells Gen Z the 10-year career plan is dead as AI wipes out entry-level jobs: ‘Don’t script your career when the future is uncertain’

For generations, graduates have been advised to map out their careers: Pick a job, plot the promotions, and know exactly where you want to be in 10 years. But ex-Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg thinks that advice is dangerously outdated. “Don’t script your career when the future is uncertain,” the former chief operating officer of Meta just told graduates at Brandeis University. “You don’t need a 10-year plan. If I had one, I would have missed the internet.” Sandberg, who went on to become one of the most powerful women in Silicon Valley, knows firsthand how tempting it is to cling to a rigid plan when the job market looks shaky—as well as what it’s like to enter the working world at a time of huge technological disruption. Having graduated from Harvard in 1991, the internet as we know it barely existed—the World Wide Web had just been invented and wasn’t released to the public until two years later. After leaving school, she worked at the Treasury Department under President Bill Clinton, but when the administration ended, she struggled to find her next job. “There were days—and I’m not being dramatic—when I thought I would never find one,” she added. “When I finally got an offer, I worried that the company might not even survive.” That company was called Google. Of course, it’s since become one of the world’s most valuable businesses: Today, Google has a $4.7 trillion market cap. And Sandberg benefited from being there in the early days, growing its sales team from four people to 4,000, before famously becoming Mark Zuckerberg’s right-hand woman. None of it could have been planned. The technology—and the roles it would create—didn’t exist yet. “I wish someone had told me during those many months of fear, the plan was never the life raft,” she said. The point to Gen Zers is this: In an AI-disrupted job market where the roles today’s graduates are chasing may look completely different (or disappear altogether) within a few years, trying to scrip