ABOUT
I’ve spent my career in content, marketing, communications, and the assorted cross-functional office work that seems perfectly straightforward until another human gets involved.
I remember being the junior person trying to figure out the parts of work everyone seemed to expect me to know already. What did “be more strategic” actually mean? How much was I supposed to figure out on my own? When someone said “use your judgment,” what, exactly, was I meant to be judging?
Nobody handed me the decoder ring.
I learned the way a lot of people do: by doing the work, getting things wrong, watching more experienced people, asking questions, noticing patterns, and slowly figuring out what mattered.
Now I manage my own team, which means I get to experience the same problem from the other side.
I can tell someone I want them to be more independent. I can ask them to take more ownership. I can tell them to come back with a recommendation instead of another question.
But if I can’t make the thinking behind those expectations visible—what I’m noticing, what matters, and why I’d make one call instead of another—I haven’t really taught them anything.
I’ve just moved “figure it out” one rung down the org chart.
I’d been thinking about this problem for a while, but AI raised the stakes.
Not because I think AI is evil, and certainly not because I want to preserve every tedious entry-level task as some sacred professional rite of passage. If a machine can spare somebody six hours of moving information from Box A to Box B, then by all means… let my people go.
What has my attention is what happens around the tasks that disappear.
Strada’s survey of employers found that 42% said AI had increased analytical and judgment-based responsibilities for entry-level employees, while 41% said it had reduced foundational or skill-building tasks. PwC found something similar from the job-posting side: the most AI-exposed entry-level roles were seven times more likely than the least AI-exposed entry-level roles to ask for traditionally senior skills such as leadership and strategic thinking.
So we’re reducing some of the work people traditionally learned on while asking them to arrive with more of the judgment they were supposed to be learning.
It’s like taking Girl Meets World-era Sabrina Carpenter, putting her directly on the Short n’ Sweet Tour, and then noting in her performance review that she needs to show more stage presence.
Gartner, to its credit, is not recommending that companies simply shrug and proceed with this arrangement. Its 2030 prediction is that AI could allow many high-performing marketing teams to eliminate traditional bottom-rung roles—but its advice to employers is to redesign entry-level jobs, not eliminate entry-level development. Junior marketers, Gartner argues, need earlier exposure to things like evaluating AI output, generating insight, and making higher-value decisions.
Which is really the question I care about: if the job changes, where does the learning go?
Of course, none of this proves that AI is destroying the career ladder. The evidence is considerably messier—and more interesting—than that. AI didn’t invent the development gap. Workplaces have been telling people to “use better judgment,” “be more strategic,” and “take more ownership” since roughly the Stone Age, often without making the thinking behind those expectations particularly visible.
But if the development gap isn’t new, it is a hell of a lot harder to ignore now that there’s such a bright spotlight on how AI is changing the workplace (and everything else). If some of the places where people happened to get observation, repetition, and lower-stakes chances to try things are changing or disappearing, then we have to get much more deliberate about where the learning happens.
My youngest son, Calvin, started an internship during his junior year of college doing technical writing.
He was excited about it. He wanted to do the work. More importantly, he wanted to do it well.
And then he discovered something that will be familiar to a lot of people early in their careers: wanting to do the work well and knowing how to do the work well are two different things.
Fortunately for Calvin, technical writing was close enough to my own field that I could help.
So for a while, we had a weekly call where I helped my son learn how to do work at a company where I was not even employed.
This arrangement was slightly ridiculous. It was also what gave me the idea for Office Auntie.
Calvin didn’t need me to do his job for him. He needed somebody to help him see what good looked like, what mattered, what to notice, what to ask, and how to think when the instructions stopped being useful.
And, of course, he wasn’t the only person who needed that.
If you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance you’ve had your own version of the same problem: somebody handed you an assignment, expected you to exercise judgment, and neglected to explain the part where you were supposed to learn how.
It is unlikely that I am your mother.
(Unless you are one of my two children, in which case: ♥ ♥ ♥ effusive maternal affection ♥ ♥ ♥.)
But I can still be your Office Auntie. And I can still help.
Workplaces say things like:
They say these things as though everyone received the decoder ring during onboarding.
They did not.
I started Office Auntie to make more of that hidden thinking visible.
Sometimes that means a workplace scenario where you have to make the call before I tell you what I notice.
Sometimes it means translating a piece of spectacularly unhelpful feedback.
Sometimes it means looking at an AI answer that sounds extremely confident despite having no idea what happened in Tuesday’s meeting.
The point is not to give you a giant collection of workplace rules. Good professional work rarely comes down to memorizing the correct response.
I want to help you get better at noticing what matters, asking better questions, weighing trade-offs, making recommendations, explaining your reasoning, and knowing when you actually need another human.
In other words: using your brain parts.
I am not the universal expert on every profession in which humans have ever suffered in an open floorplan for the sake of “collaboration”.
My own professional world is content, marketing, communications, SO MUCH POWERPOINT, stakeholder work, ambiguous assignments, competing priorities, feedback, meetings, and the ordinary judgment calls that appear when several people are trying to get something done at the same time.
It also means I’m not going to pretend that twenty-something years of office work have somehow qualified me to explain every job, every industry, or every complicated thing happening to the workplace.
I am willing to travel outside my comfort zone if it will help you. But don’t worry. When required, I will bring a travel buddy who actually knows the territory.
If you are early in your career and keep running into things everybody apparently expects you to know already, I’ve got you.
And if you manage early-career people and are trying to help them grow without doing all of their thinking for them, I’ve got you too.
You do not have to wait ten years to unlock every unwritten secret of professional judgment through osmosis. And you do not have to simply cross your fingers and hope the people you manage absorb it that way either.
We can practice. We can also get better at making the thinking visible enough for someone else to practice it.
And, as always:
You can find the more conventionally professional version of me at danielleksanders.com. I’m also on LinkedIn, where there is considerably less discussion of decoder rings and considerably more evidence that I have, in fact, held jobs.