June 26, 2026

Your Employee Experience Roundup: Gen Z’s Pay Surge, Gallup’s AI Layoff Gap and the Entry-Level Squeeze

It has been a quieter week on the employee experience news front, which felt fitting for one spent largely trying to stay cool. What did surface kept returning to younger workers: their financial reality, their shrinking access to entry-level work, and the senior-level skills they are now expected to develop fast.

Alongside that, US Gallup data exposes a gap in how AI-driven layoffs are perceived, and a reported third of UK workers are using AI to manipulate expense receipts as financial strain bites.

Prefer to watch? Here are the highlights…

Gen Z Are Out-Earning Millennials – But the Pay Rebound Won’t Last

Perhaps the most unexpected data to drop this week: Gen Z are out-earning millennials.

New Resolution Foundation data shows that at age 24, Gen Z workers in the UK are earning more in real terms than any cohort since the 1950s, and 12% more than those born in the late 1980s.

But it is a tentative win. Real wages are expected to fall again later this year, partly because of the economic impact of conflict in the Middle East, and partly because the number of 16- to 24-year-olds not in education, employment, or training (NEET) has reached one million – a level not seen since 2012.

Gethin Nadin, Chair of the Policy Liaison Group for Workplace Wellbeing, calls it an “early repair”. He cautions against interpreting it as “a restoration of generational progress”.

Key takeaway: The picture is messier than the headline lets on. Younger workers are having to navigate greater uncertainty around housing costs, student debts, cost of living, and pensions, all amid a shrinking early-careers job market (more on this below). Fair pay alone will not solve the problem. Organisations need to be far more proactive, especially CX-driven ones where junior positions dominate.

Read CXM’s full analysis on Gen Z’s pay rebound

Entry-Level Jobs Now Demand Senior Skills

Entry-level roles are about to shift dramatically. The shrinking early-careers job market is already hitting younger workers hard, but now data shows a steep rise in skills expectations. New research from Cognizant and Pearson finds 96% of HR leaders expect entry-level roles to evolve into supervising or managing AI within five years.

Data published earlier this year from PwC points the same way. In entry-level jobs most exposed to AI, traditionally senior capabilities now make up 52% of the new skills required.

Key takeaway: The traditional starting job is being hollowed out and rebuilt at the same time. People leaders need to consider how they will build strategic capability among younger workers who lack experience and won’t be undertaking the routine tasks that build it.

Read CXM’s EX Playbook for the AI Era of Entry-Level Jobs

Tech Workers Who Rarely Use AI Are Three Times More Likely to Be Laid Off

We can’t go a week without AI layoff coverage. New research from Gallup finds that, among US tech workers, those who used AI less than monthly were three times as likely to have been laid off as colleagues who used it at least monthly. This dominated the headlines.

Yet the more revealing number for people leaders sits further down the report. Only 1% of laid-off workers named AI or automation as the reason they lost their job. That sits oddly against the employer view: data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas shows AI accounted for almost 40% of employers’ stated reasons for US job cuts.

Key takeaway: Distance is growing between the official story of why people lose their jobs and what those people understand to be true. Deliberate or not, it amounts to a communication breakdown. And communication breakdowns during redundancies carry well-documented consequences.

Read CXM’s full analysis on Gallup’s AI Layoff Gap

Nearly a Third of Employees Use AI to Fake Expense Receipts

New research from expense management software firm Emburse found that 29% of UK employees have used AI to generate or manipulate expense receipts to top up their pay.

Emburse sells AI-powered expense validation, so the figure deserves some caution. But other findings in the survey, which have nothing to do with dishonesty, are a signal for people leaders to pay attention to. More than two-thirds (68%) said they had incurred bank fees after covering business costs on a personal debit or credit card.

Marne Martin, chief executive of Emburse, describes it as effectively “an interest-free loan from employee to employer”.

Key takeaway: Worry less about fraudsters in the making and more about the financial strain employees are under. In today’s economic climate, even small financial knocks now hurt. Reimburse people quickly, offer company cards, and remove the bank fees employees never agreed to absorb.

Read CXM’s full analysis on AI-faked expenses

Worth Reading

It’s been a quiet week on the HR and EX vendor front, so instead, here are two deeper insight pieces well worth your time.

Feature Spotlight: Layoff Survivor Syndrome

We keep reading about companies cutting staff to fund AI. We rarely read about the people who stay.

Layoff survivor syndrome is a term used to describe the guilt, anxiety, and broken trust that settle over the employees who keep their jobs after redundancies.

It is not a new phenomenon, but the current wave of AI-related cuts has given it fresh urgency.

Survivor’s guilt is only part of it. When colleagues are cut, the psychological contract starts to fracture. People begin asking whether loyalty counts for anything, whether the process was fair, and whether they are next.

As organisational psychologist Danny Wareham puts it, that uncertainty is “psychologically expensive” – and the cost flows straight through to the customer.

Expert Voices: Four Organisations Prove You Can’t Fix Customer Experience Without Fixing Work Design

Most conversations about customer experience skip the part that quietly determines it: how the work itself is designed.

HR thought leaders Perry Timms and Kirsten Buck want to change that, and they point to four organisations – Southwest Airlines, Morning Star, Haier, and Buurtzorg – as evidence the approach works.

Their model is ‘polymorphic work design’ – building work that adapts to context, rather than forcing people into fixed, rigid roles. The reasoning is straightforward. Customers never experience your org chart; they experience whether someone could help them quickly and with genuine care, and that depends on the system of work behind the scenes.