Janelle E. Wells, Ph.D., and Doreen MacAulay, Ph.D.
Our (In)visible Work
When day-to-day administrative tasks are automated away, what happens to the entry-level employee learning the ropes? We are in a time of significant change in the workplace. The relentless push toward efficiency is fueled by artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and digital optimization. As we experience the excitement and fear of these changes, there is something far less visible but equally vital happening in the workplace. The slow, often unrecognized learning that happens in entry-level roles is disappearing. In our pursuit of doing things faster, we may be unintentionally compromising how people learn to do things well.
This is not a nostalgic argument for inefficiency. It is, instead, an invitation to examine what is being lost when early career work is streamlined, automated, or eliminated altogether. Truth is, entry-level roles have never been just about the task. They have always been about the learning embedded within the task.
The Lesson Beneath the Work
Consider the individual taking notes in a meeting. On the surface, it is a logistical role to capture decisions, track actions, and distribute follow-ups. Increasingly, this work is being handed off to AI transcription tools. The meeting notes appear instantly, neatly summarized, searchable, and archived. So, consider what has disappeared in that transition?
The note-taker was not simply documenting the conversation. They were learning how the people think and operate. They were noticing who speaks and who doesn’t. They were beginning to understand patterns of influence, the cadence of decision-making, the language of strategy, and the nuance of disagreement. They were absorbing context in real time, developing an informal map of the organization that no onboarding manual could replicate.
Now, we are not advocating for one not to use the note-taking system, but to consider who needs to be in the room to learn from the experience. If you no longer invite the entry-level employees because they are not needed to take the notes, you are negating the learning process that could be vital to your organization’s future.
Similarly, the employee tasked with building presentation decks was doing far more than formatting slides. They were interpreting information, translating ideas, experimenting with narrative flow, and developing a visual voice. They were learning the business by shaping how the business community communicates itself. Remove the task, and we risk removing the developmental pathway hidden within it.
These are examples of what we might call invisible learning, the unseen power within the organization. The learning that was unstructured, experiential, and cumulative.
Why Invisible Learning Matters
The foundation of this idea is not new. Highlighting John Dewey’s work on experiential learning, an article to be published in the Journal of Philosophy and Education emphasized that education is not simply the acquisition of information, but the transformation of experience into understanding. Learning happens through doing, reflecting, and engaging with real-world contexts, not through passive consumption.
