How can early-career professionals build experience when entry-level tasks are increasingly automated in the era of GenAI? Marleen Huysman and Ella Hafermalz are part of the EMANAIRE project, which focuses on training doctoral candidates, to study how GenAI reconfigures early-career integration and long-term skill formation.
EMANAIRE, a newly funded project under the prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network, will train 15 doctoral researchers to study and help shape the “augmented organisation” — workplaces where agentic and generative AI transform how people make decisions, collaborate, and develop skills. The project brings together comparative, longitudinal research across eight European countries and multiple sectors, including public administration, technology, manufacturing, and creative industries, to better understand how AI is reshaping organisational practices and the future of work.
Marleen Huysman and Ella Hafermalz (AI@Work research group form the KIN Center for Digital Innovation) together with Anna Essen and Elmira van den Broek (House of Innovation, Stockholm School of Economics) and three PhD candidates examine how GenAI reconfigures knowledge creation, sharing and validation — tasks that are critical for learning and development in early careers.
The team will explore the implications of automating entry-level work, especially for early-career integration and long-term skill formation. In collaboration with RTL Nederland and KPMG Netherlands, the researchers will use embedded ethnographic research to study how users, developers, managers, and other stakeholders interact with GenAI systems. These insights will inform the co-design and testing of practical interventions.
Expected outcomes include a deeper understanding of how GenAI is reshaping apprenticeship and on-the-job learning, along with actionable strategies to support early-career development. These may include task sequencing, mentorship scaffolds, peer review checkpoints, and knowledge capture routines, with evidence on their impact on learning, reproducibility, and retention.
About the grant
The objective of he Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Networks is to implement doctoral programmes by partnerships of organisations from different sectors across Europe and beyond to train highly skilled doctoral candidates, stimulate their creativity, enhance their innovation capacities and boost their employability in the long-term.