By Chloe Wilkie, Student Engagement Manager, WiseTech Global
If you're a student mapping out your future career, it's tempting to focus purely on grades and qualifications. They matter, but they're only part of the picture.
At WiseTech, we're seeing firsthand how AI is reshaping traditional job roles and the responsibilities that go with them. As AI automates many repetitive tasks, human skills matter more than ever, and judgment is at the center of that shift.
Judgment is the capacity to recognize relationships, draw conclusions from evidence, and evaluate events and people critically, including nuance, ethics, and gray areas. It's built through lived experience: knowing your strengths and weaknesses, listening to different perspectives, being able to articulate your point of view, collaborating and working well in a team, and making thoughtful decisions when there's no single right answer.
Learning beyond the curriculum
For decades, academic results were the main route to career success. Traditional study pathways still assume a linear career: school until 18 years old, then vocational study or university, before stepping into the professional world. But that world has already changed, and students need to build real-world experience and maturity that years in a classroom alone can't provide.
PwC's 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, which analyzed more than one billion job ads across six continents, found that employers everywhere are placing a growing premium on skills, such as judgment, leadership, and creativity.
Even at entry level, roles most exposed to AI are seven times more likely to demand developed “human-intensive skills”, such as leadership, creativity, and face-to-face interaction. The good news is that these entry level roles have grown 35% since 2019, but potential new hires are expected to start with job-ready skills, rather than building competency during their early career years.
AI fluency matters too: knowing how to use it, questioning what it produces, and understanding the systems it sits within. The same PwC research found jobs requiring AI skills grew about eight times faster than the overall job market last year and carried an average advertised wage premium of 62%.
These aren't competing skill sets; technical ability, human skills, and AI fluency work together, and they're what all employers, not just tech companies, are looking for. The message for students and parents: employers aren't choosing between technical ability and human skills. They now expect both.
These skills rarely come from theory and exams alone. They're built by joining a programming club, entering a competition that stretches you, or working alongside people solving problems you've never seen before.
That's why WiseTech supports pathways like the WiseTech Global Programming Competition, delivered with Grok Academy, and our Earn & Learn program.
Building future-ready skills in Earn & Learn
The Earn & Learn program gives Year 12 students a practical pathway into software engineering, combining permanent paid employment at WiseTech Sydney with study through UTS’s IDeA Bachelor of Computer Science.
In Earn & Learn, students are employed as professional software engineers, working on real projects with real deadlines, building technical capability alongside the human skills employers increasingly value: communication, judgment, adaptability, and problem-solving.
Immersed in the fast-moving, ever-evolving tech industry, their expertise and skillsets are constantly shaped and stretched, allowing them to develop the most relevant, future-ready capabilities the market demands.
Applications for the 2027 intake are now open. There are several ways we identify talented candidates, including The WiseTech Global Programming Competition.
From competition to career: the Grok Academy pathway
This year’s online competition runs from 5:00pm AEST Friday 14 August to 5:00pm Saturday 15 August and gives students a chance to test their skills, compete for prizes, and potentially fast-track into the Earn & Learn selection process for top performers.
Last year's competition drew more than 1,000 students; winners were invited to a tour of WiseTech's Sydney HQ, as well as lunch with Earn & Learn associates from previous cohorts, and senior leaders.
Joel, who won the 2025 WiseTech Global Programming competition, is now thriving in his team at WiseTech, working as an Associate Software Engineer. Joel credits the competition for offering an opportunity to build confidence and prove his skills developed over the years. Read our interview with Joel
One of the most underrated benefits of getting involved with the Grok competitions and challenges is who you meet along the way. Programming competitions are hugely beneficial for passionate young students, putting them in front of judges, mentors, and working engineers they'd otherwise never meet.
Say yes to the opportunity in front of you
Whether it's the WiseTech Global Programming Competition, a school coding club, or a shot at Earn & Learn, participation is what turns potential into a career.
The advice I give young people that I meet through WiseTech's education events is to push yourself out of your comfort zone. The skills that shape your future are rarely found in textbooks.
They're built when you step into the unknown: entering a competition that stretches you, speaking up when you're the least experienced person in the room, or carving out a path that deviates from the traditional, even if you don't feel ready for it yet.
Keep pushing forward, and you may be surprised where you land.