STATUS: DRAFT – awaiting confirmation – thank you for your patience
Presenters: (actual talk) Alex Cotelin
Topic: Career ladder for Software Engineers in the world of AI
and BCS professional recognition
Date: 25th November 2026
Time: 13:00 for 13:30 lecture start (target 3:30pm end)
Location: International Manufacturing Centre (IMC), Room 002 (Auditorium), University of Warwick
Itinary:
1.40pm: welcome to Warwick/WMG, by Parveen Kaur Samra
1.45pm: session opening and BCS Professional Recognition, by Dianabasi Nkantah & Margaret Low
1.50pm: guest lecture, (50min + 10 min Q&A) by Alex Cotelin
2.50pm: AAI accreditation by, Ejike Ezeh, CEng pathways by Jianhua Yang,
3.20pm: closing by Ejike Ezeh
Talk Synopsis:
For over a century, professional advancement followed a predictable, linear trajectory: the corporate ladder. Junior employees performed repetitive grunt work to build foundational expertise, gradually climbing through middle management towards leadership. Today, artificial intelligence is dismantling that foundation. As generative models automate entry-level execution and reshape middle-management workflows, the traditional career ladder is transforming into a dynamic, fluid, non-linear career pathways.
Drawing on recent workforce research from McKinsey, MIT Sloan, and Harvard Business Review, this talk explores how the automation of explicit, rules-based tasks shifts the currency of career progression away from rigid technical mastery and towards ‘learning velocity’, value creation, and Human Intelligence (HI). Whilst AI handles procedural execution, it remains bound by Polanyi’s Paradox—unable to replicate human tacit knowledge, intuition, and moral accountability. We will examine historical parallels of both successful transitions and hollowed-out pipelines – from the 1940s ‘human computers’ who became the first programmers and the 1970s university calculator bans, to the commercial aviation automation paradox and the 2000s IT outsourcing boom – whilst dissecting emerging pathways like AI Workflow Engineers, Context Engineers, Agent Orchestrators, and AI Governance Leads.
Alex Cotelin is a technologist and community builder driven by a lifelong passion for science and computing. Beyond his day-to-day engineering work, he is deeply committed to nurturing the next generation of talent and strengthening the wider tech ecosystem. As an active STEM Ambassador, Alex regularly goes into primary schools to teach young children the fundamentals of programming, sparking early curiosity in how technology works. Within the industry, he is a dedicated advocate for knowledge-sharing, actively organising and speaking at engineering meetups to bring developers together and explore the evolving landscape of technology and careers.