The Removed First Rung: Digital Transformation and the Reconstruction of Talent Architecture in IT Organisations

The argument set out here can be wrong in several informative ways, which is the main reason for specifying it before fieldwork. If firms are found to have narrowed the entry portal while leaving progression policy unrevised, the mechanism operates roughly as proposed. If they are found to have revised progression policy and preserved the entry portal by assigning junior engineers to structured review of generated output, the mechanism is real but is being managed, and the more useful question becomes what distinguishes the firms managing it, which is precisely the question Phase 4 is built to answer. If entry portals turn out to have narrowed uniformly regardless of transformation intensity, the financing explanation is stronger than the account offered here, and the paper should report that. What the design commits to is making all three outcomes reportable. That commitment is what the disconfirming-evidence column in Table 4, the within-firm and across-stratum comparison, and the pre-declared saturation criterion are for. It is also why the propositions are stated as directional claims about observable artefacts, since a proposition that cannot fail against a competency framework or a graduate intake share is not doing analytical work. The entry-portal problem, if it exists in the form described, has a structure that no individual firm can solve on its own terms, and identifying that structure is a more useful contribution than a list of practices firms should adopt.

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