What AI Can’t Fake: How junior engineers can stand out in the age of AI

There is a piece of advice that circulates endlessly through mentoring conversations, coding bootcamps, and LinkedIn posts aimed at people trying to break into the tech industry. Get certified. Build something for your GitHub. Put together a portfolio. Contribute to open source. Let’s call this “the checklist”. It’s not bad advice, and it wasn’t bad advice when people started giving it. The problem is that enough people have followed it that it has stopped being advice and started being a floor. The rise of LLMs has only sharpened this, making it far easier to write a polished, tailored CV that hits every mark on a job description, or to spin up a portfolio project. The checklist looks less distinctive than ever. It’s the minimum, not the differentiator. I see this clearly through my work with CodeYourFuture, a charity that provides free technical training and career support to people from underrepresented backgrounds. The people I mentor there have worked hard to get where they are; some are still learning and trying to land their first role, others are already in the industry and trying to figure out how to progress. What I notice, talking to them, is that the checklist items are rarely what’s holding them back. They have the certifications. They have the GitHub repos. They are doing everything they were told to do, and they are still finding it difficult to stand out. Standing out requires something else, and that thing is not to add another certification to their LinkedIn. At London Tech Week this year, I listened to speakers from some of the biggest names in the industry. The same hiring wishlist kept coming up: curiosity, adaptability, and the ability to learn. They want evidence that someone can pick up an unfamiliar codebase, work in a different context, shift between problem domains without falling apart. These qualities matter more to them than any specific technical credential. The difficulty — and every speaker acknowledged it — is that these qualities a