The evolution of the internet industry pattern has reshaped the employment ecology of industrial enterprises in an all-round way. With the intertwined creative and substitution effects, the transformation and reform of its employment model have become a core issue for the development of industrial economy and social stability. Taking Chinese industrial enterprises as the research object and relying on the relevant data of industrial employment from 1949 to 2024, this paper analyzes the differentiated impacts of different development stages of the internet industry on the employment scale and structural proportion of the overall industry and its sub-sectors such as mining and manufacturing from the perspectives of the three industrial sectors, urban non-private and private units. The study finds that the reshaping of China's industrial employment by the internet shows significant stage characteristics and industrial heterogeneity. Industrial employment has experienced a process from scale expansion to stabilization and adjustment with the development of the internet, and the decline is essentially a digitally driven structural optimization. There are significant differences in the employment development of industry in different types of urban units. Ultimately, the internet has driven the transformation of industrial employment from scale expansion to quality improvement, with flexibilization and high-skill orientation becoming the mainstream direction of the employment model.