ACM CareerNews for Tuesday, January 21, 2025
ACM CareerNews is intended as an objective career news digest for busy IT professionals. Views expressed are not necessarily those of ACM. To send comments, please write to [email protected]
Volume 21, Issue 2, January 21, 2025
Tech Unemployment Dipped at the End of 2024
Dice Insights, January 16
Tech unemployment dipped in December to 2%, the lowest level since November 2023, according to new U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data. Although employment within the tech sector itself sank by 6,117 jobs between November and December, tech employment throughout the broader economy increased by a net new 7,000 positions. The national tech workforce continues to stand at roughly 6.5 million workers. There were 434,415 active employer job postings for tech positions in December, including 165,189 newly added during the month. Both totals were down from November. Positions in software development and engineering, IT project management, cybersecurity, data science and analysis and tech support had the most activity.
Tech professionals who have mastered in-demand skills such as artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud engineering have the best opportunities for landing the position of their dreams. While AI is a powerful tool, recruiters point out that human ingenuity and creativity remain invaluable. With that in mind, focus on ways you can leverage AI technology to enhance your work without becoming overly reliant on it. This will help you adapt to a tech market that is quickly adopting new AI tools.
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Tech Salaries Barely Inched Up in 2024
CIO Dive, January 14
Salaries for IT workers grew just 1.2% in 2024, marking another year of tepid growth in IT compensation. The average tech worker earned $112,500 last year, though technologists with AI expertise commanded an 18% salary boost compared to their counterparts. With wages rising only slightly, IT professionals are more open to new opportunities. Nearly half of employed tech professionals say they actively sought new positions in 2024, up from just 29% in 2023.
The tech job market of 2024 was more constrained than in previous years as businesses recalibrated their IT priorities and adjusted their budgets. A post-pandemic era of over-hiring for technologists gave way to more restrained hiring dynamics in 2024. Official data reflects a cooler environment for technology demand. IT unemployment spiked during multiple months in 2024, reaching a four-year high of 3.7% in June. Despite fluctuations, the year ended on a high note, with employers adding 7,000 tech positions in December.
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Will 2025 Bring a Soft Landing For the Job Market?
HR Dive, January 10
Total employment rose by 256,000 jobs in December, while the unemployment rate shrunk slightly to 4.1%, indicating growing optimism for the job market going into 2025. But it is not yet clear whether the upward swing in December indicates returning stability or a one-off jump due to seasonal hiring. Overall, hiring prospects for the tech sector remain higher than for just about any other sector of the economy.
Signals for assessing the relative strength of the tech hiring environment have been decidedly mixed. For example, the share of U.S. workers aged 25-54 who are employed continued to decline for the third month in a row. Labor force participation rate stabilized, but only after four months of declines. Growth was mostly spread between sectors, data indicated, though it was somewhat focused once again in healthcare and government.
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Tech Versus Technician: The Most In-Demand Skills For 2025
Silicon Republic, January 15
The most in-demand skills for IT professionals in 2025 include coding and web development, data science and analytics, and AI. According to Upwork, the numbers are indicative of the growing demand for professionals with specialized skills across a range of industries. It also exposes the dual nature of the current landscape, as it finds that both advanced technical expertise and soft skills will be critical to navigating the evolving workplace.
When it comes to careers in coding and web development, a number of skills were high on the list of priorities. Full-stack development, front-end development, web design, mobile app development and back-end development took the first five spots. They were followed by e-commerce website development, UX/UI design, scripting and automation, content management systems development, and manual testing. This has not changed from last year and is indicative of the need to continuously upskill or even reskill in key areas. Additionally, of the skills listed under the umbrella of coding and web development, scripting and automation, web design, and UX/UI were the fastest growing skills.
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Get a Job in AI or One of These Industries If You Want to Be in One of the Fastest-Growing Roles in 2025
Fast Company, January 8
Job search platform LinkedIn recently released its annual Jobs on the Rise report, including a list of the top 25 fastest-growing jobs in the United States. To create the list, researchers at LinkedIn analyzed millions of jobs started by members of the platform between January 2022 to January 2024, calculating the growth rate for each job. They excluded internships, volunteer positions, and interim roles. According to this analysis, AI roles top the chart as the artificial intelligence market grew by $50 billion since 2023. In fact, the top two spots were related to AI.
The role of artificial intelligence engineer came in at the top of the list. Artificial intelligence engineers design, develop, and implement AI models and algorithms to optimize processes and solve complex problems. Second on the list was the role of artificial intelligence consultant. The popularity of this role reflects greater integration between business and IT units within organizations. Artificial intelligence consultants assist organizations with the adoption and integration of AI technologies to meet business goals and improve operations.
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As Gen Z Job Applicants Balloon, Companies Are Turning to AI Agent Recruiters
Tech Crunch, January 15
Currently, tech employers are overwhelmed by the number of job applications they are receiving. In the U.K. alone, employers hiring new graduates received an average of 140 applications for each job in 2024. That is 59% more than in 2023. And despite some trepidations amongst a few recruiters, plenty of companies are turning to AI platforms to assist them in finding the best candidates. As a result, job candidates must increasingly learn how to navigate this new world of AI agent recruiters.
Companies are now experimenting with AI agents for job interviews, skills assessment tests, and candidate filtering. In theory, these AI agents can streamline the hiring process, create a better experience for candidates, and reduce employee turnover. Some AI agents can converse with prospective candidates in natural language. Others can be customized for specific needs. In general, agents are being used to source, screen, schedule, and interview candidates. For example, during the interview process, these AI agents can call candidates over the phone or be a visual avatar on a video call. Already, they can have 15-minute conversations with candidates to assess hundreds of skills. The AI agent is capable of assessing the candidate for customer empathy, collaboration, or resilience, among other things.
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LinkedIn Launches Free AI Tools For You to Find the Perfect Job
Tech Radar, January 16
LinkedIn has unveiled two new AI-powered features designed to help candidates land their perfect job. Using AI, Jobs Match is set to tell applicants how well their profile matches the qualifications of a role before they proceed to the next stages, helping them to find the most suitable role. On the other side of the process, HR professionals from smaller businesses will be able to use the recruitment platform AI agent to create job ads, find qualified candidates and vet the suitability of different candidates.
In an effort to address the ongoing global skills shortage, LinkedIn plans to make its new AI tools free to all users. However, premium subscribers will get enhanced versions of the tools with more detailed information on how to use them. These new tools represent a next generation of AI for LinkedIn, running on its own proprietary models and first-party data rather than OpenAI models, which power many of the other smart tools on the platform.
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Why Software Developers Need to Build Their Personal Brand
InfoQ.com, January 16
Growing your personal brand can improve your credibility, give you greater impact in the workplace, and lead to better career opportunities. With that in mind, it is important to find out what you are passionate about, learn more about it, get better at it, and share it, in order to build your personal brand over time. Broadly speaking, a personal brand is the combination of the experiences, skills, and values that differentiate you. Whether you like it or not, you already have a personal brand, so it is worth considering how you can shape this brand over time.
Software developers should care about their personal brand because it is part of selling themselves to peers and superiors. It can be a way to get access to better projects, a promotion, or even a career change. By improving your personal brand, you will also improve your credibility. With that influence, you can inspire others and add significant value to the company. For engineers, this impact can extend far beyond their immediate team. If they take full advantage of personal branding, they can not only elevate their careers but also inspire and help others along the way.
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Superpowers of Gender Equality Failing to Establish Gender Balance in IT
Communications of the ACM, December 19
The Nordic countries are often considered to be world leaders when it comes to gender equality. However, even these countries still struggle to achieve gender balance in IT education and work. The mismatch between a high score on international ratings of gender equality and a continuous gender divide in most fields of IT has been labeled a gender equality paradox. Within the Nordic countries, there is growing evidence that this paradox is the result of a gap between gender-equality policies and a lack of engagement to achieve these policy ideals.
The stories from women in Nordic countries are not significantly different from stories told by women in other Western countries such as the U.K. and the U.S. Few of the women interviewed had any particular insight into what it meant to study or work with IT before they started higher education. Rather than considering different IT disciplines and the multitude of uses for IT competence, they navigated the educational landscape with references to gender stereotypes and a limited idea of what IT was. Their images of IT were populated by young male colleagues, many of whom had been playing with computers since their early teens. Few of the women had identified themselves as interested in computers or IT as teenagers, and facing these images they questioned their own participation in the field.
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The Evolution of Computer Science at the University Level
Communications of the ACM, January 17
While undergraduate degrees in computer science are on the rise, they are frequently being combined with arts disciplines, even at schools that specialize in computer science programs. This interdisciplinary approach is designed to enhance creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills among students. Courses that blend computer science with arts-related fields, such as digital media, interactive design, and even music technology, are becoming more common. These efforts are not only making the field more accessible to a diverse range of students, but also preparing graduates for the multifaceted challenges they will face in their careers.
At prestigious technical colleges in the U.S. and around the world, enrollments remain high, but increasingly, students are opting for programs that incorporate other fields of study. And there are many to choose from. Carnegie Mellon University, for example, offers a Bachelor of Computer Science and Arts degree, which the school describes as a technical, critical, and conceptual foundation for students interested in pursuing fields that comprehensively meld technology and the arts. This includes game design, computer animation, computer music, recording technologies, interactive stagecraft, robotic art, and other emerging media.
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