ACM CareerNews for Tuesday, January 7, 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 1, January 7, 2025
What IT Hiring Looks Like Heading Into 2025
Computerworld, December 16
Despite low unemployment in the tech industry, IT hiring has slowed over the past two years and is expected to plateau in 2025 as employers prioritize experienced candidates with specialized skills. Companies are shifting from volume hiring to quality hiring, leading to fewer roles for tech job candidates. Staffing firm ManpowerGroup, which just published a new report on hiring, predicted employers will pull back on hiring in 2025 because of economic uncertainty. Overall, IT hiring will increasingly be based on having flexible skills that can meet changing demands.
While hiring plans remain steady at many organizations, employers will likely adopt a more strategic approach in the first quarter of 2025, with a focus on retaining existing talent and prioritizing in-demand skills in areas like IT, financial services, and manufacturing. Companies are taking longer to make a hire and seasonal hiring patterns are changing too. Overall, organizations are adapting and becoming more precise in their workforce planning. The latest U.S. jobs data shows increased IT hiring, indicating stability heading into the new year. At the same time, there are signs of a potential cooling, as companies continue to rebalance after a hiring surge in 2021 and early 2022 driven by pandemic-related demand for tech services.
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Workers Fear Their Skills Will Be Obsolete This Decade
CIO Dive, December 17
As a result of the fast pace of technological change, many workers fear their job skills will become partially or fully obsolete within this decade. In fact, half of U.S. workers are concerned about their skills becoming redundant and say that technology is driving their need for upskilling. The good news for employers is that employees seem to value self-improvement. Nearly one-half (44%) of workers feel the responsibility for upskilling falls on them, and not on the employer.
There are now four major forces affecting the global labor market: globalization, demographic shifts, technological advancements and actions against climate change. These are reshaping the essence of work, worker expectations and skills required for career growth and adaptability. As a result, individuals who focus on continuous learning and skills development put themselves in a more favorable position for employment and are more likely to experience career growth, job satisfaction, and financial stability. Employers are pivotal to this process. By providing training and development opportunities, employers nurture skills integral to organizational success and competitiveness.
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Soft Skills Are More Critical Than Ever For Post-AI Professionals
HR Dive, January 2
The conventional narrative about AI in the workplace has shifted rapidly in recent months as more professionals have begun using the technology in their day-to-day lives. Instead of concern that AI could replace them or fear that their skills would somehow become less marketable, the vast majority of professionals now say they see AI as a tool that will help them unlock new levels of creativity and make them even more valuable to employers.
Increasingly, workers are viewing AI as a career ally and not as a threat. Given the broad applicability of generative AI tools to many work-related tasks, it did not take long for professionals to start to see where AI could help them at work. The more people use AI, the more they embrace its potential to help them do their jobs better. In fact, based on those experiences, 77% of professionals now predict AI will have a high or transformational impact on their work over the next five years. The biggest transformation is not automation or replacement of human work. Rather, it is an augmentation of the human skillset. AI is enabling a shift in focus toward higher-value tasks that put an emphasis on soft skills, and this is where the real potential for AI is really just beginning to come into focus.
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4 Tips for Approaching a Hiring Manager About an Open Job
Dice Insights, January 3
When it comes to advancing your tech career, one of the most impactful strategies is reaching out directly to a hiring manager. Whether you are a software developer, data scientist, or cybersecurity expert, a confident and tailored approach can help you stand out in a competitive job market. That being said, there are four practical tips to help you make a positive impression on hiring managers.
Hiring managers are decision-makers responsible for filling open positions within their teams. They work closely with HR to identify candidates who not only meet the technical requirements but also align with the company culture. In the tech industry, hiring managers often focus on specific skills such as proficiency in programming languages, cloud computing expertise, or experience with machine learning frameworks. While recruiters screen applications and manage initial outreach, hiring managers make the final decision on who joins their team. Establishing a connection with them can give you a competitive edge, especially if you demonstrate that your skills match their specific needs. Before contacting a hiring manager, do your homework. Research the mission and culture of the company, and the specifics of the role you are targeting. Understanding their priorities will help you tailor your message effectively. You can use professional platforms like LinkedIn to identify the hiring manager for the role you are interested in.
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The One Profession Where Being a Jack of All Trades Is the Key to Success
Hackernoon, December 26
If you are planning on a successful career as an IT project manager, then you will need to become a jack-of-all-trades. You will need to learn the basics of everything that might help you. Moreover, you will need to recognize that this is a never-ending process. There always will be something new you will have to learn and apply to keep being successful as a project manager.
In order to successfully complete and deliver a project to production, most of the times you should also take ownership of the product you are building. Additionally, you will act as a project analyst and an architect. You will conduct behavioral analytics, and dive deep into data to understand what to expect and what to improve with each new iteration. You will act as a psychologist to your teammates; and, at other times, think beyond your assigned role and responsibilities. You will play a role in design, content, and user flows. And surely, you will take on a sense of responsibility for the result, even when it is technically not supposed to fall entirely on you. It takes a mix of soft and hard skills to roll out a project successfully and on time.
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What to Include in a Resume to Get More Interviews
TheLadders.com, December 25
In a competitive job market, crafting a resume that stands out is essential, especially for ambitious professionals aiming for six-figure careers. The key to landing more interviews is to include the right information in your resume that highlights your qualifications, showcases your achievements, and aligns with the needs of potential employers. To increase your chances of securing those coveted interviews, you will need to become proficient at creating tailored, rather than generic, job descriptions.
Generic job descriptions will not make your resume stand out. Tailoring your job descriptions to the specific position you are applying for ensures that your experience aligns with the needs of the employer. When it comes to responsibilities and achievements, focus on duties that are directly related to the job you are seeking. Use numbers to showcase your impact and quantify your achievements. Also, highlight the skills that were essential in achieving your accomplishments.
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How To Avoid the Top Hiring Mistakes Recruiters Make
Fast Company, December 27
Organizations are responsible for finding the right person for the right position, and companies that fail to define job roles or inadequately vet qualifications will ultimately hire people who miss the mark. When those new employees struggle to thrive or choose to depart quickly, it can send ripples of frustration across teams, costing the company money, time, and morale. Thus, recruiters and HR leaders need to find ways to avoid making costly hiring mistakes. It all comes down to a well-structured hiring process, which takes a great deal of coordination and effort to run.
Hiring failures impact your company in three different ways. First, it is a major financial cost. After taking into account everything that goes into attracting applicants, conducting interviews, onboarding, and training, it takes roughly two times the labor rate to hire someone. Second are competency costs, which occur when the hiring manager struggles to build trust and credibility within the business. It can be challenging to make a hiring decision, but if the manager has several bad hires in a row, people begin to question their ability to make good decisions. Employees may start to wonder if they can trust the judgment of the manager as a subject matter expert. Third, it can be painful managing someone whose qualifications do not match the needs of the company once they are in the door. Stay ahead of these costs by helping your organizational leaders understand that it pays to wait for the right candidate. Although it helps to quantify the cost of hiring in dollars and cents, the more you can start to shine a spotlight on the non-monetary costs and their long-term impacts, the better.
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Hiring Is Broken And Not in the Way You Think
Inc.com, January 3
Within the tech industry, it is becoming increasingly difficult to connect the right person to the right role. It is no longer enough simply to put together a resume, fired up LinkedIn, and get in touch with a few of your friends or colleagues within the industry. According to one long-time tech professional, the hiring process is so broken that hiring has the potential be the biggest and thorniest concern for business in 2025.
In the current hiring environment, finding the right job can seem like an impossible task. And that starts with crafting the perfect resume. For many job seekers, it can be difficult to explain the transition between different roles and positions, and to do so in a way that will be easy to digest for applicant tracking systems. And the process only becomes more difficult from there. The temptation is to apply to every job, and to spend 40 hours a week reading through every job description possible. The reality, though, is that even with the help of career coaches or insider connections at certain companies, that may no longer be the optimal strategy. The entire concept of finding a job is changing, and job seekers should not be spending their time on low ROI tasks when they could be networking.
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Is Computer Science a Profession? Should It Be?
Blog@CACM, December 30
Computer science is often considered to be a profession, but there are certain definitions of a profession that it sometimes fail to meet. Broadly speaking, a profession is a self-governed group of individuals who purport to, and are considered by the public to, possess special knowledge and skills in a widely recognized body of knowledge derived from research, education, and training at a high level, and who apply this knowledge and exercise these skills under ethical standards in the interest of others.
Professions are known to carry restrictions on freedom and obstacles to entry. They are often self-regulated by a governing body with authority over membership. They usually require education or some form of training or apprenticeship. They have members who are licensed or credentialed, contingent on continuing education. Within the profession, workers are autonomous and objective. Work is often done in the public interest, and there is some expectation of pro bono work, such as providing free services for needy clients. All of these properties of a modern profession, however, may not be a perfect fit for the reality of Silicon Valley.
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Technical Credit
Communications of the ACM, December 26
Technical debt is an established concept in software engineering encompassing an unavoidable side effect of software development. It arises due to tight schedules, which often prioritizes short-term delivery goals over long-term product quality concerns. Even when long-term planning is feasible, the continuous evolution of requirements and technology platforms necessitates design decisions and code revision. Inevitably, even the best software designs will deteriorate over time, leading to technical debt. The opposite of this is technical credit, which remains a relatively unexplored concept within the software industry
Addressing technical debt is an essential task that entails continuous efforts to refactor code bases, update integrated third-party components, and resolve low-priority bugs. A living software system requires constant attention to technical debt. Simply put, technical debt is an unavoidable aspect of the software development process. Technical debt has been a subject of extensive research and analysis within the software engineering community. In many ways, technical debt is the gift that keeps on giving for the research community, delivering an endless source of problems to study from the vast global ecosystem of the software industry. It is simply an intrinsic problem in software engineering that will never go away. Surprisingly, the software engineering literature has yet to explore the opposite concept of technical debt, namely technical credit.
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