ACM CareerNews for Tuesday, March 18, 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 6, March 18, 2025
AI Skills Earn Greater Wage Premiums Than Degrees
CIO Dive, March 11
While the demand for AI skills continues to grow, the share of AI roles that have a degree requirement is on the decline, according to new research from the Oxford Internet Institute. From 2018 to 2023, demand for AI roles grew 21% as a share of all job vacancies in the United Kingdom, while mentions of university education requirements fell 15%. At the same time, jobs specifying AI skills earned a 23% wage premium, generally greater than that of roles requiring degrees. Degrees did not command higher wages until the PhD level, at which point they brought in 33% premiums, the report found.
The traditional path of university education leading to higher pay is no longer the default for AI professionals, who are now being rewarded for practical skills and industry-specific know-how. Even among college graduates, employers showed a preference for those with AI skills. A study last year found that employers are significantly more likely to offer both job interviews and higher salaries to graduates with AI capital. Specifically, men with AI skills were shortlisted for positions with wages 12% higher on average, while women with AI experience were considered for roles with wages 13% higher, the study found.
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What Is the Game Plan As Tech Badly Outpaces Talent?
CIO.com, March 13
With the pace of generative AI adoption accelerating across all business sectors and functions, AI-related skills are increasingly in demand. Yet, professionals with real experience in this space are rare and can command significant compensation expectations or pursue roles of their choice. According to a new survey, 99% of senior IT decision makers say their companies are deploying AI, with more than half using and integrating it throughout their organizations. But 76% of respondents say there is a severe shortage of personnel skilled in AI at their organization.
According to a recent HR report, demand for AI skills has increased five-fold between 2023 and 2024. Generative AI-related job listings were particularly common in roles such as data scientists and data engineers, and in software development. And a survey of IT managers in several European countries and the UAE found that 71% reported a shortage of AI skills, making it the most significant skill gap today, ahead of cybersecurity, cloud, and Agile. To help address the problem, companies are doing a lot of outsourcing, depending on vendors and their client engagement engineers, or sending their own people to training programs.
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Do These 3 Things Before a Job Interview to Stand Out
CNBC, March 10
If you are interviewing for high-profile jobs with top tech companies, you will need to take certain steps to stand out during the interview process. People often make the mistake of thinking that their interview is the 30 minutes that they are in the meeting. But the interview starts as soon as the preliminary call with the recruiter takes place. With that in mind, the article proposes three specific things that you can do, such as writing a post about the company on LinkedIn, in order to set yourself up for success during the job interview.
First of all, consider writing a one-page plan for your role before you go into the interview to share with your prospective employer. In it, include a few pillars of the business and how you would contribute to them. You could for example, focus on areas such as revenue, operations, and teamwork, and explain how you would contribute to each. The point is to give a sense of how you could move your employer forward through the different responsibilities of your role. In addition to sending this one-pager to your interviewer in advance, you could also think of a way during the interview where you can bring this up to illustrate a certain point.
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How to Translate Your Government Experience For a Private Sector Resume
Dice Insights, March 11
Transitioning from the federal government to the private sector requires rethinking your professional identity, and that starts by rethinking your resume. It is not just a matter of translating your government experience into equivalent roles and titles for the private sector. Creating a resume that will resonate with recruiters and hiring managers in the private sector requires a mindset shift. You will need to adapt the format, length, content, and narrative of your resume for a private sector audience.
Before you start writing your resume, you need to know your target audience. Figuring out what you want to do next is vital. The reality is that the job you have had may not exist in the private sector, so you may need to make some adjustments. For example, you may need to pursue a lower-level position or dedicate a portion of your time to updating your skills, especially if you have been working with outdated technology. Keep your career goal in mind every time you consider adding a bullet point or skill to your resume. Once you have identified your target market, create an inventory of your hard and soft skills and keywords that match the most common job requirements. The process of creating an inventory can help you identify patterns, create a skill summary, and paint an accurate and compelling picture of how your experience, skills, certifications and impact transfer to a new opportunity.
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Employees at Remote-Friendly Jobs Are Working From Home Nearly Half the Time
Fast Company, March 13
Employees in remote-friendly jobs now spend an average of 2.3 days each week working from home. And when you look at all workers, and not just those in remote-friendly positions, they are working remotely 1.4 days a week, or 28% of the time. That is a huge change from 2019, when remote work accounted for only 7% of paid workdays. By way of comparison, during the height of the pandemic in 2020, a staggering 61.5% of all work was remote.
Employers made a significant jump to remote work in 2020 due to the pandemic. Five years later, many employers, including some high-profile tech companies, are rejecting remote work, demanding that employees return to the office full time. But these examples are not the norm. According to Flex Index, which tracks the workplace strategies of over 10,000 U.S. companies quarterly, fully in-office work is on the decline. At the start of 2023, 49% of employers insisted that their staff report to the office daily. That percentage fell to 32% at the end of 2024. Companies are also retreating from remote-only work. While 31% of employers were fully remote in 2023, only 25% had remained fully remote at the end of 2024. Instead, companies are increasingly turning to hybrid arrangements, in which employees spend a part of their week at the office.
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What STEM Skills Do You Need to Cultivate an Agritech Career?
Silicon Republic, March 13
Agritech careers are defined as roles in which a tech professional uses data, AI, robotic, and biotech innovations in order to contribute meaningfully to the fields of agriculture and sustainability. It is an incredibly diverse sector in that it combines elements of many disciplines across the STEM spectrum. It goes without saying that a knowledge of plant biology, earth science, and genetics is absolutely crucial for anyone aiming to be an expert in agritech.
Aspiring agritech professionals should have a strong educational background in biology and biotech. Students and experts can also consider alternative fields such as synthetic biology, which is the application of engineering principles to existing biotechnology techniques such as DNA sequencing and genome editing, in order to modify or redesign organisms. For STEM professionals looking to make the planet more sustainable, interesting new career opportunities are continually emerging. Agritech specialists can study fields such as water management, soil health, and climate-related topics, in order to conceptualize, develop, test, and eventually implement sustainable, agricultural systems and technologies.
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AI Is Creating New Paths For Women and Closing Doors at the Same Time
eWeek, March 13
AI is opening new career opportunities for women while simultaneously putting their jobs at risk. As companies embrace automation and generative AI, women are advancing in tech. But they also face a higher risk of displacement, exposing a growing divide in the workforce. Two recent reports underscore the contradictory impact of AI on women’s careers. One report finds that women in tech are using AI to advance, while the London School of Economics (LSE) finds that the technology is displacing female workers. This raises questions about whether AI is widening workforce inequalities.
Generative AI is proving to be a career accelerator for women in tech, with 89% of survey respondents saying their AI skills have helped them climb the ladder. The number of women who consider themselves experts in the field has doubled in a year, showing a rapid shift toward AI proficiency. Despite these gains, LSE warns that artificial intelligence is eliminating jobs at a faster rate for women than men, particularly in roles involving administrative tasks, customer service, and clerical work. In the U.S., 79% of employed women hold jobs classified as high-risk for automation, compared to just 58% of men, LSE reports.
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Most Job Seekers Say They Are Uncomfortable With Employers Using AI For Resume Review
HR Dive, March 7
Although most organizations say they plan to rely on artificial intelligence in 2025 to make hiring decisions, most job seekers feel cautious about AI use in recruiting and hiring. In a survey of more than 1,000 people, 67% of job seekers said they are uncomfortable with employers using AI to review resumes and make decisions. In addition, 90% said they want companies to be upfront about using AI in recruiting and hiring. This presents companies with the opportunity to be proactive in developing their strategies for using AI in hiring in a way that can benefit those applying for job openings.
Companies should consider ways to educate prospective applicants on exactly how AI will be used in the hiring process to ease their fears and encourage people to apply. If people only see a notification about potential AI use in hiring, they may not apply if uncomfortable, which could mean losing out on qualified applicants. The finding also highlights the importance of human interaction in recruitment. AI-based tools can support HR teams, allowing them to dedicate more time to personalization and human connection with applicants. In fact, most survey respondents said they prefer AI to be a supportive tool. They ranked their comfort with AI use in specific tasks, indicating the highest comfort with automation in interview scheduling, candidate sourcing, and candidate screening.
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Ushering In a New Era of Business Process Innovation with AI and ML
Blog@CACM, March 11
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have vaulted beyond outcomes of efficiency gains to drive game-changing innovation of business processes. They have evolved rapidly to create and implement processes for complex and data-driven decision-making, transforming business strategy and driving workforce empowerment. Not only have AI and ML streamlined the work to be done, they have also completely redefined job roles and created exciting new possibilities of how AI and ML will revolutionize business processes in 2025.
The era of reactive AI assistants is over. New AI agents are ready to deliver proactive customer engagement and decision-making. These AI agents can and will be customized to collaborate with humans to design and implement strategic tasks and decisions. AI agents will amp up business processes, efficiencies, and customer experiences. Leveraging predictive analytics and models on real-time data, AI and ML will enable businesses to anticipate trends and outcomes, make proactive decisions, and outpace the competition. For example, logistic companies can optimize routes with AI-driven algorithms, manufacturing firms can predictively schedule maintenance even before breakdowns occur, retailers can swiftly adjust prices to counter competitor moves, and financial institutions can anticipate and prevent fraudulent activity before it happens.
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Homo Ratiocinator (Reckoning Human)
Communications of the ACM, February 18
Homo Sapiens is the taxonomic species name for modern humans. However, a more accurate name might be Homo Ratiocinator. This translates as reckoning human, where reckoning refers to both reasoning and computing. This builds on the notion that computing is the dominant paradigm of the modern era. The article takes a look back at the long history of humanity, showing the evolution of Homo Ratiocinator.
Around 2500 B.C., the Sumerians invented the abacus, a manual tool for arithmetical computing. In the 1670s, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz developed his Step Reckoner, a machine capable of addition and multiplication. In 1820, Charles Babbage developed his Difference Engine. His Analytical Engine was a proposed digital mechanical general-purpose computer. While it was never actually built, the proposal gave birth to the idea of a general-purpose programmable computer. Ada Lovelace, a Babbage collaborator, believed that computers could become much more than calculators, including composing elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.
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