ACM CareerNews for Tuesday, October 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 20, October 21, 2025
10 New Job Roles AI Could Create
ZDNet, October 1
Certain job roles will be key to succeeding in an AI-powered workplace, including data scientists, data analysts, and Python programmers. There is also a lot of attention on the prompt engineer role. At least 85% of U.S. workers across all generations believe AI prompting will be an important job skill within the next five years. In a recent survey of young Generation Z workers, 63% of respondents said strong prompt-writing skills will definitely be a career asset. But it remains to be seen which jobs or roles could emerge over the next few years, thanks to the rapid emergence of AI.
While there are many fears about AI (particularly generative AI) usurping job roles, human professionals will be needed more than ever to keep things on track. This is creating the opportunity for new job roles. This includes creating and managing models, maintaining and updating models, and ensuring their accuracy and performance across enterprises. Then there are all the ethical and legal aspects to AI deployments that require constant human supervision. With that in mind, one potential role that could emerge is agent behavior coach. These coaches will be responsible for tuning AI agents to reflect brand voice, business goals, and ethical values. They will ensure that AI does not just act, but that it acts appropriately, balancing autonomy with accountability.
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Hiring Managers Say They Will Pay For In-Demand Skills
CIO Dive, October 3
An overwhelming majority (84%) of hiring managers say they will offer higher salaries to candidates who have skills that are in high demand. Hiring managers identified AI, machine learning and data science; and content strategy, digital project management and marketing analytics as among the top areas where salary premiums will be offered. To attract and retain in-demand talent, employers must provide competitive pay along with meaningful benefits and perks or risk losing top candidates.
Almost 3 in 4 hiring managers say they are worried about meeting candidate salary expectations. Generally speaking, they say total compensation will play a larger role in recruiting. Half of companies expect that offering new benefits and perks will be effective in recruiting next year. While offering a competitive salary is imperative, it should not be the only consideration. Employers who embrace both monetary and non-monetary perks and benefits will stand out to candidates who are evaluating offers.
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Why Generation Z Wants Employers to Pay for More Skills Training
Inc.com, October 17
Companies are increasingly shifting hiring priorities from requiring applicants to have college degrees to recruiting people with specific skills and experience to fill openings instead. As a result, workers are changing how they prepare for the future. New data shows many employees want to pursue additional degrees or vocational training. In addition, they also insist that employers support their efforts to improve their capabilities on the job.
While many workers either taking courses or pursuing professional certification, licensing programs, or skills-based training, their goals are often thwarted by financial, time, or other constraints. As part of that, nearly two-thirds of respondents said they are not actively supported by employers in their objectives. As a result, 34 percent of respondents say they plan to quit their jobs within the next year in search of better growth or new opportunities to boost their skills.
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How to Reshape the Developer Hiring Process for the AI Era
Built In, September 29
AI coding assistants are reshaping the technical talent landscape, rapidly changing the way talent is hired, trained, and retained. While these tools significantly accelerate software development and open new possibilities for engineering productivity, they also demand a fresh perspective on how organizations assess capabilities and build career paths. The definition of what makes a great candidate is expanding with success being a blend of technical fluency, tool literacy, domain understanding, and human judgment. Especially in this current environment with the rise of AI agents, it is no longer just about pure coding skills.
Overall, a candidate with moderate coding skills but strong interpretability instincts and system design thinking might be more valuable in some roles than a pure coder. The disruption to established talent structures goes all the way back to the first step: the interview. With candidates able to leverage AI assistance to present polished outputs, organizations have had to dig deeper during hiring, developing interviews that are increasingly scenario-based, rooted in real-world problems that reflect the environments engineers operate in daily. Paradoxically, to address this challenge, organizations are re-emphasizing the importance of conducting face-to-face interviews alongside projects or demonstrations. This real-time format forces candidates to demonstrate independent thinking and practical skills.
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What an IT Career Will Look Like in 5 Years
CIO.com, October 6
Going forward, successful IT careers will blend soft skills with AI. Early reports suggest that AI is already reshaping the IT job landscape and showing signs of taking over junior IT positions. This is leading to a lot of uncertainty regarding the long-term outlook on IT careers. In response, Oxford University researchers have attempted to offer a data-driven view to the knock-on effects of shifting job requirements in the wake of AI going mainstream. Analyzing 12 million U.S. job postings over five years, the Oxford Internet Institute found that while AI is replacing some lower-level IT skills, overall automation is driving job growth.
Along with new AI-specific roles, demand has risen for complementary skills such as digital literacy, teamwork, and self-management. The strongest formula for security and pay appears in AI-focused roles that combine technical proficiency with skills such as resilience, agility, and analytical thinking. These skills command a significant wage premium. Data scientists, for instance, are offered 5-10% higher salaries if they also possess resilience or ethics capabilities. Experts now advise building a mix of technical expertise, AI fluency, and soft skills to future-proof an IT career given anticipated changes ahead.
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Is Software Engineering Oversaturated in 2025?
Hackernoon, August 25
The old pathways into software engineering are narrowing, while entirely new ones are widening faster than many engineers can pivot. As a result, it can sometimes be difficult to decipher what is happening with the overall market for software engineers. On one hand, traditional full-stack developer roles are disappearing, applications are stacking up, and frustrated engineers are struggling to land interviews. On the other hand, there is a hiring boom in AI and other high-demand specializations, with salaries climbing and roles going unfilled.
Since 2015, more than 177,000 software engineers have entered the U.S. market through degrees, bootcamps, and self-taught routes. But since 2020, demand for traditional software engineering roles has dropped by one-third. Layer on the more than 300,000 tech layoffs since 2022, and you get an intense competition dynamic: senior engineers applying for mid-level jobs, juniors competing with automation, and entry-level opportunities disappearing. The job market may not have shrunk, but it has certainly shifted.
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Nearly All Workers Believe in Title Inflation and Most Say It Is on the Rise
HR Dive, October 16
Most workers (92%) believe that companies use inflated job titles to present the illusion of career growth, all while withholding raises and real advancement. Similarly, 2 in 3 workers say that companies are giving out impressive-sounding titles without better pay more often than in years past. Not only did workers report being given titles without raises or better growth opportunities, but they also said they felt afraid to negotiate for a higher salary or a more senior title.
Previously, experts have warned that title inflation was on the rise. In 2022, one leader at an executive search firm blamed startup culture, saying these employers were unable to pay competitively and compensated workers with bigger titles. In a recent report, 91% of survey-takers said they believe employers use title changes to avoid giving raises. Similarly, in 2023, workplace experts had concluded that companies were increasingly using job titles to attract talent. Management advisory firm Pearl Meyer surveyed more than 400 public, private and not-for-profit organizations, and found that 54% were using titles to attract talent. This was a 35% jump from 2018, and researchers acknowledged that this behavior was occurring in response to an economic lull.
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Know These 8 Unwritten Rules of Searching For a Job in Tech
Dice Insights, October 9
AI-powered hiring and application tools have created new rules that dictate what is acceptable to say and do during the job application process. Understanding these unspoken rules, guidelines, and expectations of recruiters and tech hiring managers can help IT job candidates act appropriately and navigate the intricacies of an increasingly challenging job search process.
Applying for multiple roles at a company when you do not meet the qualifications not only makes you seem desperate and unfocused, but it can also get you blacklisted. Modern applicant tracking systems (ATS) can identify and flag someone who applies to multiple irrelevant jobs, ensuring that you will never get a call back. You might think that applying to five different jobs at the same company would increase your chances, but it does not. In fact, it harms your candidacy for all positions, including ones you might be a better fit for. It is better to spend more time and write a qualitative application for selected opportunities than to come off as unfocused.
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AI Literacy Should Be a Core Engineering Skill Not an Afterthought
Communications of the ACM, October 2
Too many companies and organizations are still treating AI literacy as optional. From their perspective, AI is something to be explored once deadlines calm down or if a project happens to demand it. That mindset is setting engineers up for obsolescence. Engineers who cannot speak the language of AI will soon find themselves unable to fully participate in problem-solving, innovation, and even basic collaboration. Hence, treating AI literacy as central to engineering is the difference between staying relevant and being permanently sidelined.
Engineering has always revolved around the ability to combine logic with creativity, and AI has become the most powerful extension of that tradition. When engineers view AI as the responsibility of someone else, they effectively ignore a toolset that is transforming industries at lightning speed. Understanding how models are trained, what data drives them, and how their limitations manifest is no different from an electrical engineer understanding voltage or a civil engineer understanding stress loads. It is foundational, not optional. Without this literacy, engineers run the risk of being reduced to implementers rather than true problem-solvers.
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Computing Is Indeed a Discipline in Crisis
Communications of the ACM, October 14
Due to the rise of AI, many within the computer science community have deep concerns about the direction of the field. However, at the same time, they feel unable to influence its direction, which is mostly driven by powerful Silicon Valley tech giants. While Silicon Valley is investing tens of billions of dollars chasing the artificial general intelligence dream, academic computing research in the U.S. is facing a severe drought. U.S. academic research has already been dealing with intensified competition for funding over the past 15 years. Going forward, it seems clearer that the federal funding budget for computing research will shrink considerably.
Given the growing gap between increasingly tight federal funding for academic computing research and the widely generous industrial funding, many AI researchers are questioning the viability of the academic path. Beyond the funding issue, there is the question of who will carry out the research in academia. Academic research in engineering and science is carried out by doctoral and postdoctoral students under the supervision of faculty members. About 90% of U.S. graduate programs in computer science and engineering have a majority of international students, but the attractiveness of the U.S. as a place to pursue advanced study has been diminishing for years.
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