ACM CareerNews for Tuesday, February 17, 2026
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 22, Issue 4, February 17, 2026
These Are the Fastest-Growing Skills Companies Are Hiring For
CNBC, February 9
Hiring for AI skills is skyrocketing, but it is not displacing the need for other skills, according to a new report. The demand for AI-related skills, like using AI in creative or analytics work, more than doubled in the last year, compared to 23% growth for other high-demand skills, according to the latest report from Upwork. The fastest-growing skills on the platform over the last year include AI video generation and editing, as well as AI integration for coding, web development , and e-commerce work.
Beyond AI expertise, businesses are hiring for creativity and talent. Roughly half of business leaders say they would pay a premium for candidates who demonstrate creativity and innovation in their ability to use AI. The continual demand for talent is the recognition that AI cannot do what it does without human expertise, judgment, and creativity. As a result, workers struggling to understand the impact AI is having on their work should not abandon the expertise that they have or the domain they work in. Rather, they should be willing to boost their skills in ways that AI can help them deliver that work differently and better.
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Nervous About the Job Market? How to Stand Out in the Age of AI
ZDNet, January 25
For IT professionals hoping to find work and climb the career ladder, the rise of AI brings new obstacles to long-term career success. Research from Stanford University suggests workers ages 22 to 25 are seeing the steepest declines in employment, especially in fields most exposed to AI-enabled automation. Software engineer jobs for workers ages 22 through 25 declined nearly 20% in 2025 compared to their peak in 2022. With that in mind, it is important for all IT job seekers to develop critical skills for an age of AI.
Successful professionals need to be able to answer key questions about deploying AI. They need to understand how to drive value through this technology, and they need to understand what AI is going to cost, what benefits it will create, and how to make sure they are making the right choices and decisions. The ability to make assessments as the technology grows quickly is where professionals need to be educating themselves and doing it in a way that allows their organizations to come to the right judgments. The ability to work across business and technology will be a crucial skill for managing the speed of organizational transformation, both inside and outside the IT department. Business analysts will need to become business systems analysts. They will have a bit of the technology specialist and a bit of the business analyst. People outside technology will also need to educate themselves on AI, data, and business transformational change.
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Job Hiring Is Growing Fastest For This AI Skil
Fast Company, February 10
With AI spending at an all-time high, Big Tech companies are on a spending spree to hire the best available AI talent. Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon are forecast to spend $650 billion on AI in 2026 alone. While many people assume the most in-demand AI skill is coding, that is not actually the case. Recruiters and companies are looking for a wide range of AI skills right now, including those related to data science, web development, and e-commerce.
A recent report found that the AI skill for which hiring is growing fastest is AI video generation and editing. Demand for that skill is up over 329% year over year. This refers to the ability to use AI tools to cut down on time by generating and editing video content from text, images, or audio. Some of the other AI skills that are most in demand include coding and web development, data science and analytics, and design and creative work. When it comes to web development, the demand for artificial intelligence integration is up 178%. When it comes to data science and analytics, the demand for data annotation and labeling is up 154%.
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Silicon Valley Can't Import Talent Like Before So It’s Exporting Jobs
Rest of World, February 9
If tech talent can not come to the U.S., American companies will go where the talent is. Hiring by Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, and Google has risen sharply in India in recent months. This trend coincides with the growing scrutiny of the H-1B visa, often used by tech companies to bring international talent to the U.S. Of the current openings, just 15% are for entry-level roles that require less than three years of experience. In contrast, AI, machine learning, cloud, and cybersecurity roles comprise nearly half of the vacancies. In 2025, these companies added around 33,000 workers in India, a roughly 18% increase from the previous year.
Based on current trends, it is only natural to expect an even steeper uptick in hiring by U.S. tech giants in India in 2026. Experts believe a big reason for this rush to hire in India is the recent clampdown on the H-1B visa program, which allows highly skilled workers to live and work in the U.S. for up to six years. The H-1B has become much harder to get, and its fee has been increased from around $5,000 per petition to $100,000 per petition. There has also been a sharp rise in rejections and tighter scrutiny of applicants. This changed the math entirely, given how many businesses have depended on the H-1B in the past. The trend poses a risk to tech companies, which are among the biggest beneficiaries of the H-1B. In 2025, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Apple were among the top 10 H-1B visa recipients. The majority of H-1B workers in the tech sector each year are from India.
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Top Tech Jobs 2026: 5 of the Fastest-Growing Tech and AI Careers
Mashable, February 7
As the tech industry goes all-in on artificial intelligence, some of the most in-demand U.S. jobs focus on AI engineering, consulting, and research. The spotlight has primarily been on major tech companies like OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and Google. Yet, smaller firms and startups, along with non-tech businesses, need high-quality AI professionals, too. The search is also on for skilled individuals who can look beyond the initial adoption of AI and the first wave of integration and product launches. The shift reflects a move from organizations simply experimenting with AI to using it deliberately and responsibly.
There is rapidly growing interest amongst employers in hiring AI consultants and strategists. They now rank among the 25 fastest-growing roles in the country. The fastest-growing role in the U.S., according to LinkedIn, is AI engineer. There are a wide variety of applications for artificial intelligence, from powering robotic systems to developing the complex algorithms that drive generative chatbots. An AI engineer can build models capable of performing tasks, along with the required production infrastructure. AI engineers should expect to draw on extensive technical knowledge for building AI agents, optimizing large language model output, and neural network training. They should also have comprehensive mathematical and statistical skills.
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Tech Skills Gap: How Difficult Is It to Hire IT Talent?
Spiceworks.com, January 14
For years, IT leaders have complained about difficulties in hiring and retaining top tech talent. But the narrative on IT hiring may be shifting, as new data suggests the situation has improved. The annual Spiceworks State of IT Report has tracked sentiment on the tech labor market by asking IT professionals if they believe it is currently difficult or easy to hire skilled tech workers. Based on analysis of this data over time, it appears that it is actually easier to hire skilled IT talent today compared to just a few years ago.
In 2026, more than one-half (51%) of IT professionals said it is either somewhat or very difficult to hire skilled IT talent, compared to only 22% who believe it is somewhat or very easy. In other words, IT professionals were more than twice as likely to say it is difficult to hire skilled talent in 2025. While these findings suggest that hiring tech talent remains somewhat challenging, historical data provides a slightly different perspective by revealing how sentiment has evolved over time. When researchers look at the net difficulty to hire skilled IT talent over time, a new trend emerges. In 2025, IT professionals collectively agreed that it was easier to hire skilled IT talent compared to 2023.
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Your Job Is Still Safe From AI Agents For Now
BuiltIn.com, February 5
For years, tech leaders have promised a future in which artificial intelligence could take on entire jobs, not just one or two basic actions. Now, that vision is starting to take shape with a wave of new AI agents entering the workplace. There are now systems that can execute complex, multi-step tasks without human intervention. However, it may still be some time before there are truly autonomous agents that function as skilled workers.
Right now, autonomous AI systems are not ready to take over roles categorized as knowledge work. While some systems show flashes of promise, none consistently demonstrate the level of reliability or judgment required to operate without human supervision. There is still a substantial gap between the ambitious rollout of AI agent products and their current capabilities. Certainly, AI agents have been hyped as major job disruptors, with some claiming that they could eliminate up to half of entry-level white-collar roles by 2030. This prediction could very well come true, but AI agents have underwhelmed so far for several reasons.
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I Offered to Take Less Money to Get Hired But It Still Didn't Work
Slate, January 20
In a difficult hiring market, a growing number of younger job seekers have begun lowballing their salary expectations. The logic is simple: given how impossible it feels to get hired in the current job market, lower salary expectations should make the process of getting hired easier. However, this strategy is rarely effective, even for entry-level jobs.
In a difficult hiring market, a growing number of younger job seekers have begun offering to work for less than the posted salary. This reflects the fact that securing employment in the tech sector is even harder if you are a member of Generation Z. A recent survey found that 38 percent of employers avoid hiring recent graduates for roles they are technically qualified for. This comes on top of the increased use of AI tools in hiring, which a recent study found favors certain demographic groups. If workers do make it to the interview stage, they now face multiple rounds and are subjected to interviews with chatbots and unpaid assignments that shift the cost and risk of hiring onto workers. At the same time, companies focused on efficiency and lean operations are now using AI instead of hiring entry-level workers, freezing roles, or cutting staff altogether.
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What I Learned About Computer Science From My Civil Engineering Dad
Blog@CACM, January 30
A Purdue University computer science professor discusses career lessons learned from his father, a retired civil engineer who worked for the federal government of India. While the modern work of a computer scientist can seem far removed from this world, there are actually a number of important lessons, insights, and viewpoints that can be leveraged to have a better and more fulfilling computer science career. These lessons have made the journey across geographies, cultures, and professions remarkably well, and will likely have enduring value.
Throughout their careers, software developers should plan to create code that can survive and thrive for many years. This means they should develop code capable of being used in far-flung contexts and across different geographies. Regardless of what happens, that code should stand up and work as the people have been told it would. Developers should anticipate the unexpected, such as unexpected interactions with hardware or with other pieces of software. It also includes users who might unpredictably behave outside of the specifications. Software developers also need to design software and code that is resilient to malicious attacks.
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The Invisible Labor Force Powering A
Communications of the ACM, February 6
After AI models are created, there is a constant, large-scale infusion of human judgment to make them safe, coherent, and aligned with human values. That means that they must be trained and refined by people. This process involves tasks like generating high-quality training examples, rating different model responses to reinforce good behavior, and flagging toxic, biased, or harmful content. This essential work is generally not done by high-paid engineers in Silicon Valley. Instead, it is performed by a vast, largely invisible labor force in the form of millions of gig workers, primarily in countries in the developing world.
A low-cost global labor force is essential to how AI models function. Human workers are needed at every stage of AI production for tasks like creating and annotating data, reinforcing models, and moderating content. Current LLM models are not self-made. They are socio-technical systems whose quality and safety hinge on human labor. As a result, a global workforce is essential to making these systems usable. Without an ongoing, large human-in-the-loop layer, current capabilities would be far more brittle and misaligned, especially on safety-critical or culturally sensitive tasks.
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