As companies embrace AI, it's a job-seeker's market
As companies embrace AI, it's a job-seeker's market
By Ann Saphir October 15, 2018
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Dozens of employers looking to
hire the next generation of tech employees descended on the University of
California, Berkeley in September to meet students at an electrical engineering
and computer science career fair.
Boris Yue, 20, was one of thousands of student attendees,
threading his way among fellow job-seekers to meet recruiters.
But Yue wasn’t worried about so much potential
competition. While the job outlook for
those with computer skills is generally good, Yue is in an even more rarified
category: he is studying artificial intelligence, working on technology that
teaches machines to learn and think in ways that mimic human cognition.
His choice of specialty makes it unlikely he will have
difficulty finding work. "There is no shortage of machine learning
opportunities," he said.
He's right.
Artificial intelligence is now being used in an
ever-expanding array of products: cars that drive themselves; robots that
identify and eradicate weeds; computers able to distinguish dangerous skin
cancers from benign moles; and smart locks, thermostats, speakers and digital
assistants that are bringing the technology into homes. At Georgia Tech,
students interact with digital teaching assistants made possible by AI for an
online course in machine learning.
The expanding applications for AI have also created a
shortage of qualified workers in the field. Although schools across the country
are adding classes, increasing enrollment and developing new programs to
accommodate student demand, there are too few potential employees with training
or experience in AI.
That has big consequences.
Too few AI-trained job-seekers has slowed hiring and
impeded growth at some companies, recruiters and would-be employers told
Reuters. It may also be delaying broader adoption of a technology that some
economists say could spur U.S. economic growth by boosting productivity,
currently growing at only about half its pre-crisis pace.
Andrew Shinn, a chip design manager at Marvell Technology
Group who was recruiting interns and new grads at UC Berkeley's career fair,
said his company has had trouble hiring for AI jobs.
"We have had difficulty filling jobs for a number of
years," he said. "It does slow things down."
“COMING OF AGE”
Many economists believe AI has the potential to change
the economy’s basic trajectory in the same way that, say, electricity or the
steam engine did.
"I do think artificial intelligence is … coming of
age," said St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank President James Bullard in an
interview. "This will diffuse through the whole economy and will change
all of our lives.”
But the speed of the transformation will depend in part
on the availability of technical talent.
A shortage of trained workers "will definitely slow
the rate of diffusion of the new technology and any productivity gains that
accompany it," said Chad Syverson, a professor at the University of
Chicago Booth School of Business.
U.S. government data does not track job openings or hires
in artificial intelligence specifically, but online job postings tracked by
jobsites including Indeed, Ziprecruiter and Glassdoor show job openings for
AI-related positions are surging. AI job postings as a percentage of overall
job postings at Indeed nearly doubled in the past two years, according to data
provided by the company. Searches on Indeed for AI jobs, meanwhile increased
just 15 percent.
Universities are trying to keep up. Applicants to UC
Berkeley's doctoral program in electrical engineering and computer science
numbered 300 a decade ago, but by last year had surged to 2,700, with more than
half of applicants interested in AI, according to professor Pieter Abbeel. In
response, the school tripled its entering class to 30 in the fall of 2017.
At the University of Illinois, professor Mark
Hasegawa-Johnson last year tripled the enrollment cap on the school's intro AI
course to 300. The extra 200 seats were filled in 24 hours, he said.
Carnegie Mellon University this fall began offering the
nation's first undergraduate degree in artificial intelligence. "We feel
strongly that the demand is there," said Reid Simmons, who directs CMU's
new program. "And we are trying to supply the students to fill that
demand."
Still, a fix for the supply-demand mismatch is probably
five years out, says Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist at Glassdoor. The
company has algorithms that trawl job postings on company websites, and their
data show AI-related job postings having doubled in the last 11 months.
"The supply of people moving into this field is way below demand," he
said.
A JOB-SEEKER’S MARKET
The demand has driven up wages. Glassdoor estimates that
average salaries for AI-related jobs advertised on company career sites rose 11
percent between October 2017 and September 2018 to $123,069 annually.
Michael Solomon, whose New York-based 10X Management
rents out technologists to companies for specific projects, says his top AI
engineers now command as much as $1000 an hour, more than triple the pay just
five years ago, making them one of the company's two highest paid categories,
along with blockchain experts.
Liz Holm, a materials science and engineering professor
at Carnegie Melon, saw the increased demand first-hand in May, when one of her
graduating PhD students, who used machine learning methods for her research,
was overwhelmed with job offers, none of which were in materials science and
all of them AI-related. Eventually the student took a job with Proctor &
Gamble, where she uses AI to figure out where to put items on store shelves around
the globe. "Companies are really hungry for these folks right now,"
Holm said.
Mark Maybury, an artificial intelligence expert who was
hired last year as Stanley Black and Decker's first chief technology officer,
agreed. The firm is embedding AI into the design and production of tools, he
said, though he said details are not yet public.
"Have we been able to find the talent we need?
Yes," he said. "Is it expensive? Yes."
The crunch is great news for job-seeking students with AI
skills. In addition to bumping their pay and giving them more choice, they
often get job offers well before they graduate.
Derek Brown, who studied artificial intelligence and
cognitive science as an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon, got a full-time
post-graduation job offer from Salesforce at the start of his senior year last
fall. He turned it down in favor of Facebook, where he started this past July.
(Additional reporting by Jane Lee; Editing by Greg
Mitchell and Sue Horton)
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