You studied computer science but big tech no longer wants you. Now what? | At what age do you hit the peak of your career? | 5 Ways to Develop Talent for an Unpredictable Future

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You studied computer science but big tech no longer wants you. Now what? - The Economist

Armed with a stack of CVs still warm from the printer, Ayara (a pseudonym) plunged into the career fair. The room was already packed with job-seekers. The second-year student wasn’t expecting much. In past years, a computer-science student at the University of California, Berkeley, could hope to emerge from this campus ritual with an interesting summer internship, possibly at a “FAANG” company – the acronym for Facebook (now Meta), Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google. Ayara’s best friend had snagged an internship at Apple at a fair like this one.

But none of the FAANG firms was here this time. Neither were Spotify, Salesforce, Uber or Microsoft. In any case most of those companies and almost 50 others – “all the famous ones” – had already rejected her internship applications a few months earlier. And that was before the latest round of job lay-offs. There were 120,000 tech lay-offs in January and February alone; Alphabet, Google’s parent company, accounted for 10% of those lost jobs. (Meta would announce another 10,000 lay-offs shortly after the fair.) By the time the fair came round in March, Ayara had scaled back her ambitions. “Any company that will hire me is good, at this point,” she told me later.

By the time the fair came round, Ayara had drastically reduced her ambitions. “Any company that will hire me is good, at this point”

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At what age do you hit the peak of your career? - The Economist

WHEN JOHN GOODENOUGH won the Nobel prize in chemistry in 2019 at the age of 97, scientists breathed a sigh of relief. Many had worried that the committee would not get around to honouring his groundbreaking work on lithium-ion batteries from 1980.

Goodenough (who died this year) was the oldest winner of the world’s foremost research prize. Usually laureates are closer to 55 when they pick up the phone to hear the welcome Swedish accent. But it can take years between the publication of a laureate’s career-defining work and recognition from the Nobel committee. At what age are they at the height of their powers?

The answer has changed over time. Science laureates who received the prize between 1901 and 1950 were, on average, 39 years old when they published their winning paper, according to research published in 1957. But a study of more recent Nobel laureates published in 2019 by Rasmus Bjork of the Technical University of Denmark found that science and economics winners were, on average, 44 at the time of their prizewinning work (see chart 1).

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5 Ways to Develop Talent for an Unpredictable Future - Harvard Business Review

We may not know what tomorrow’s jobs will look like, but we can safely assume that when people are more curious, emotionally intelligent, resilient, driven, and intelligent, they will generally be better equipped to learn what is needed to perform those jobs, and provide whatever human value technology cannot replace. Rather than betting on specialists or forcing people into specific niches, organizations need to focus on expanding people’s talents. What we need is not just re-skilling or up-skilling, but pre-skilling: that is, being able to future-proof talent and reinvent peoples’ careers before we even know what tomorrow’s jobs and in-demand skills will be. This article makes five broad recommendations for preparing your workforce for an uncertain future.

Despite the many clickbaity headlines and apocalyptic fearmongering around AI and job automation, the data are rather clear: As I highlight in my latest book, I, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique, you are less likely to lose your job to AI than to another human using AI, especially if you don’t use AI yourself. In that sense, there’s nothing new about the AI age; just like previous disruptive technologies, AI is eliminating some jobs but creating many more new jobs in turn, which desperately require humans.

As illustrated in our recent ManpowerGroup report, 58% of employers see AI as a net creator of new jobs. The problem is that people who are displaced by job automation (for example, brick-and-mortar store managers) don’t automatically have access to all the new jobs that are created by technology (for example, cybersecurity analyst, digital marketer, or AI ethicist). According to the World Economic Forum, half of employees will need reskilling by 2025 to keep up with new technologies, and this figure predates the current generative AI boom.

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How to (Actually) Change Someone’s Mind - Harvard Business Review

Much of leadership boils down to turning adversaries into allies. In this piece, the authors discuss three persuasion strategies leaders can employ when faced with a disagreement in the workplace: the Cognitive Conversation, which is best for convincing colleagues focused on the rational reasons behind a decision, the Champion Conversation, which is best for convincing colleagues with whom you have a strained relationship, and the Credible Colleague Approach, which is best for convincing someone who has preconceived notions that you’re unlikely to be able to change on your own. Armed with these three methods, leaders can modulate their arguments —in terms of both content and presentation — to maximize their chances of reaching an agreement and preserving a positive working relationship.

If you’re a leader, it’s likely that not everyone who works with you will agree with the decisions you make — and that’s okay. Leadership involves making unpopular decisions while navigating complex relationships with colleagues, partners, and clients. But often, you will need to get buy-in from these constituents, and therefore you will need to convince them to change their mind.

There is little friction involved in convincing people who are your natural supporters. But trying to change the mind of a dissenter, or a detractor, is a different story. How do you go about convincing someone who, for one reason or another, doesn’t see eye-to-eye with you? Someone who gives you a flat out “no”?

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