Tech companies don’t want new graduates because they believe that AI is going to annihilate them. IBM is hiring non-stop

The business world is so terrified of AI that recent graduate hiring is in crisis. However, there is a company that is just going in the opposite direction: IBM not only has not frozen these hirings, but is tripling them. And his argument is powerful. IBM wants new graduates. “We are tripling our hiring of junior positions,” explained Nickle LaMoreaux, IBM’s top human resources officer, in a interview at Charter. In fact, he highlighted, those positions they are filling “are for software developers and for all those jobs that they tell us AI can do.” It is a surprising statement, especially considering that the market trend is just the opposite. Unemployment among recent graduates—and among young people—is at record levels in the last decade in the United States. Source: Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The problem of unemployment in Gen Z. The young people of the generation Z (Born between 1997-2012 approximately) face one of the most complex times when looking for a first job. In the United States, the unemployment rate for recent graduates is at 5.6%, the highest in the decade except for the time of the pandemic. Managers of technology companies have been warning for some time that AI is going to greatly impact work, and especially in the field of programming. Junior profiles with a new focuseither. While competitors appear to show growing interest in replacing entry-level positions with automation — 37% plan to do so according to Korn Ferry—, IBM is changing the mentality. Newbie software engineers won’t spend their days chipping away at routine code that an AI can generate. Instead, they will focus on interacting with clients and monitoring model results. AI no longer replaces the junior, but forces him to be more strategic from day one. IBM is not the only one to think this way. Although it seems that the trend towards automation is clear, IBM is not alone in this flight forward. Dropbox is doing the same, and its head of human resources, Melanie Rosenwasser, believes that Gen Z has a fundamental advantage: they are better prepared to work with AI than veterans. According to her, “it’s as if (the young people of Gen Z) were on their bikes in the Tour de France while the rest of us are on training wheels,” she said. on Bloomberg. But. IBM’s move is not without a certain cynicism. The company made this announcement a week after carry out a mass layoff to focus on growth areas. It is as if they have created a revolving door in which they have removed expensive seniority to let in cheaper youth. AI as an amplifier. Be that as it may, the CEO of IBM, Arvind Krishna, defends this strategy – logical – indicating that AI is not a substitute for human capacity, but rather an amplifier. The speech, whether we believe it or not, represents a unique commitment, especially now that companies seem to propose that they will do the same with many fewer employees. For IBM, the bet is on loyalty and knowledge cultivated from the base instead of subordinating everything to algorithms. “Developers, developers, developers!”. At the .NET event that Microsoft organized in 1999, the famous viral moment occurred in which an overexcited and sweaty Ballmer sang that from “Developers, developers, developers!” non-stop. The company was trying to attract talent again with that speech, but in reality that work had been intense years before. Hiring recent graduates worked very well for Microsoft. Steven Sinofsky, who led the development of Windows 7, told on Twitter how Microsoft became what it was thanks to its strategy of hiring recent graduates—even if they had not completed their degree. The development of Office, for example, was especially nourished by these young people, but that strategy was stopped. As Sinofsky explains, “The ‘dark times’ were accentuated by a forced pause in hiring recent graduates, and the consequences were felt five years later.” In Xataka | “They are much more daring”: Gen Z is overturning all labor consensus in its massive entry into work

In Spain there are many graduates. The problem is that they are not the ones that companies need.

a study on educational quality in Europe has put in black and white one of the keys to what is happening in the labor market in Spain: Graduate rates in Spain have exceeded the European average. However, the data suggests that these graduates have studied the wrong races. The result is a mismatch in the labor market and a inefficient use of talent because an important part of those who have spent years training end up in positions that either do not require that level of education or have nothing to do with the studies they completed. ​Many university students, many vacancies. According to the report ‘Education and Training Monitor‘ Prepared by the European Commission, in the age group of 25 to 34 years, 52.6% of people in Spain have higher education. This places Spain above the EU average, with 44.1%, and the European goal of 45% set for 2030. This is great news since Spain has already exceeded the European goal for graduates, and even so it continues to expand that advantage year after year. The problem is that all these graduates do not respond to what the labor market is demanding. According to Eurostat data By 2024, 35% of higher education graduates aged 20 to 64 are working in jobs for which their level of qualification is not required, compared to an EU average of 21.9%. Spain is at the rate of highest overqualification in all of Europe. What is studied and what is needed. The European Commission emphasizes that this mismatch between the higher education courses being taken in Spain and the demand from companies is structural and that the Spanish economic system is not being able to absorb the volume of graduates it generates. ​The European report describes a low employability of graduates in humanities, social studies and arts, who are more likely to end up in jobs below their educational level or far from the field they studied. In parallel, it is noted that overqualification affects women to a greater extent than men, which aggravates the gender inequalities in qualified employment. On the other hand, the demand for specialists in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), grows much faster than the supply of graduates. In 2024, the number of vacancies per worker in the green and digital sectors will exceed the average by 52% and 212% respectively, showing a growing gap between the skills coming out of the education system and those requested by companies. ​FP is taking off, but it’s not enough. The Vocational Training figures in Spain progress positivelybut they have not yet reached the point of balance between the supply of training and the demand for professionals. According to the study, only 10.1% of adults aged 25 to 64 have a mid-level VET qualification, well below the 34.6% average in the EU. This lower presence of intermediate qualifications translates into worse employment results. The data suggests that the average employment rate in 2024 of recent VET graduates is 68.6%, compared to the 80.0% European average and far from the target of 82%. Connecting education and business improves job placement. The dual vocational training reform It does seem to show signs of a positive impact on job placement. According to data From the Ministry of Education, Vocational Training and Sports, 73.8% of mid-level vocational training graduates in dual modality from the 2019-2020 academic year were working four years after finishing, compared to 66.5% of those who completed non-dual vocational training programs. Furthermore, 33.8% of dual vocational training students got a job in the first year after graduating, which confirms that direct contact with the company facilitates the transition to the labor market. In Xataka | Spain has a big problem with the generational change in the labor market: there is a lack of 3.5 million young workers Image | Unsplash (Christian Lendl)

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