For emerging professions, such as jobs in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) or sustainability (green), labour supply does not meet industry demand. In this scenario of labour shortages, our work aims to understand whether employers have started focusing on individual skills rather than on formal qualifications in their recruiting. By analysing a large time series dataset of around one million online job vacancies between 2019 and 2022 from the UK and drawing on diverse literature on technological change and labour market signalling, we provide evidence that employers have started so-called "skill-based hiring" for AI and green roles, as more flexible hiring practices allow them to increase the available talent pool. In our observation period the demand for AI roles grew twice as much as average labour demand. At the same time, the mention of university education for AI roles declined by 23%, while AI roles advertise five times as many skills as job postings on average. Our regression analysis also shows that university degrees no longer show an educational premium for AI roles, while for green positions the educational premium persists. In contrast, AI skills have a wage premium of 16%, similar to having a PhD (17%). Our work recommends making use of alternative skill building formats such as apprenticeships, on-the-job training, MOOCs, vocational education and training, micro-certificates, and online bootcamps to use human capital to its full potential and to tackle talent shortages.

Generative AI models continue to become more powerful. The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 has ushered in a new era of AI. ChatGPT and other similar chatbots have a range of capabilities, from answering student homework questions to creating music and art. There are already concerns that humans may be replaced by chatbots for a variety of jobs. Because of the wide spectrum of data chatbots are built on, we know that they will have human errors and human biases built into them. These biases may cause significant harm and/or inequity toward different subpopulations. To understand the strengths and weakness of chatbot responses, we present a position paper that explores different use cases of ChatGPT to determine the types of questions that are answered fairly and the types that still need improvement. We find that ChatGPT is a fair search engine for the tasks we tested; however, it has biases on both text generation and code generation. We find that ChatGPT is very sensitive to changes in the prompt, where small changes lead to different levels of fairness. This suggests that we need to immediately implement "corrections" or mitigation strategies in order to improve fairness of these systems. We suggest different strategies to improve chatbots and also advocate for an impartial review panel that has access to the model parameters to measure the levels of different types of biases and then recommends safeguards that move toward responses that are less discriminatory and more accurate.

As modern technology moves forward in such great leaps, there's no way of knowing what the next heavy-hitting career choice of the tech industry will be. One thing is for sure, the importance of the 10 tech careers on this list will only continue to grow. A technology degree is one of the few qualifications out there that you can rely on to see you right. The rate of job offers and job acceptances, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, is higher among computer science graduates than any other STEM qualification. This goes some way towards explaining why we had 32% more computer and information science students in 2014 than in 2010 (according to one CareerBuilder survey), and why the number of students completing science technology degrees grew by 49%.