LinkedIn CEO on the jobs, skills, and career paths that matter now

Executive overview

50% of US college graduates this year will be unemployed or underemployed. Hiring is sluggish across all levels — but the cause is macroeconomic, not AI.

AI is creating net new jobs. The risk is narrower: roles made up entirely of automatable tasks.

The skill combination that matters most is AI literacy paired with human skills — curiosity, courage, creativity, compassion, communication.

What the hiring data actually shows

• 1.3 million net new AI-related jobs added to LinkedIn
• 600,000+ new data center roles currently open
• Entry-level hiring down ~12% — proportional to all other job declines, not disproportionate
• Skills required for any given role have changed over 25% in the last few years; expected to change 70% by 2030
• Hiring sluggishness driven by macro conditions and interest rates, not AI displacement

Three jobs set to grow

1. Data annotator — domain experts (e.g. doctors, lawyers) paid to evaluate and mark up AI model outputs; every topic, niche, and language needs coverage
2. Data center roles — trade, technical, and maintenance jobs building the physical infrastructure AI runs on
3. Forward deployed engineer — sits inside a business unit (marketing, product) with both business acumen and AI fluency; bridges business need and AI capability to generate real ROI

Skills worth investing in now

• AI literacy: familiarise yourself with tools and how they can improve your specific work — you don't have to use them constantly
• The five C's (from Roslansky's book Open to Work): curiosity, courage, creativity, compassion, communication
• Soft skills are not optional — they are harder to automate and increasingly what differentiators look like
• Think in months (what new skills can I learn now?) rather than years (where do I want to be in five years?)

Career paths and credentials

• No linear career path exists in the LinkedIn data — it's non-linear across the board
• Roles are flattening; generalists are increasingly valued over narrow specialists
• College credentials matter less in hiring; skills and posted content matter more
• Two emerging paths for entry-level workers: micro-entrepreneurship/creator roles, and trade roles seen as more AI-resilient

Jobs at risk

• Any role that is purely a bundle of automatable tasks — summarising, rewriting, translating
• Framework: break your job into its component tasks; assess which are automatable; if most are, start acquiring new skills now
• AI is good at content transformation tasks — roles built around those are most exposed

Growing on LinkedIn

• Post content that demonstrates what you know — recruiters use posts to assess personality, depth, and identity
• LinkedIn's feed is optimised for economic opportunity, not viral engagement — quality of audience over quantity of views
• Personal stories tied to real events perform well, especially for younger creators
• 75 million members identify as creators; 4 million list it as their full-time job title