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For organizations looking to attract talent, job seekers are interested in competitive compensation, career and professional development, and a commitment to healthy work life balance. Expect heavy competition for software engineers, software developers, and cloud, database, and systems engineers and administrators, as well as end-user support professionals.  Here are 10 jobs expected to be in high demand for 2025, the skills and experience you should look for when hiring, and the salary ranges you’ll want to pay to stay competitive in the marketplace — ranked by average pay. The 10 most in-demand tech jobs for 2025 Job 25th percentile 50th percentile 75th percentile Data engineer $125,750 $154,000 $179,500 Senior software engineer $121,250 $147,500 $177,250 Software developer $106,500 $130,750 $153,000 Network/cloud architect $108,250 $129,750 $152,000 Systems engineer $97,750 $119,250  $148,500  Developer/programmer analyst $94,750 $120,500  $142,500  Senior consultant $96,750 $116,000 $136,250 Systems administrator $78,750 $96,250  $115,500  Desktop support analyst $55,000 $66,500  $77,250  Help desk – tier 1 $40,500 $49,000 $54,750 25th percentile: new to the type of role, still acquiring relevant skills 50th percentile: average experience, has most of the necessary skills 75th percentile: above average experience, has all needed skills Data engineer Data engineers are responsible for building, designing, and maintaining the tools and software required to analyze and process large data sets in the enterprise. It’s an important role for maintaining data in a business, with a focus on ensuring data tools are scalable, reliable, and secure across the organization. source

In many cases, this eliminates the need for specialized teams, extensive data labeling, and complex machine-learning pipelines. The extensive pre-trained knowledge of the LLMs enables them to effectively process and interpret even unstructured data.  An important aspect of this democratization is the availability of LLMs via easy-to-use APIs. Today, almost every developer knows how to work with API-based services, which makes integrating these models into existing software ecosystems seamless. This allows companies to benefit from powerful models without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. Alternatively, several models can be operated on-premises if there are specific security or data protection requirements. However, this comes at the cost of some of the advantages offered by the leading frontier models.  Take, for example, an app for recording and managing travel expenses. Traditionally, such an application might have used a specially trained ML model to classify uploaded receipts into accounting categories, such as DATEV. This required dedicated infrastructure and ideally a full MLOps pipeline (for model training, deployment and monitoring) to manage data collection, training and model updates.  source

In a down economy, stick with a large company “When I was thinking of leaving my job to start the company I now own,” says Andrew Nieman, co-founder and managing principal at Arro Labs, “my then boss told me that, in a down economy — and we were very admittedly, at the time, in a down economy — the smart move is to stick with a big company.” This is a commonly held belief. People typically assume there is job security in a big company and that large firms are better able to weather economic ups and downs. “You generally think of them as having less inherent risk, and it’s a safer career move to stay there,” says Nieman. With the benefit of hindsight, though, he sees that this assumption is false and that the advice, if he had listened to it, would not have served him well. “Big companies are forced to make harsh, often shortsighted decisions,” he says. “Whether it’s to move the stock price or satisfy executive KPIs you didn’t even know existed. That means you might be swept up in a layoff round of 2,000 people without explanation.” Eliminating staff — especially key decision-makers — is brutal at a small company. They think hard before cutting loose key roles. Those people are core to the operation of the organization. “You’re safer at a small company when times are tough,” says Nieman. “You likely have a closer relationship with the final decision-makers, your impact on the company is more apparent to everyone there, and it’s easier for management to envision the harsh reality of life without you. A company will feel the impact of pulling one person out of a 20-, 50-, or 100-person organization more than from a 25,000-person organization.” Always have the final word “Early in my career I was counseled to ‘always have the final word’ in any decision,” says Raviraj Hegde, SVP of growth at Donorbox. “The idea was to establish authority by having my voice be the loudest and, ultimately, unquestioned.” This advice might stem from a belief that leaders should always appear decisive and confident, he says. But it didn’t go well for him. With this advice in mind, he found himself inadvertently shutting off input from team members and losing valuable, diverse perspectives, ideas, and solutions. None of this served his goals or those of the company. “It finally dawned on me that great leadership isn’t about having the last word,” he says. “It’s about facilitating a team culture where everybody is comfortable contributing. As I turned my attention to open communications and team-member empowerment, our outcomes started to improve — as did our team dynamics.” source

Findings among Fortune 1000 firms reveal that ‘techno optimism prevails,’ with 96.6% of organizations seeing the overall impact of AI as beneficial. source

Under the rules, only a core group of 20 trusted countries, including most large European and Asian democracies, are exempt from export caps. However, key US partners including India, Singapore, Vietnam, and Mexico are excluded, along with smaller European nations such as the Baltic republics and Czechia, signaling disparities in US trust. Local cloud providers could qualify as “validated end users” by meeting specific security assurances, as seen in a recent US-UAE deal allowing G42 to access Microsoft’s advanced AI technology after limiting ties to China. What it means for enterprises The implications for enterprises are far-reaching. Under the new framework, businesses relying on GPUs for cloud services or AI development may face cost increases, supply chain challenges, and delays in accessing cutting-edge technologies. For cloud providers, compliance costs linked to retrofitting data centers with stringent security requirements could create additional burdens. “For enterprises, the export control framework may disrupt GPU supply chains, causing project delays and increased operational costs, while forcing enterprises to invest in alternative technologies, potentially impacting their competitiveness and profitability,” Forrester’s Dai said. source

00:00 Hi, good afternoon and welcome to CIO Leadership Live. I’m your host, Maryfran Johnson, CEO of Maryfran Johnson Media, and the former editor in chief of CIO magazine. Since November of 2017 this video and audio podcast has been produced by the editors of cio.com and the digital media division of foundry, which is an IDG company. Our growing collection of past interviews all openly available on cio.com and CIOs YouTube channel now includes more than 150in depth conversations with Chief Information technology and digital officers from mid size to large enterprises across every industry joining that esteemed lineup of CIOs is my guest today, Annie Baymiller, who is the Senior Vice President and CIO At Owens Corning. Owens Corning is a $10.4 billion global building and construction materials company based in Toledo, Ohio, and employing 19,000it’s four integrated businesses, roofing, insulation, composites and doors provide products and services across 33 countries, leveraging the company’s 86 year history of material science, manufacturing and market innovation as the CIO for the last two years, Annie is accountable for Global Information Technology with a focus on digital transformation, analytics, cybersecurity, modern enterprise platforms and business partnerships. She reports to CEO Brian Chambers. Before her current role, Annie served as the it vice president for the roofing and insulation businesses globally, and also led Enterprise Project Management Europe, information technology and the market facing digital strategy for the entire company, a 15 year veteran of the company, Annie joined Owens Corning in 2006 as a project manager, leading SAP deployments and serving as the European IT portfolio leader. After taking a three year consulting break where she gained broader business experience in process transformation and organizational strategy. She rejoined the OC in 2016 as IT director, and was later promoted to vice president of it and then onward to CIO. Among her many industry honors, earlier this year, Annie was chosen as the 2024 global CIO of the year in the Ohio Orbee Awards. She also serves on the board of the Owens Corning Foundation, the Susan G komen community board, and as board chairman for tutor smart, an academic tutoring non profit based in Toledo. Annie, thanks so much for joining me today. Welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It is our pleasure. Let’s start out talking about the range and scope of the CIO job today at Owens Corning, tell us about your marching orders coming into the role two years ago. So I think the predecessor story is sets up the stage for the my journey into the company. So my long time mentor and the prior CIO here at OC who probably many know, Steve Zerby, he had positioned the organization in such a great way, I’d say, especially in terms of talents and in terms of our close connection with the business. So as I came into the role two years ago. You know, it was more about shaping it for the future. And so we spent more time in those first few months being more intentional about the longer term IT strategy and what strategic pillars we wanted to put in place that were tied up to the enterprise strategy. And it turned out to be really useful for us, because it allowed us to communicate. It allowed us to align on the investments going forward. It allowed us to make sure that everyone on the team could see as a function where we were headed.And then, obviously it was a way to position our investments against the strategic intent. So kind of an example inside those would be, you know, we have a pillar around driving business growth. We have a pillar around leading digital transformation, modernizing and flexing our core, and then, as you would expect, protecting with cybersecurity. So that was kind of the big fundamental shift. Is really anchoring in on kind of the longer range strategy. And then as we put that in place over the last year and a half now, it’s been building out those building blocks of where do we continue to need to make new investments and using it as a as a shaping tool with the executive committee. Yeah, well, and it does seem like it’s been a very graceful transition from from Steve to you. And of course, we, we knew Steve extremely well at CIO magazine and at CIO.comI we were always chasing after him to be on stage or to speak and, you know, and try to get him to apply for big, important CIO awards, that kind of thing he was. He’s just a very delightful guy. So I hope he’s enjoying himself now in retirement. Lunch with him two weeks ago, and he is so, oh, good, good, good. Well, it’s always such a great story when there’s been a mentorship and a way to do succession planning, because that is something that IT leadership has not always had the luxury to do in the past. So good. Good for the OC that you guys did, I was just gonna say, and not only did we do good, I think, planning, we also had a long transition period, which was really helpful. And so he was sliding out a role as I was getting one step deeper every day, but by the time he was ready to move on to next phase of life, I was feeling like I was more positioned to lead. So the long transition, I think, really helped, from a stability point of view, good, good. Well, that’s got to be a fine balance to strike. You know, you want to, you want to stay around and be as helpful as possible, but then you don’t want to get underfoot. So, so I’m sure it’s, it seems like it’s working out really well. One of the pillars you mentioned, the business pillars, that driving business growth. I love the sound of that, because too often in

OpenAI set out to build AGI from its founding in 2015, when the concept of AGI, as Altman put it to Bloomberg, was “nonmainstream.” “We wanted to figure out how to build it and make it broadly beneficial,” he wrote in his blog post. “At the time, very few people cared, and if they did, it was mostly because they thought we had no chance of success.” But the company recruited talent with the lure “just come build AGI,” and in April 2023 appeared to have at least made some strides toward it: Microsoft researchers said that ChatGPT had “sparks” of AGI. They demonstrated that “beyond its mastery of language” GPT-4 could solve “novel and difficult tasks” including math, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology, and more, without special prompting. source