IBM study finds AI workforce skills gap

What it means for hiring

IBM and Oxford Economics surveyed 1,500 chief HR officers and 8,800 employees between April and June. Seventy-one percent of the HR leaders said the ability to supervise, check and override AI output is the most important skill, but only 29 percent of employees rated judgement that highly. Eighty percent of HR leaders said AI creates invisible work, such as checking and correcting its output, and 42 percent of employees said AI had increased their workload. Organisations that clearly defined which work is human-led, AI-assisted or AI-executed reported 18 percent lower risk and 20 percent better quality.

For engineering employers the finding is practical. AI tools are now part of chip design, verification, test and code review, and the engineer who is valuable is the one who can tell when the tool is wrong. That is experience, and it cannot be learned from the tool. Hiring managers should ask candidates how they check an AI result, not only which tools they have used, and should be careful about replacing senior reviewers with cheaper staff plus software. The survey also found that almost half of organisations leave HR out of AI strategy, which is how a team ends up hiring for the tool instead of the judgement.

Read the original at eeNews Europe .