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- THIS Industry off to a blazing start in 2025
THIS Industry off to a blazing start in 2025
PLUS: No evidence of jobs being entirely automated by AI
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What’s up, party people! Hope everyone had a great weekend! Here are the hottest stories from the job market this week ⬇️
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PARTY PLAN 🎉
đź’» Tech employment off to a strong start in 2025
🤖 No evidence of jobs being entirely automated by AI
đź’µ End-of-year bonuses increased in 2024
But first, MEMES!
MEME OF THE DAY
Tech
Tech employment off to a strong start in 2025
U.S. employers added 228,000 technology occupations during the first month of 2025, marking the second consecutive month of growth, according to a CompTIA review of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics published last week. Open tech jobs also jumped in January as companies added 51,000 net new job postings, for a total of 476,000 active open roles.
Despite the rise in tech jobs, unemployment among IT positions also increased in January to 2.9%, up from 2% the previous month. The national unemployment rate dipped slightly to 4%.
“A potential explanation for the month-over-month rise in unemployment is jobseekers may have restarted their search last month after a pause in December, but haven’t yet found a new position.”
January workforce reductions have become common practice for large tech companies. In 2023, tech providers trimmed thousands of roles, citing economic concerns. Last January, there were more than 34,000 tech job cuts, according to Layoffs.fyi.
The market for AI skills is still on fire, with more than 40,000 active job postings for positions in AI or requiring AI skills, up from 38,500 in December.
AI
No evidence of jobs being entirely automated by AI
Great news for all the AI doomsday preppers worried that all of our jobs are getting replaced! Anthropic (an AI safety and research company) recently completed an assessment of over 4 million user-submitted AI prompts and found that most workers used the technology to augment their work, not replace it.
According to the analysis, workers are using artificial intelligence slightly more for augmentation (57%) than for automation (43%). Computer and mathematical workers, particularly software engineers, made up the bulk of employees using AI for work tasks. Of all requests sent to Claude,
Anthropic’s native AI, 37.2% were in this job category. Some of the most common task requests included software modification, code debugging and network troubleshooting.
“If it remains the case that AI is used only for certain tasks, and only a few jobs use AI for the vast majority of their tasks, the future might be one where most current jobs evolve rather than disappear.”
Only about 4% of jobs used the tool for at least 75% of tasks, the company found, while a little over a third of jobs used AI for at least 25% of tasks. The findings mirror an assessment made by Indeed last fall stating that while generative AI could assist in various tasks, there were no skills for which it was “very likely” to replace a human worker.
Workers with mid-to-high median salary ranges, like computer programmers and copywriters, were the heaviest users of AI. Both low-paying and very-high-paying jobs had very low rates of AI use.
Money 🤑
End-of-year bonuses increased in 2024
Average end-of-year bonuses increased about 2% in December compared to 2023. However, the share of workers receiving a bonus declined by almost 2% during the same period, which indicates that bonuses aren’t being applied equally among staff or across industries.
“This indicates that while some employers are continuing to use bonuses as a tool to keep their top performers engaged, they may not be paying bonuses to the entire staff, as we sometimes saw during the peak of the hiring market in 2021 and 2022.”
“The overall increase in bonuses in most industries reflects a general optimism among small business owners and managers as we head into 2025.”
Average end-of-year bonuses increased significantly among white-collar industries such as communications (22%), technology (7%) and professional services (6%), the report found. These industries had some of the lowest wage growth in 2024 but are forecasted to have the highest wage growth in 2025.
Service industry workers had smaller bonuses in 2024, particularly in transportation and warehousing, where reduced demand led to a 10% decline in bonuses. Tourism, accommodations and personal services bonuses dropped significantly, too, which may signal a cooling period in 2025 after years of pandemic-era wage growth.
At the end of 2024, 3 in 5 companies said they planned to give holiday bonuses, according to a survey by Agital. However, most employees said they’d prefer a shorter workweek or fully covered health insurance over a cash bonus.
During the first half of 2025, more than half of workers plan to look for a new role, according to a Bartech Staffing report. Most job seekers said they want higher pay, better work-life balance, career advancement or flexible work arrangements.
Companies will likely see an ongoing rise in salaries and wages in the next 12 months, with an average 7.3% increase, according to a Deloitte survey. The bullish projection comes as CFO confidence in economic and business conditions soared to a 10-quarter high.
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