Seeking a Career in AI? Here Are Some Pointers
CIOs seek candidates willing to learn and evolve; technical skills a baseline; experience on a project team a plus; open source contributions can differentiate; watch for robot dogs
By John P. Desmond, Editor, AI in Business
For young people looking to move into a career in AI, or mid-career professionals trying to ride the wave of AI, recent accounts offer some guidance.
Gil Haus, a CIO at JPMorgan Chase, said in a recent account in Computerworld that he hires new people from a variety of educational backgrounds, spanning traditional universities, coding bootcamps and workforce development programs. He focuses on candidates willing to learn and evolve.
Asked what he looks for to hire for entry-level positions, Haus stated, "It’s less about what you know compared to how open you are to learning new things and growing as a technologist. We look for candidates that have the aptitude and attitude [for] learning and collaborating with their peers.
Chase runs its own development and training programs to help employees fill gaps in technical skills. Haus stated, “We have a culture of continuous learning.”
Advice from CIO Haus to recent graduates on how to stand out among job applicants: “Never stop learning. The skills you mastered a few years ago may no longer be relevant today.”
Getting some degree of practical business experience is a good idea to improve candidate marketability. At Chase, IT goes through constant renewal. Has stated, “Today, we’ve reorganized ourselves away from project-based teams into product-based teams. Each product now has a dedicated tech, product, design, and data & analytics leader to help speed up decision-making and improve connectivity and collaboration.”
Having some experience enables candidates to imagine being closer to customers. "Looking at problems from the lens of the customer is an important muscle for organizations to flex,” Haus stated. “For technologists and software developers to deliver a solution, they have to be close to the customer problem and fully understand the issue, long before a code is written by an engineer."
Hot technology areas today include machine learning, AI and cloud computing. “Candidates who come in with experience and skills in this area are a plus,” Haus stated. To build its own pipeline of technology talent, Chase started the TechConnect program. “Upon completing the rigorous, full-time training program, participants transition to our Software Engineer Program and then software engineering roles,” Haus stated.
Technical Skills are Baseline; Soft Skills a Plus
In a 2021 account in CIOInsight, CIOs were asked what they look for when hiring recent graduates for IT jobs.
Arthur Linuma, cofounder and president of software company ISBX of Los Angeles, stated, “We expect IT graduates to have coding skills in at least one of the main languages: Java, HTML, CSS and C++. Ideally, they should have some familiarity with one of the more exotic languages like C#, Python, AngularJS, Ruby or React.
He has a suggestion for graduates who want to build experience in the industry. Contribute to open source projects, such as via GitHub. “Candidates must have a firm understanding of systems architecture and database management. As the future of IT is data, strong data analysis skills are a must,” Linuma stated.
Thilo Huellmann, CTO at software company Levity.ai of Berlin, Germany, suggested that for a young graduate to get experience in being on a team that sees a project through from start to finish would be a differentiator. “It’s a surefire way to set fresh IT grads apart, to stand out from the crowd,” he stated. He recommended taking project management classes and/or volunteering on a project that can result in a recommendation letter.
One CIO put an emphasis on skills in communicating with others and building relationships. Rich Temple, VP and CIO at Deborah Heart and Lung Center in New Jersey, stated, “I place a particular emphasis on the so-called ‘soft skills.’ Building constructive and collaborative relationships is extremely important, even in the most technically complex roles. Ensuring that we aren’t hiring someone who could be toxic to a positive team environment or would work in a “bubble,” not being cognizant of the larger impact of their work, is exceedingly important to me.”
A different take on working in the AI industry is from the point of view of an anthropologist, who observed the culture of people who staffed a cloud data center for six years.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrateis is a PhD candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who calls himself a cloud anthropologist. In a recent account posted on Aeon, he recounted some of the experience.
“Though often forgotten, this community of technicians, engineers and executives is integral to the functioning of our increasingly digitized society,” he states, adding in part, “these workers are very much flesh and blood.”
Data centers the world over exist in a range of conditions–regulations, climate, power sources–and they vary in their technical sophistication, which translates to percent uptime, the lifeblood of the business. Google’s facilities are “idyllic” while two-thirds of data centers are not as impressive. “Some are found in moldy basements,” the author states.
The high tech giants Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook/Meta run hyperscale data centers with ultra-efficient designs and cooling systems, highly-automated, monitored by technicians on scooters. Robotic dogs might be employed as well.
A Robot Dog Could Take Your Job
A robotic dog is being customized by engineering students at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, to work in a data center. BYU is partnering with local startup Novva, to deploy the customized Spot dog robots developed by Boston Dynamics.
“We’re trying everything we can to build a better data center, so why not give it a shot?” stated Wes Swenson, CEO of startup Novva, in an account in Datacenter Dynamics. “So far we’re actually really happy with what it does.”
Initially, the robots monitor temperature, greet guests, and confirm security clearances via facial scanning and recognition.
Novva’s flagship data center is on a 100-acre campus in West Jordan, Utah. It is to be built in four phases out to 1.5 million square feet. The first 300,000 square foot phase was completed in late 2021. The sheer size is driving innovation in how the center is managed. “Such large facilities really require a different approach,” Swenson stated.
He plans to concentrate human data center workers on watching for anomalies, and use the robots for repetitive tasks that tend to bore humans.
BYU engineering students, including electrical, mechanical and software engineers, work on the robot’s autonomous navigation software, and its ability to recognize faces and say the name of the person it encounters.
Swenson envisions deploying three to four dogs per facility, for 16 to 20 total eventually.
Young graduates and mid-career enhancers anticipating these and other advances, would be well-advised to tune their resumes to complement robots in the data center and other automation advances.
Read the source articles and information in Computerworld, CIOInsight, Aeon and in Datacenter Dynamics.
(Write to the editor here.)