AI agents
Agentic AI is a topic that opens the discussion around AI’s usage going further to achieve long-term goals.
For communicators, how agentic AI can increase personalisation is where the gains are in terms of employee engagement. AI agents can be tailored to specific learning platforms to streamline the process, particularly with onboarding new talent.
For employer brand practitioners, roles will need to change as knowledge workers offload routine and administrative work to AI and agents. It will be important to keep the finger on the pulse on the value that emerging roles like prompt engineers, AI integration specialists and AI ethics experts will bring to organisations.
It’s worth considering the other side of the AI coin. Some 47% said they didn’t know how to unlock productivity benefits and in fact survey of 2,500 professionals found generative AI increased workload for 77% of workers.
US-UK tech deal
A recent UK-US investment deal was struck earlier this week, with the likes of Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI participating in a multibillion-dollar package to turbocharge tech in the UK. This would be used to build the “low-carbon economy” by encouraging the build-out of new nuclear power stations to power the datacentres and supercomputers that underpin the technology.
Part of this investment we hope will mean an increase in vacancies in the world of tech more broadly. Specifically, technical roles, to manage both greener technologies, and other more sophisticated work should rise to the top.
Prevalence of senior-level roles
Via The Pragmatic Engineer, there appear to be as many senior-level positions open as mid and entry-level roles, supported by research from TrueUp.
The cause could be due to layoffs across the sector where companies were looking to cut costs but regardless, for communicators and recruiters this means looking at how to onboard new hires at scale.
This means streamlined processes to educate new hires and centralised databases that are readily accessible. Regular and consistent communications make a world of difference in establishing the norm and bringing people up to speed as quickly as possible.
Vacancies drop
The UK recorded a 15.39% drop in vacancies in August, but there have been pockets of growth in talent-short or commercially driven areas, including in tech.
This isn’t to say companies aren’t being cautious with many opting for project-based recruitment or targeted skills hiring rather than increasing headcounts more generally.
It has long been predicted that skills-based recruitment structures will become the norm. However, this can only be maximised with cohesive and monitored employee journeys.
Communicators need to highlight these cross-departmental growth opportunities to make the best of internal mobility and hiring opportunities. They need to ensure that employee requests for such opportunities are properly recorded and responded to.
