UpTrajectory Review
The article discusses how artificial intelligence is reshaping the job market, leading to layoffs while simultaneously creating new high-paying roles. A report from Ladders highlights over 1.3 million jobs that have emerged since AI became mainstream, many offering salaries significantly above average. The report identifies key positions worth pursuing, such as AI ethicists and AEO specialists, which are essential as businesses adapt to AI's impact on their operations.
For small business owners, this shift presents both challenges and opportunities. While the threat of job loss looms, the emergence of new roles indicates a need for strategic hiring and investment in AI-related skills. Understanding the landscape of these high-paying jobs can help operators align their workforce with future demands. Emphasizing roles that involve managing AI rather than competing against it could be a game-changer for businesses looking to thrive in this evolving environment.
“Most headlines frame AI as a wrecking ball aimed at our paychecks.” — Fast Company
Takeaway: Invest in roles that leverage AI to enhance your business, focusing on human oversight rather than replacement.
From the original item — Fast Company:
Artificial intelligence is disrupting the current job market, leaving a trail of corporate layoffs and workers scrambling to determine what positions will be safe in the future.
At the same time, AI tools are also creating a number of high-paying jobs that didn’t exist a decade ago, according to a new report from job search and career platform Ladders. The survey looked at data from professionals earning over $100,000 a year and mapped the top 15 six-figure jobs that it says are worth considering.
“Most headlines frame AI as a wrecking ball aimed at our paychecks,” Marc Cenedella, Ladders’ CEO, tells Fast Company. “This study, however, shows [more than] 1.3 million new jobs have been created since the term ‘AI’ entered the mainstream vernacular, with many of those roles paying 56% above the rest of the pack.”
These jobs exist across industries including medicine, marketing, technology, human resources, information technology (IT), and cybersecurity.
Cenedella says the study’s real value is that it provides a map of the jobs that workers should invest their time in today, including a mix of new positions (chief listening officer, AI ethicist, and climate change analyst) as well as some obvious choices (SEO specialist, social media manager, and chief AI officer).
“The best job bets all share one trait: A human is managing the machine, not racing against it,” Cenedella adds.
Cenedella says there is currently a high demand for AEO specialists and AI ethicists. But what exactly do they do?
As AI-generated summaries cut search in Google by 45% (even though the summaries are wrong 10% of the time), companies are adapting to the collapse in web traffic by investing in answer engine optimization (AEO) specialists, who make sure their original content appears in AI overviews or large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude. These AEO specialists are the next generation of marketing and website professionals.
Alternatively, the need for AI ethicists will only continue to grow as AI agents make more autonomous decisions, requiring a human to verify that their output is accurate, legal, and fair. AI ethicists set policies for how companies can ethically use AI while protecting against data leaks and major mistakes AI agents can make, such as deleting 2.5 years’ worth of records.
Here is the full list of 15 high-paying jobs in the age of AI, as well as a salary range and degree requirements for each.
However, Cenedella adds that degree requirements shouldn’t be a main focus. “The smartest move a worker can make today is to stop treating a degree as the main thing that qualifies them and start building proof for why they should own a role instead,” Cenedella tells Fast Company. “Whatever your current job is, do a piece of it with AI, capture the result, and put it somewhere you can show it: A year of quietly documented results beats a degree program that won’t exist until you’re already too late to it.”