Jan 22, 2025
Written by Will Markow
Every January there is a predictable flood of, well, predictions. By now, every future of work pundit has typically crafted at least one think piece predicting what 2025 will hold for the workforce, and many of these predictions intersect with the future of tech. Whether any of these predictions will prove accurate is usually beside the point, and they typically offer little in the way of nuance or empirical evidence. After all, it is hard to quantify the future when it hasn’t happened yet. It is, therefore, with some reluctance that I wade into this crowded space to offer thoughts on what the future may hold for the tech workforce.
Because of this reluctance, I will refrain from offering firm predictions on what will occur in the coming 12 months. Instead, I will explore a set of three key themes that IT executives, educators, policymakers, and individuals should keep a close eye on in 2025. Some of these trends are already on the lips of every future of work prognosticator, while some are still emerging. All, however, have the potential to fundamentally shift how the IT job market will unfold, both in the coming year and beyond.
Trend #1: The Silver Tsunami
Countries across the developed world are staring down a demographic crisis that follows a familiar formula: aging populations will soon cause mass retirements, while decades of declining birth rates mean there aren’t enough workers to replace those leaving the labor force. As a result, a larger share of our population will need to take on care-focused roles and long-term talent shortages will become the norm.
In the United States, for example, over four million people are reaching retirement age annually, but the working age population is only growing by about 600,000 every year. Moreover, the birth rate is 22% below the replacement level, suggesting this issue will only worsen in the foreseeable future.
This trend is not unique to IT, but no roles will avoid the gravitational pull of these demographic shifts. There will also be specific implications for the tech workforce. Jobs with a larger share of older workers - such as database administrators and network architects - may become harder to fill as more workers in these roles retire. If these roles become too difficult to fill, or if older workers don’t pass their skills and knowledge to a new generation, these jobs may fundamentally change or even disappear as their tasks must be absorbed by other roles.
Tech workers will also have to do more with less. If talent shortages become widespread, firms will look to new technology to increase productivity as a buttress against the reduction in brute people power. This means that there could be greater demand for already depleted tech teams, and IT workers will need to prioritize where to apply their limited time. It will also create an incentive to leverage new tools and skills to increase productivity, which will increase the need for constant reskilling so workers remain as productive as possible.
Finally, employers won’t be able to outsource their way out of the talent shortage. As the graph of fertility rates across the globe shows below, demographic challenges are present across much of the world, meaning there will likely be a global bloodbath for talent for decades to come. As a result, organizations will need to get creative with the mix of hiring, reskilling, outsourcing, and automation they use to build their workforce.
Fertility Rates by Region
Trend #2: Artificial Intelligence Searches for Applications
To say that Artificial Intelligence casts a long shadow over the tech workforce is, at this point, an understatement. However, after years of constant prognosticating, experimentation, and hand wringing over the impact of AI, there is still an open question around what we have to show for it.
I won’t attempt to answer that question here, and I certainly won’t make bold predictions about the future of AI, which has been a fool’s errand for decades (in 1965, for example, famed computer science researcher Herbert Simon stated that "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do”). What I will discuss are key barriers to deeper adoption of AI and explore how these challenges may shape the future of AI and its impact on the tech workforce.
First, the adoption of AI will always be constrained by our trust in AI and our risk tolerance for leveraging it within the context of certain applications. This risk tolerance is largely tied to the severity of the consequences when AI gets something wrong. We’ve been willing to let AI pick our next show to binge on Netflix for years, but there’s a reason most of us still haven’t handed our car keys over to Waymo.
This gives us cause to be skeptical that AI is about to lead to mass layoffs, either in tech or elsewhere. Some people argue that these layoffs are just around the corner as companies trade IT workers for AI that can, among other things, write and deploy code, but it’s unclear how many managers are ready to let AI take over responsibility for their most valuable digital operations. The optics of a severe breach are bad no matter what, but they will be even worse if it comes to light that a breach occurred because there was no human in the loop.
Another challenge AI must overcome is the need to demonstrate real economic value. Thus far, quantifying the benefit of AI has remained elusive for many organizations. Even the few studies and anecdotes that do reference “productivity gains” or “time saved” are a far cry from offering concrete ROI figures, and while there have been some emerging use cases bubbling up - especially related to AI supporting rote tasks in legal, HR, and marketing, to name a few - we see little evidence that organizations have uncovered many truly game-changing use cases for AI.
Of course, this hasn’t stopped organizations from spending money hand over fist on AI. Thanks to data we’ve analyzed from our partners at Lightcast, we find that organizations are offering average salaries about $35,000 higher for IT workers with AI skills, to say nothing of the money they are spending for AI-powered tools. Eventually, however, leaders will have to answer how their AI investments are driving bottom-line results, not just making catchy headlines. This will cause a shift from widespread AI tinkering to a focus on building targeted AI applications that have a direct line to business value.
Trend #3: The Fracturing Digital World Order
The last trend we’ll discuss is the increased fracturing and fragmentation of the digital world order. As geopolitical tensions have risen in recent years - whether in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, or elsewhere - the ripple effects for the tech workforce are manifold.
In particular, these tensions have led to a rise in digital threats that is continuing to boost demand for cybersecurity workers while necessitating strong digital security and privacy literacy for everyone. It is also leading to a constellation of new regulations across the globe that IT teams will need to adhere to and enforce throughout their organizations. This requires IT teams generally, and information security teams specifically, to have a dual mandate of reskilling both themselves and their organizations more broadly. This emphasis on education may not be in the DNA of many existing tech teams, meaning it is one more dimension that must be factored into firms’ reskilling initiatives.
The increasingly volatile geopolitical arena is also forcing IT teams to rethink their talent sourcing strategy. Where you source IT resources from is becoming a question of ever larger importance, as governments around the world are taking a more critical look at the organizations and regions they will associate with. IT teams, therefore, must take a more diversified talent sourcing strategy to hedge against a riskier global landscape.
The Road Ahead
The themes explored in this article are far from comprehensive but offer a glimpse at the shifts underway across the tech landscape. IT leaders, policymakers, individuals, and other stakeholders will need to grapple with these shifts as they manage an increasingly fluid future. While there are no crystal balls showing the future of work with great clarity, we can state with confidence that one enduring skill will be adaptability. In an era marked by new technologies, new demographics, and new geopolitical realities, the organizations and individuals that learn to continuously reassess and reinvent themselves will be more resilient in the face of change. This still may not be a guarantee against disruption, but it will help us operate more confidently in an increasingly uncertain world.
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