I'm about to break down everything you need to know about the tech job market in 2025, including changes in the labor market, skill requirements, AI influence, and changes in talent acquisition strategies. Companies are racing to the office, AI has taken over performance reviews, the younger generation is not willing to step into managerial roles, and the 'fake it till you make it' mentality is finally on the decline. If you're still writing your resume with ChatGPT, you need to listen to this; hopefully, I can convince you to rethink it. We're going to start with hiring optimism and labor market resilience.

Based on the available information, in 2025, we will be shifting towards a more balanced labor market, rather than continuing to be in a strong employers' market as in the past three years. Several factors contribute to this: 76% of employers plan to expand their headcount in 2025, according to a ZipRecruiter survey. The job market is expected to see a net growth of 7% in total employment, or 7.8 million jobs, between 2025 and 2030. Job postings remain at pre-pandemic levels in many sectors, indicating sustained demand for workers.

However, despite the cooling trends, there are signs of continued labor market strength and employer optimism. The market is still very saturated; there is a lot of political uncertainty, especially in North America, and if we take into consideration the tariff wars that may or may not happen, many people are still holding on to their jobs in anticipation of upcoming economic changes that may or may not follow as a consequence of potential tariff wars.

I cannot emphasize this enough: everything you're doing career-wise has to be viewed through the lens of current market conditions. If you're feeling like you're behind and you're looking at a friend who has a job at Big Tech (大型科技公司：通常指市值高、影响力大的科技巨头, 如Google、Apple等), always ask when and how they got that job. If you are trying to break into FAANG (FANG: 最初指Facebook、Amazon、Apple、Netflix、Google五大科技巨头，现泛指大型科技公司) and nothing's working for you, you should not be talking to somebody who got that job in 2018 or even in 2020. That is an entirely different universe. The conditions of the job market that were present when your friend entered Big Tech were polar opposite to where we are today. If your friend had big logos (指在知名大公司的工作经验) before they got into FAANG, again, that is a very different situation from what you're facing right now.

Number two: growing skill shortages. Skill shortages have been a significant problem for employers and recruitment teams for a while. However, the rapid pace of technological progress has made matters worse, leaving businesses scrambling to find workers with the right skills. We are slowly moving away from the era of generalists. Overcoming skill shortages in 2025 will require a multifaceted approach from the business side. Businesses will continue expanding their talent pools, tapping into passive candidates, recent graduates, and remote employees. At the same time, businesses will take a comprehensive approach to investing in continuous training and skill development of their employees.

Now, take this from your employer: if they're offering that, I see so many people around me who are not taking advantage of what their companies are offering them. There are budgets allocated for your skill development, and if the company's not forcing you to do it, you should be proactive about it because that's free money. You should also consider the company's willingness to invest in your education when making your next move, especially if you're early in your career. Here's an example from my own experience: I worked at a company that promised they would make investments into my education and skill development when I was accepting their offer. The promises were very generic; they were not documented; they were just verbal promises. But when I joined the company, it turned out that every team got allocated a certain budget, and that budget was split between the number of members on every team. So, if your team got $1,000 and you had 10 employees on the team, every single one of you would get only $100. And $100 is nothing for a good quality education. I got offered $500 a year, which in the end was not enough even for one course at Reforge (在线职业教育平台). So, if skill development is something that matters to you, make sure that it's stipulated in your contract.

Number three: rise of individual contributors (个体贡献者：指在组织中通过个人专业技能和产出直接贡献价值，而非通过管理团队实现目标的员工) in tech. This is the most interesting trend, and the one I'm incredibly excited about because I no longer feel like a fraud. Before I talk about it, I want to give a very quick example from a personal experience. I never wanted to become a manager; I never had this ambition, and I never looked at people managers as someone I aspired to be one day. That is because the way I thought about being a people manager is that I think it should be given to people who truly earned it, not those who just waited long enough at the company until everybody else left and they were the only candidate for the job. Instead, it should be given to those who actually earned it with their intelligent, quantifiable outcomes and a very high level of emotional intelligence that would give them the ability to lead other people.

To me, this job comes with numerous responsibilities and a very high level of stress, and I personally would rather spend that time investing in my skills and my own personal development as a product management professional rather than coaching others. I always thought that a person becoming a manager has to be incredibly skilled; they have to be very good at what they do already, and they have to be very good at leading other people. However, historically and up until very recently, the standard progression in most corporate roles, including tech, was Junior, Intermediate, Senior, Manager. It was kind of expected that you would eventually become a manager once you were doing well enough in your senior role as an individual contributor.

Even when I was younger, just starting my career, I kept thinking what I would do when I passed the senior level because I never wanted to be a manager. My goal has always been to gain very intense competence in what I do. I do not abide by tactics where you document every single thing you do during the day, then create a larger-than-life story for your management team, and then start working for those optics. That's how you make your way into the managerial role, climbing that corporate ladder by not being intensely competent but by knowing who to talk to and who to show your face to. Because I think that even if you manage to build a career by being very tactical and very calculated about your moves and things that you do, eventually your lack of skill will show.

There is nothing I hate more than this freaking expression: 'fake it till you make it.' I think that we as a society have a lot of problems on a global level because there are a lot of people that are very good at faking it. I had the same perception of the role of a consultant, like a business consultant at Deloitte (德勤：全球四大会计师事务所之一) or McKinsey (麦肯锡：全球知名管理咨询公司). I thought you had to be insanely competent to land a role there. I thought that being a consultant—well, the word 'consultant' implies that you are consulting somebody on how to do business, and probably after 20 or 25 years of proven success, you are invited by a consulting company to do that work. Then there is a customer who is willing to pay a lot of money for your experience and knowledge and your way of thinking that you're now allowed to consult a massive business on how to grow or how to transform. Yeah, that was until I had a chance to spend more time with people from the consulting world working at those top five consulting firms, and my perception of this job just shattered.

So anyway, back to the topic, I am so excited about the rise of career paths for individual contributors. Roles such as Principal PM (Principal Product Manager) in my case, but it could be any other job: principal level, staff level, group level directors, senior directors, VPs without direct reports. They're going to be making just as much as their counterparts who have reports, except their focus will be on the competency and the experience in their specific field rather than people management. This is still very rare, but we are going to be seeing the rise of individual contributor roles in the next 5 years, and I'm very excited for people, including myself, who want to build competence in their specific field rather than working on people management skills, because this gives me a lot of hope for the future.

Companies are starting to create dedicated career paths for individual contributors, allowing them to progress and to be rewarded for their technical expertise without necessarily moving into management. This trend recognizes the value of deep subject expertise (remember the skill shortages we talked about earlier) and encourages the retention of top talent. We're going to start seeing the creation of co-director roles where one director focuses on people management responsibilities, such as performance reviews, vacation discussion, compensation, and so on, and the other director guides you within the area that you specialize in.

Now, let's talk about AI and bots versus people. Employers are embracing the idea that AI tools can increase fairness in their workplace and highlight contributions that people managers could miss in more traditional performance management. Managers will still finalize the decisions as the human in the loop, validating and verifying the bot's recommendations. But for more everyday activities, such as in-the-moment performance reviews, bots are likely to take on an increasing share of manager tasks, especially for work that is digitally based.

I expect that going forward, we will be seeing increased use of AI in scheduling, feedback, performance reviews, and promotion and hiring decisions. A June 2024 Gartner (高德纳：全球领先的信息技术研究和顾问公司) survey of more than 3,300 employees revealed that 57% believe that humans are way more biased than AI when it comes to making compensation decisions. An October 2024 Gartner survey of nearly 3,500 employees suggested that 87% of employees think that algorithms could give fairer feedback than their managers right now.

Now, what does this mean for you? If you have those systems at work where your manager asks you to fill out your weekly summary every Friday—what you've done, what you've achieved, things like that—do it and be very diligent about it, because those data points are going to be fed to AI agents that will be processing your feedback every single week. And that is exactly what's going to be helping you in your next performance review and conversation about your bonus and compensation. Do not neglect those things. I know this has been said many times: that you should be documenting all of your achievements throughout the year so you can properly fill out documentation at the end of it. But you should be doing it a lot more, because a lot of that data will be processed not by your direct manager but by the AI tools that they're going to be putting to use.

And this leads me to my next point: what changes are we going to be seeing in talent acquisition (人才招聘：指企业寻找、吸引、评估和聘用合格人才的过程) strategies going forward? AI will be used a lot in identifying which resumes will make it through to the interview round. I hope I don't have to explain to anybody that AI can detect AI. Please do not use ChatGPT (OpenAI开发的大型语言模型) or Claude (Anthropic开发的大型语言模型) blindly to write your resumes by simply copying and pasting. I feel like this is such an obvious thing and should go without saying, but I personally have seen so many resumes last year that were written entirely by ChatGPT from start to finish without changing a word. AI tends to generalize, AI tends to exaggerate, AI isn't always accurate, and the information needs to be reviewed and fact-checked. Don't rely on it blindly to write a document that starts your entire relationship with a potential employer.

The labor market is going to be adapting to new realities. There is a trend towards hybrid work (混合办公：结合远程工作和办公室工作的模式), with 40% of employers supporting mixed arrangements. Skill-based pay is gaining momentum, particularly in high-demand fields like AI, cybersecurity, and data science. The great office return: there's going to be a big shift toward hybrid work models, with 40% of employers supporting the mixed model, while fully remote work declined to 7% from 21% in 2024. Companies will be requiring in-office presence at least three days a week. Companies requiring in-office presence will increase to 53% compared to 37% last year.

Many major companies are implementing stricter return-to-office policies in 2025. For example, as you've probably heard, Amazon (亚马逊：全球电商和云计算巨头) is requiring a five-day in-office presence starting January 2025, marking a significant shift from their previous hybrid model. AT&T (美国电话电报公司：美国最大的电信公司之一) is requiring all staff to work on-site five days a week beginning January 2025. JPMorgan (摩根大通：全球领先的金融服务公司) increased its in-office presence requirement to three days a week, with senior leaders being on-site five days a week.

This trend is not isolated to large companies; a KPMG (毕马威：全球四大会计师事务所之一) survey from 2025 confirms that 83% of CEOs expect a full return to office within the next three years. If your company is offering a fully remote setup, think twice before changing roles. A lot of people got accustomed to being at home five days a week, and if that is something that matters to you, be careful when you look for a new job. The majority of new roles require some degree of in-office presence.

Now, onto the factors that are driving this shift: collaboration and innovation. Many executives believe that in-person office culture fosters better collaboration and innovation. There is a growing concern about maintaining and strengthening corporate culture in a remote environment. There are productivity concerns; some leaders argue that in-office work leads to higher productivity and higher engagement across all teams, although this remains a point of debate. Economic uncertainty: in times of economic instability, companies prefer more direct oversight of their workforce. Hybrid work is often seen as a compromise that offers flexibility while maintaining some in-person collaboration. Interestingly, hybrid workers often report feeling more connected to their teams and their work compared to those who work exclusively in person or exclusively remote.

Now, those factors are being listed as drivers of this shift across multiple reports, and frankly, at this point, I personally think that it doesn't even matter whether you agree or not with those factors. I personally disagree with half of them, but I don't think those opinions are going to be taken into consideration. Companies are rapidly shifting to a hybrid model, and even the ones who have been remote for years are now asking employees to show up at least twice a week.

And the last trend is around wellness-centric employment (以员工福祉为中心的工作模式). Mental health and overall well-being continue to be a trend, and it's going to be one of the central components of talent acquisition strategies. Organizations are developing comprehensive wellness plans beyond traditional health benefits, so you will start seeing more budget allocated towards mental health days, therapy, and meditation. This shift reflects a deeper understanding that top talent increasingly prioritizes organizations that demonstrate genuine commitment to employee well-being.

I hope this was helpful. If there are any trends I haven't mentioned, please mention them below; I'm happy to continue this conversation. I am personally semi-excited for what's about to happen in the next five years. I've enjoyed the fully remote setup for many years, and personally, I wouldn't say that it impacted my productivity, but I am very curious to hear about what you guys think. Let me know in the comments. Till next time, bye.