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From return-to-office mandates, anxiety about AI taking (or reshaping) jobs, and a highly competitive atmosphere for recent graduates and other job seekers, 2025 has been a year of change. Its also been a big year of change for women in the workplace, with a record number exiting the workforce. And, according to a new report, women are now also less inclined to seek promotions. LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Co. just released their 2025 Women in the Workplace report based on a survey of 124 organizations employing around 3 million people. The survey research found that while companies overwhelmingly say that diversity (67%) and inclusion (84%) are top priorities, just over half (54%) of companies say the same about women’s career advancement. For women of color, only 46% of companies value advancement. And while employers broadly say they value diversity, equity, and inclusion, one in six have reduced DEI budgets. The survey also revealed another worrisome trend. Across categories, women say they want to be promoted at lower rates than men. Only 69% of entry-level women want a promotion compared with 80% of entry-level men. Likewise, 84% of senior-level women want to be promoted, while 92% of senior-level men do. And overall, 80% of women overall say they want to be promoted to the next level, compared to 86% of men. Interestingly, it doesn’t start out that way. Young women are extremely ambitious. In fact, women under 30 are more interested in being promoted than young men, but after 40, only 52% of entry-level women want to advance, while 71% of men still do. According to the report, the statistic seems tied to how much support men and women are receiving, which is far from equal. Only 31% of entry-level women have had a sponsor compared to 45% of men, which the report says can nearly double promotion rates. Likewise, “when entry- and senior-level women and men have sponsors and receive similar levels of support from managers and more senior colleagues, they are equally enthusiastic about getting promoted to the next level,” the report explains. But there’s another undeniable obstacle that women seem to disproportionately face, which is likely to impact their desire to be promoted: families. Almost 25% of both entry and senior level women who are not interested in promotions say it’s due to their personal obligations which would make more responsibility at work too challenging. However just 15% of men said the same. Unfortunately, for women, findings follow a bounty of previous research that women still do more housework and child-rearing than men. Per the McKinsey report, “In 2024, women with partners were more than three times as likely as men with partners to be responsible for all or most housework.” Therefore, it’s not all that surprising that women who are disproportionately weighed down at home may not be as hungry for even more obligations on the job, too.
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E-Commerce
The U.S. workforce is facing a pivotal challenge: A widening skills gap that threatens economic growth and innovation. While demographic trendslike declining birth rates and a shrinking pipeline of young workersare real, the more actionable issue is the growing mismatch between the skills employers need and those available in the labor market. According to Pearsons recent Lost in Transition research, nearly 90% of U.S. employers report difficulty finding candidates with the right skills, and more than half of workers feel unprepared for the demands of the future workplace. This problem is decades in the making, and its consequences will be global. Without action, this gap threatens economic stability, public health systems, and critical infrastructure. Projections indicate the U.S. could face skills shortages in 171 occupations by 2032. But instead of focusing on the inevitability of demographic change, we should zero in on the skills gapa challenge we can address through education, collaboration, and the smart use of technology. The skills gap is not just a statistic; its a call to action for educators, employers, and policymakers to rethink how we prepare people for work. AI AS A CATALYST FOR WORKFORCE READINESS Artificial intelligence, when thoughtfully designed and applied, is already helping to close the skills gap. When used as a tool for guided learning rather than a shortcut, AI can help bridge the skills gap and equip the workforce to succeed where human touch is required. AI-powered learning tools in educational environments are already accelerating pathways into critical professions by enabling learners to demonstrate measurable improvements in critical thinking and adaptability, as well as build durable skills that employers need most and are essential for thriving in a rapidly changing economy. Employers, too, are leveraging AI to upskill their current workforce, using adaptive platforms to identify and close skills gaps faster than traditional training methods allow. This approach is not about replacing people with technology, but about empowering workers to learn, adapt, and grow alongside digital tools. THE NEW COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE: LEARNING HOW TO LEARN The ability to learn how to learn is now a core competency for career success. As the shelf life of technical skills shortens, the most valuable workers will be those who can continuously acquire new knowledge and adapt to new roles. AI can support this by personalizing learning experiences, promoting metacognition, and helping people build the confidence to navigate transitions throughout their careers. Were already seeing data showing that AI can promote the real learning and adaptability skills that are needed in the workforce. High school and college students are improving their academic performance and demonstrating critical thinking skill through the use of science-backed AI tools that align with Blooms Taxonomy of Learning framework. AI in education is doing more than raising test scores; it’s teaching students how to learn, adapt, and thrive in an economy where continuous upskilling is the norm. Closing the skills gap will require collaboration across education, business, and government. We need to align AI literacy standards, invest in educator training, and ensure responsible use of technology that prioritizes data privacy, bias mitigation, transparency, and measurable learning outcomes. By focusing on the skills gapand leveraging the best of AI and learning sciencewe can build a workforce that is not only prepared for the future but empowered to shape it. Tom ap Simon is the President of Pearson Higher Education and Virtual Learning
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E-Commerce
Each business has its unique challenges, but one commonality today is that AI is poised to disrupt almost every business everywhere. Organizations arent the only ones rapidly shifting to adopt AIattackers are too, and theyre doing it faster. The implications of this AI arms race are alarming for legitimate businesses around the world. Security teams must rapidly evolve their cyber strategy to meet these new threats, moving away from a reactive posture that detects and then responds after an incident happens. To outpace attackers, organizations will need to be preemptive insteaddeterring, neutralizing, and preventing threats before they happen. HOW AI IS CHANGING THE GAME Anthropic recently revealed that a threat actor group was able to use AI (Claude) to perform 80-90% of an espionage campaign, with only sporadic human intervention, to attack 30 enterprises around the globe. The AI made thousands of requests per second, something even a team of highly skilled human attackers couldnt do. Anthropic concluded that less experienced and resourced groups can now potentially perform large-scale attacks of this nature with the help of AI. That means the barrier to entry for cybercrime has dropped dramatically. Individuals who previously lacked the technical skills to code can now leverage AI tools to create and execute complex attacks. This will inevitability lead to a surge in the number of sophisticated attacks unleashed on business and governments worldwide. Most enterprises and cybersecurity vendors are responding to this change by taking legacy, reactive security approaches and trying to add AI on top of them. The idea is that you should fight AI-powered attackers with AI-powered defenses. However, this is akin to taking a tank and adding AI to it to battle a fleet of drones. Yes, the AI-enabled tank will get better, but it is fundamentally too slow and too expensive to meet the new threat and win. As AI makes large-scale attacks accessible to anyone, its not just the volume of threats that will explode, its their uniqueness. Attackers are no longer limited to reusing the same malware, they can now target specific infrastructure vulnerabilities with single-use attacks. MASS PERSONALIZATION: A NEW FRONTIER FOR ATTACKERS Before AI, attackers built and then reused malicious software (i.e. malware) to attack as many enterprises as possible, but AI changes that entirely. It enables mass personalization: the ability to generate custom, one-off attacks for each target, at scale. As more and more attackers use these types of specialized, single-use malware to target their victims, businesses relying on legacy approaches will experience an exponential increase in breaches. They will face a never-ending battle to contain breaches before they can cause millions or even billions of dollars in damage. The traditional security model, and thus your business, relies on identifying patient zerospotting the first instance of a new threat, then blocking it everywhere else. However, when every attack is unique, there is no patient zero. In a world where even unskilled attackers can use AI to perform thousands of tasks a second, novel threats can be created and evolve faster than legacy, reactive security systems’ ability to observe and respond. This is not a future problem; this is a problem today. Last year, Infoblox classified over 25 million new domains as malicious. Ninety-five percent of them, or about 24 million, were unique to one enterprise, meaning the domains were made to specifically attack a singular organization. Last year, attackers personalized 24 million attacks for enterprises all over the world, each able to initially evade most legacy, reactive security tools. If your executive team and boardroom are not already discussing this, they need to start now. THE FUTURE OF YOUR CYBERSECURITY IS PREEMPTIVE AI has changed the nature of attacks, so now, it must change the nature of our defenses. To combat these threats, its no longer enough to be reactive. Instead, the cybersecurity industry and enterprises must urgently undergo huge changes to become more preemptive in their approaches to security. Gartner analysts are saying the same, predicting that preemptive cybersecurity will make up 50% of IT security spending by 2030, up from almost 5% in 2024. The firm specifically cites AI-enabled attacks as the force behind this change. Its time for a mindset shift. Leaders must see the security fight with a higher-level view. Instead of just focusing on using AI to speed up how fast they can detect and respond to individual fires, they must focus more of their energy and investment on using new approaches to stop the fires from ever starting. By developing strategies to preempt threats, teams can beat attackers to the punch, stopping threats before they can wreak havoc on their businesses. Scott Harrell is CEO of Infoblox.
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E-Commerce
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