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      IBM plans to replace 7,800 jobs with AI, pauses hiring certain positions

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 2 May, 2023 - 15:48

    The IBM logo in front of an AI-generated background.

    Enlarge / The IBM logo in front of an AI-generated background. (credit: IBM / Midjourney)

    IBM Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna has revealed plans to halt hiring for about 7,800 positions that could be replaced by artificial intelligence systems in the near future, according to a Bloomberg news report published Monday.

    Krishna said that hiring in back-office functions like human resources will be suspended or slowed, affecting roughly 26,000 non-customer-facing roles. "I could easily see 30 percent of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period," Bloomberg quoted Krisha as saying in an interview.

    The announcement comes at a time when generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT have stirred anxiety about the future of human jobs. In March, Goldman Sachs released a report estimating that generative AI may " expose " 300 million jobs to automation, which means those roles might be reduced or replaced by AI systems.

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      Beyond Good & Evil 2 studio rocked by reported gov’t labor investigation

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 28 February, 2023 - 20:13 · 1 minute

    The team that brought you this <em>Beyond Good & Evil 2</em> concept art is not doing well, according to a new report.

    Enlarge / The team that brought you this Beyond Good & Evil 2 concept art is not doing well, according to a new report.

    If you've been waiting patiently for Beyond Good & Evil 2 since its first announcement back in 2008 , we have some bad news about the studio responsible for the long-delayed project's development. Kotaku now reports that Ubisoft Montpellier has lost its managing director amid a local government investigation into labor policies that have left "an unprecedented number of developers experiencing burnout and going on sick leave."

    Ubisoft Montpellier, which also developed the first Beyond Good & Evil two decades ago now, is being looked at by its local branch of the Inspection du Travail , according to "three sources familiar with the development," cited by Kotaku. In December, that office reportedly started looking into reports that dozens of developers had taken extended leave over stress or sickness over the last year. Employees have been interviewed regarding their health and well-being by a third party, according to the report.

    “The health and wellness of our teams is an ongoing priority,” an Ubisoft spokesperson told Kotaku. “Given the length of the development cycle with Beyond Good & Evil 2 , the Montpellier development team is undergoing well-being assessments through a third-party for preventative measures and to evaluate where additional support may be needed.”

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      Record number of parents miss work as respiratory illnesses spike in kids

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 16 November, 2022 - 23:34 · 1 minute

    Parents work on their computers while their son entertains himself at their home in Boston in April 2020.

    Enlarge / Parents work on their computers while their son entertains himself at their home in Boston in April 2020. (credit: Getty | Boston Globe )

    Respiratory illnesses are raging this fall, slamming children particularly hard. Cases of influenza-like illnesses are off to a startlingly strong and early start this season. RSV—respiratory syncytial (sin-SISH-uhl) virus—continues to skyrocket. A stew of SARS-CoV-2 variants is still simmering in the background. And the rabble of usual cold-season viruses, such as rhinoviruses and enteroviruses, is also making the rounds.

    With the surge in infections, children's hospitals around the country have reported being at capacity or overwhelmed, as Ars has reported before. But another effect of the crush of viruses is a squeeze on the workforce. As The Washington Post first reported Tuesday , the US broke its record last month for people missing work due to childcare problems—such as having children home sick and childcare facilities or schools shuttered due to staffing shortages and sickness.

    In October, more than 100,000 employed Americans missed work for childcare-related problems, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics . That is more missing workers than in any other month in recent records, including the entirety of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which many childcare facilities and schools closed down for extended periods. At the height of pandemic-related shutdowns in 2020, the number of Americans missing work for childcare problems only reached the low 90,000s.

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      Your Career Is a Marathon, Not a Sprint

      pubsub.dcentralisedmedia.com / LifehackerAustralia · Sunday, 14 February, 2021 - 21:25 · 3 minutes

    In the hyper-competitive ‘jobs’ culture, young workers often expect their careers to reach meteoric heights on a quick timeline. Younger generations don’t stay at their jobs for quite as long as their parents did, whether it’s due to economic factors or the view that most jobs are mere stepping stones toward more lucrative salaries and better job titles.

    Feeding into the perpetual rat race can lead to burnout, or worse — total disillusionment. While it might be easy to fall victim to this mindset, it’s better to view careers as the decades-long endeavour that it is, rather than a moonshot bid for rapid success.

    If you like your job enough, stay for a while

    If you’re in a constant rush to scale the ranks, you could risk losing out on opportunities already at your fingertips. Knuckling down and focusing on your current job will allow your skills to blossom, while constantly chasing new pastures in search of professional clout can put you on a merry-go-round where your skills may languish more than they grow.

    Most people stay at their jobs for an average of four years, according to the most recent numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labour and Statistics . That’s a pretty long time for most Millennials — and more than enough time to really master a trade before you feel the need to move on. If you feel you’re being nurtured and treated fairly by your employer, don’t rush for the door — it’s better to wait until the right opportunity, rather than will any quick opportunity into existence.

    Don’t Quit Your Job Without a Plan

    You might hate your job so much that you nurse fantasies about how you’ll quit — perhaps spontaneously, standing on your desk, with a righteous speech to your manager followed by a 1980s-movie slow clap from your colleagues. As cathartic as that may seem, you shouldn’t quit without a plan,...

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    Tune out the hype

    Not everyone suffers from this, but there’s a noticeable current of careerism in today’s corporate world. LinkedIn is full of would-be influencers and aspiring business magnates who trumpet their accolades and pontificate about the culture of work. This is toxic, but especially so for anyone yearning for professional advancement. Subscribing to this sentiment can make you a status-chaser, and someone who isn’t so much into the work itself as much as potential titles, salary, and acclaim.

    Do your best to hit the unsubscribe button. Perusing your peers’ latest career updates and musings on LinkedIn can do a lot to make your career feel woefully inadequate. Focus more on yourself and developing your own skills. That’ll help make work — in addition to life — way more enjoyable.

    How to Make Your Work-From-Home Status Permanent

    With COVID infection rates declining modestly across the world, the prospect of returning to our offices is inching closer to reality. After 11 months of living through a pandemic, you might feel uneasy about settling in to a confined space next to dozens of colleagues, and you’re not alone: a...

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    Visualise your career path over the long haul

    At the expense of sounding like a corporate consultant or corny stock broker, you should try imagining your career track like a graph that shows short-term versus long-term investment gains — it looks volatile in the short-term, but when you zoom out you can see the upward trend. When it comes to taking big risks versus staying the course, your career will likely wind up in the same place, or better, if you play it long.

    It can often seem like critical time is passing by, especially as your peers make headway and progress in their careers while you seemingly aren’t, but understanding that no success story happens overnight can help keep you grounded. To put it in perspective again: You won’t be eligible to collect retirement benefits until you’re 65. One’s career spans decades from start to finish, so it’s best to take a deep breath and understand that you can and will get what you want, just maybe not immediately.

    The post Your Career Is a Marathon, Not a Sprint appeared first on Lifehacker Australia .

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      Use Admin Roles to Share Access to LinkedIn Pages

      pubsub.dcentralisedmedia.com / LifehackerAustralia · Tuesday, 9 February, 2021 - 22:00 · 2 minutes

    Managing your business’ presence on LinkedIn takes teamwork, but unless you really know and trust your colleagues, you probably aren’t comfortable sharing the company LinkedIn page’s password with another employee just so they can post updates.

    Thankfully, LinkedIn now lets you add other users as admins for any page you own. With these new admin tools, you can give someone else the ability to post updates and manage new job listings for your company from their personal account. They never have to sign into the page.

    There are obvious privacy benefits to using LinkedIn’s new admin roles, but they can also help you organise your business by assigning admin privileges based on a person’s role in the company.

    Don’t Use LinkedIn to ‘Build Your Brand’

    Like all social networks in 2021, LinkedIn is regularly swarmed by users trying to go viral or make a splash by pontificating about their career insights. Though it isn’t as toxic as Facebook or Twitter — remaining a much more benign platform existing (mostly) outside of the social media culture...

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    There are two types of admins you can create for a LinkedIn page: Page Admins , who maintain the page’s content and communication, and Paid Media Admins who can create and manage ads and sponsored content for a page. Each type has a hierarchy of roles that grant the admin different features and privileges. Here’s a quick explanation of each:

    Page Admins:

    • Super Admin: Has full access to all admin tools, and is the only role that can edit a page’s information, deactivate a page, or add (and remove) other page admins.
    • Content Admin: Can create, post, and manage page-related updates, Events, Stories, and job listings.
    • Analyst: Can access a page’s analytics tab on LinkedIn and access the page in third-party analytics tools.

    Paid Media Admins:

    • Sponsored Content Poster: Can post sponsored content and ads on behalf of a company through their personal LinkedIn profile.

    • Lead Gen Forms Manager: Can download marketing lead data from page-associated ad campaigns.

    • Pipeline Builder: Can create and edit Pipeline Builder landing pages for other Media Admins and manage leads through LinkedIn Recruiter.

    LinkedIn says the new admin tools are rolling out to all users, but it may take some time before they’re universally available. However, once they are, you can start assigning admin roles to any employee, advertiser, or member associate with your page.

    How to become an admin on LinkedIn

    Users can request admin privileges for any page they work for or are otherwise associated with. The process is identical on desktop and mobile:

    1. Add current position with the organisation on your LinkedIn profile. As LinkedIn’s support page notes , this is a required step to ensure you’re qualified to be an admin.
    2. Open the LinkedIn page you’re requesting admin privileges for.
    3. Click/tap the three dot “More” icon.
    4. Select “Request Admin.”
    5. Confirm that you’re authorised to become an Admin, then click/tap “Request access.”
    6. You’ll receive a notification once your request is approved.

    (Note that requesting access grants that page’s Super Admins access to your profile’s public info.)

    The post Use Admin Roles to Share Access to LinkedIn Pages appeared first on Lifehacker Australia .