AI Career Paths and Skills for Information Systems Graduates
Abstract
The objective of this study is to identify artificial intelligence (AI) skills in the industry that are easily accessible for the information systems (IS) graduates to upskill. Data were collected from three sources: (a) AI learning paths, courses, and certifications available on major public cloud platforms including Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, and Google GCP; (b) AI job listings at leading job websites including LinkedIn, Indeed, and others; and (c) career recommendations obtained using two generative AI tools from Google including Google Career Explorer and Gemini. The data from these sources were reviewed by the author to extract AI skills that are adjacent to a typical IS curriculum. Term-frequency and bigram-frequency analyses of the terms in job titles and job descriptions were performed to better delineate potential AI skill paths and skills. The results indicate that undergraduate IS majors do have adequate foundational skills and education to pursue AI upskilling such as an AI certification, or an AI major or minor. This study is expected to be of practical use to IS graduates in their career upskilling, and to IS curriculum committees for designing and offering AI courses and concentrations .
