Gen Z leads AI roles as broader hiring trails pre-pandemic levels

Nine in ten AI hires hold a bachelor’s degree

Ninety percent of hires for AI-related jobs held a bachelor’s degree, according to LinkedIn data shared with The Wall Street Journal, and 20% of hires for AI leadership roles held a doctorate. Women made up 26% of AI hires in 2025, the data shows.

Generation Z workers filled 69% of AI engineer hires and 68% of forward-deployed engineer hires in 2025, LinkedIn reported. Sixty percent of “head of AI” hires in 2025 were millennials, according to the data.

Kory Kantenga, LinkedIn’s head of economics for the Americas, said the AI hiring figures stand in contrast to the overall market. “While hiring overall is down compared to last year, and it’s way down compared to prior to the pandemic, this is one area of the labor market that’s quite robust,” Kantenga told The Wall Street Journal.

“Most of the workers who have been hired into AI roles in the last year are actually Gen Z,” Kantenga said. “We talk about how they’re worried about AI, and there are certainly legitimate concerns that AI may be harming the job market for younger workers … but right now we actually see AI providing a green shoot for some of these younger workers.”

LinkedIn said members of Gen Z have “grown up adapting to the cutting-edge technology.”

“There’s a lot of momentum there, but not everyone is able to take advantage of it,” Kantenga said. The educational and gender patterns have sharpened questions about which fields can be sold to teenagers as “futureproof,” Journal reporter Isabelle Bousquette wrote. Parents, she said, raise the question with her constantly.

Kantenga acknowledged the difficulty of giving a single answer. “At the end of the day, we can talk about where there is momentum, where there is opportunity. For some people, if you come from a modest background, being unemployed is not an option. So you need to pursue an area where there is momentum,” he said.

He added: “Beyond that, it really is about what people are passionate about, what they’re interested in, what problems they want to solve in the world. I think that’s really up to the individual to decide that.”