Industry Insights – What’s Trending in Winter 2025.
Successful BILTs (Business and Industry Leadership Teams) always give employers ample opportunity to share their perspectives on industry trends. This best practice is part of the larger BILT model, which provides a structured process that allows employer feedback to inform curriculum development. By teaching skills employers need, graduates are more likely to be “workforce ready.” Learn more here: https://www.nitic.org/industry/national-bilt/the-bilt-model/.
Over the last 12 months, NITIC’s national BILT meetings have covered a wide range of topics and disciplines. IT workforce trends that have been discussed and debated include:
* Critically verifying and evaluating LLM results
* Emerging services like agentic AI and integrated sensing and communications (ISAC)
* Growing importance of students learning containerization, microservices, and log consolidation tools
* How to handle sensitive data ethically
* The ongoing domination of AWS and Azure among cloud providers
* Risks of providing intellectual property to AI models
* Whether the R programming language is valuable
Through all of these discussions, employers made two points were made again and again. One, despite the AI transformation of IT, students still need to know the fundamentals. Graduates seeking entry-level jobs need to be familiar with physical hardware. And two, employers want students who have more than just technical know-how. Employers urged educators to continue teaching collaboration and communication skills.
The National IT Innovation Center (NITIC) recommends two to three “trends meetings” each year, during which a BILT discussion of where the industry is going next is the primary agenda item. These trend meetings form the perfect complement to the extended job skills prioritization meetings in which employers vote and discuss entry-level job skills one by one – whereas the annual prioritization meetings can last up to two hours, the trends meetings can be handled in just 60 minutes. Together, these two kinds of meetings (trends and job skills prioritization) help educators better inform their students.
The content of NITIC’s BILT meetings is always accessible for free on its website (https://www.nitic.org/industry/national-bilt/bilt-overview). Both meeting minutes and one-page trend summary pages are available for download.