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Nearly three in five people worldwidea significant 58%plan to look for a new job in 2025. Thats a lot of people in the hunt and if you’re one of them, it can feel a bit overwhelming. It doesnt help that many job seekers are also feeling stuck, applying to more positions than ever yet hearing back less often. The shifting job market, influenced by more competition and the growth of AI, has made old strategies less effective. To succeed, job seekers need to rethink their strategyfocusing on roles that align with their skills, crafting tailored applications, and finding ways to stand out. The good news? With a clear, intentional approach, you can navigate these challenges and make meaningful progress in your career. Heres how to take control of your job search in 2025: Be Adaptable: Go where the opportunities are The job market is changing quickly. Consider this: Nearly three-quarters of todays fastest-growing rolesthink Artificial Intelligence Engineer or Chief Growth Officerdidnt even exist 25 years ago. Its a good reminder that building a sustainable career means staying ahead of the curve. Identify which skills are in demand and which industries are growing. Resources like LinkedIns Jobs on the Rise report can be helpful in spotting trends. For example, we’re seeing a willingness among job seekers to pivot into new industries. Making such a leap begins with assessing your transferable skillsattributes like communication, leadership, problem-solving, and adaptabilityand exploring how they align with roles in unfamiliar sectors. By pairing curiosity with preparation, you can position yourself as a strong candidate in emerging fields. Highlight your expertise Simply claiming expertise isnt enoughyou need to show it. Hiring managers look for specific skills, so align your profile and résumé with the job description. Highlight achievements that show how your skills have produced results. Update your LinkedIn profile as well; listing at least five key skills can help you get up to 5.6 times more profile views from recruiters. Think of this as your opportunity to build a digital portfolio that speaks for you. Whether its showcasing a project, sharing industry insights, or highlighting new skills youve gained, your profile can become a dynamic representation of your expertise and professional brand. Focus on quality over quantity Applying to as many jobs as possible might seem like a good strategy, but its not effective. Instead, focus on quality instead of quantity. To help you be more strategic in the roles youre applying for, consider using LinkedIns new job match feature to see how your skills and experience line up with what hiring managers are looking for. It can also help you identify any skills you may be missing that could improve your chances of hearing back from recruiters. And, take the time to customize your applicationwriting a cover letter tailored to the role lets you clearly explain how you can meet its needs. It may seem like overkill, but it will help you stand out to employers. Navigating the current job market doesnt have to be frustrating. Small, focused actionslike improving your profile, expanding your network, or learning a new skillcan move you closer to your next role. In a fast-changing job market, being focused and strategic is the best way to stay ahead.
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E-Commerce
It was the year 2000. We survived Y2K and sat at our computers obsessed with a strange new game called The Sims. It was the first game I ever played where the protagonist could be late to work, forget to take out the garbage, or be so preoccupied by the doldrums of life that they might pee themselves. I, alongside millions, was hooked and could not articulate why. Born from the mind of Will Wrightthe same designer who bucked the industrys penchant for arcade games for world simulators like SimCityThe Sims is almost as hard to define now as it was then. Is it a virtual dollhouse? A simulacrum of suburban life? A neighborhood of tamagotchis with jobs? An HGTV home improvement show crossed with Real Housewives? [Image: EA] By design, whatever you call The Sims may reflect on you more than it. From its earliest days, The Sims universe has attempted to be anything but prescriptiveright down to its progressive view on relationships without labels or gender expectations. Twenty-five years later, the franchise, now owned by EA, has amassed half a billion players. The Sims 4 came out over a decade ago at this point, but after it became free-to-play in 2022, its popularity ballooned to reach 85 million players, and its released 17 expansions that allow people to do everything from arguing over family inheritance to convening a court of vampires. For the 25th anniversary, I sat down with two creatives that have been with the franchise since the original game to discuss their core design approach of The Sims, whats kept players obsessed, and why fewer of these little characters are peeing themselves these days. [Image: EA] A funhouse mirror of the world The Sims may have a quiet premisecreate a character and their home, choose a profession, and socialize with neighborsbut nothing about the presentation from there is literal. Through every bit of its art, design, and animation, the world balances the mundane with the zany. That not only brings an element of fun to The Sims; it expands whats plausible at any moment. We definitely talk more about being relatable than realistic, which means that we do lean more dramatic in our acting and our animation, says Lyndsay Pearson, VP of franchise creative for The Sims. Thats partially because of the way you play the game: You’re far away [from characters], you need to be able to read it. But also because that supports the world and the stories we’re trying to enable. Each gesture of these little characters is exaggerated, as if theyre actors on a stage being read from the audience, even though youre just sitting at your computer. That ensures that the mundane feels interesting. [Image: EA] When you’re cooking, or going to sleep, or making up the bed, or doing these life actions, a lot of your players actually want to experience them in this extremely whimsical and playful fashion. Nobody wants to see that in a replica of actual real life the exact same way, says Nawwaf Barakat, senior animation director for The Sims. So it needs to be telling its own story every single time. It needs to look interesting the 1,000th time you’ve actually seen it. The tone of those moments isnt merely legible or entertaining; they also highlight the farce, expanding whats possible in the world. We’ve described it as a fun house mirror to the world, where it looks familiar enough that you can relate to it and feel like, Oh, if I if I take out the trash, I understand the chain of events and the rules of this universe, but it’s all skewed so that when a giant monster pops out of the trash, I’m not surprised. [The design] explains that these things can coexist. [Image: EA] Implying so the player can infer While players enjoy rich, multigenerational stories in The Simscomplete with love, backstabbing, and sudden plot twistsin fact, the design team admits that most of this narrative takes place in your head. The Sims is really a game of interpretation, says Barakat. It’s amazing how much our players will actually fill the stories in themselves. A key idea behind fiction, born from The University of Iowas Writers Workshop, is that the wrier should imply so the reader can infer. The Sims is designed to do this across a characters relationships. The Sims speak in Simlish (gibberish that sounds almost like English). You can broach a topic, like brag about promotion, but responses from characters are always in either Simlish or word clouds filled with simplistic, emoji-like images. [Image: EA] Many players try to tell multi-generational stories in the game, and recently, The Sims released an expansion all about death and family legacy. The challenge was about creating an opportunity for these stories without determining the plot ahead of time. We added enough conversation dialog choices or enough icons in the thought balloons to get them to think about the character or think about a gravestone, that you could make that story kind of happen, says Pearson. So, we have to carve out those spaces, particularly to leave room for that interpretation to say, Oh, this could be them all mourning at a wake,’ but it could also be, ‘They’re all fighting at a wake.’ [Image: EA] These techniques almost sound silly to deconstruct, but theyre also at the core of how iconography and symbology works across culture. There are points where interpretations are shared, and points where they diverge. Everything in between is the fun of criticism IRLand where the opportunity for differing interpretations around narrative exist in The Sims. You see comments online sometimes about how deep our game is, how we thought of everything, says Barakat. And we’re like, Wow, we didn’t really think about that! It was our players building that story based off of all the elements we provided. [Image: EA] By avoiding labels, not only is The Sims less prescriptive, it is also more inclusive. (You wont find Republicans and Democrats in The Sims, for instance.) Since the earliest days of the game, relationships spanned gender boundaries without specific labels around status. Today, The Sims 4 does allow players to very deeply specify a characters gender and sexual identity (and even if they lactate), but still, the way this background plays out in actual game logic can be fluid and, again, unlabeled. Sims may fight, but they dont judge. [Image: EA] Is polyamory just the absence of jealousy? Because functionally, that’s kind of what it is. If you decide what gets jealous of what, the player then can infer a lot of different types of relationships of that, says Pearson. And we don’t have to label all of them. We don’t have to provide specific definitions and restrictions. We sort of just have to open up space, which is a really interesting design challenge . . . we say, ‘What’s the lowest common denominator that would unlock a lot of these things?’ [Image: EA] Building forgivable failure (like, why Sims still pee themselves) You cannot win The Sims 4. But you cannot lose either. The way that the franchise has handled the topic of failure has evolved over time, climbing Maslovs hierarchy of needs to be less about survival than everything else in life. When you go back and play The Sims 1, it is very hard to keep your Sims alive. They caught fire all the time. It was a very dangerous world in The Sims 1, the plate spinning was really hard, says Pearson. So, when we moved into The Sims 2, we wanted to introduce a different level of pushback, a little bit higher up the sort of chain of needs. Sims began failing at the meta layers of life, like being too lonely. [Image: EA] But by The Sims 3 and 4, everything got a little bit easier about life. Your Sims don’t fail so much as they just aren’t thriving, and that you can do so much more when you’re working with them, nurturing them, and pushing them along the way, says Pearson. Screenshot Micromanaging has been tuned down in interest of choose-your-own-adventure story charting. If you aren’t spending every moment feeding yourself so you don’t starve, or showering so you don’t stink, you can spend more time, say, turning an entire town into vampires. But notably, you still need to tend to your Sim. You even need to make sure that they use the bathroom now and again, or else, yes, after 25 years, they will still pee themselves. This micromanagement isnt just gamification to keep the player active, but core to the emotional draw of The Sims. There’s a certain amount of pushback that the game still needs for you to believe that these are little people that need you, and that could be a mode of failure, like having an accident or starving. We try to make those entertaining as well: things like being hit by a meteor because you were stargazing for too long, says Pearson. Because at the end of the day, that is a reminder that there is a little bit of humanity in them that you need to pay attention to, and that you can’t just treat them like some ants and it’s fine if they die. You want to care about them. And perhaps thats the real appeal of The Sims after two and a half decades. In a world where we constantly dehumanize one another, reflexively hating people as avatars on social media, The Sims offers another waywhere even a few polygons and lines of code can be worthy of our care.
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E-Commerce
Reid Hoffman returns to Rapid Response to explore todays AI landscape, and the future promised by a concept he calls superagency. Hoffman shares his vision for what an AI-infused workday will soon look like, how we should address societys greatest fears about technology, and more. As we enter a daunting new erapolitically, socially, and technologicallyHoffman urges listeners to choose curiosity over fear. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. So you have a new book out today called Superagency with coauthor Greg Beato. Some people have called the book a surprisingly positive take on AI and on humanity. I think the surprise is less about you being optimistic than about the topic, that there’s so much skepticism right now about the future of both AI and humanity. Can you start first by defining the word agency, and then what superagency is beyond that? So agency is our ability to express ourselves in the world, to make choices, to configure our environment, to say, “This is . . . what I want to have happen to me, to my environment around me.” Obviously nobody has infinite agency, but we all have some agency, and we aspire to that as part of what we do. AI, like other kinds of general-purpose technologies that have come before, gives us superpowers. Superpowers are like a car gives you superpower for mobility, the phone gives you superpowers for connectivity and information. AI gives you superpowers for the entire world of information, navigation, decision-making, etc. And what superagency is, is not just when you as an individual get the superpower, but when you and many of the people around you, when millions of people throughout society also get that superpower. Just as a car doesn’t just transform your mobility, your ability to go somewhere, when other people’s mobility is similarly transformed, like a doctor can come for a house call, a friend can come to visit. So the society that you experience with this kind of superagency is when many people get the same superpowers, and we’re all benefiting from our own and from others. I mean, the fears around AI, I guess, are that AI will eventually limit human control. And when you’re talking about superagency, you’re sort of positing the opposite, that we’re going to have more control. Well, it’s actually different, but more in some important ways. These technological transformations of agency are never only additive. They’re mostly additive. Like the car is broadly additive. But of course, if your agency was previously that you were a driver of a horse carriage, that agency changes. Like when you have a phone, you can reach out to other people, but other people can also reach out to you. So you’re available. Agency kind of transforms in these cases. You can already see it if you start playing with these agents. You can now do things and accomplish things that you couldn’t accomplish before, which unlocks your ability to learn things, your ability to communicate things, your ability to do things faster and in more interesting ways. That’s part of the reason why it’s really important that we actually play with these technologies. We engage with them. We do serious things with them. We do what I call in the book “iterative deployment,” and that’s what’s so important for us all engaging on this path heading towards superagency. You’ve been preaching about the potential of AI for some time. You wrote a book with ChatGPT to demonstrate the potential. You’ve made digital twins of yourself to try demystifying it. Not everyone is convinced. What do you feel like you have to fight most in getting people over this, and what prompted you to do the book now as a way to try to make that change? My biggest hope and persuasion is that people who are AI fearful or skeptical may begin to add some AI curiosity and kind of say, “Hey, look, I should try to play with this.” Part of what superagency is about is to say, look, it doesn’t just matter for yourself, but it’s other people getting exposure to this that will also be good for your life. For example, if you think about the fact that I have a smartphone, I have a medical assistant that is as good or better than the average doctor. Would you rather have a radiologist read your X-ray scan, or would you rather have a radiologist with an AI? And the answer is with an AI every day of the week, eight days a week, because that then gives me a much better health outcome. So it’s not just me and my superpowers, but other people gaining superpowers also helps me. Even if I’m not engaging quite the way you would like me to most, I’m still going to get some of the benefits of this. It’s going to be part of cultural changes. Ultimately how people get to adopting and adapting their lifestyle to these new technologies is because they begin to see, “Oh, actually, in fact, this is a new, very good thing.” As opposed to when cars were first introduced, they were considered so dangerous that they had to have a person walking in front of them, waving an orange flag. Now, we got rid of that regulation very quickly. And it’s like, okay, well, they’re dangerous, but can we contain and shape the danger in ways that are small relative to this massive benefit of superagency and mobility? AI acting on its own seems to be what scares people the most about it. But I’ve thought that the likelihood that I’m going to lose my job to an AI alone may happen at some point, but I’m more likely now to lose my job to someone who uses AI better than I do, right? Although if I’m losing my job, maybe it doesn&8217;t matter that much either way, which one I’m losing it to. Part of the thing that I love about thinking about technology is whenever you think there’s a problem, including a problem created by technology, you think, Can technology be a solution? So, yes, I do think that a lot of jobs will then start requiring the use of AI and AI agents as part of being professional. It’s a little bit like if you said, “Hey, I’m a professional today, and I don’t use a computer, or I don’t use a smartphone.” It’s like, no, not really good. So there are technological requirements, which increase with new tool sets for doing jobs, and AI is definitely going to be one of those. That being said, part of the solution, you go, “Oh, my God, am I going to be out of a job?” Well, actually . . . this gets back to the book being for technologists and thinking about human agency: How do we help people have their agency to learn the new skills and say, “Hey, yes, my job is going to be taken over by a human using an AI.” Well, how about that human being me? Or, okay, so this particular one doesn’t work, but how can the AI help me find a different job? In many ways, I think we will naturally get there, but I think, you know, just because we’ll naturally get there doesn’t mean we can’t get there better by being intentional in having design. It’s one of the reasons I identify myself as a bloomer in the book versus a zoomer, because I don’t think that everything will just be great with technology. I think we have to steer it intentionally, because when human beings encounter new general-purpose technologies as early as the printing press, all the rest of them, we mess up in various ways. We handle the transition of new technologies badly. And part of the reason why I’m doing this book, this podcast, things like this, is to try to say, Let’s do this transition much better. It doesn’t mean we won’t have suffering in the transition. But if you embrace it with some agency, we can possibly make that both less painful and have more opportunities. We are entering into the cognitive industrial revolution, and all you have to do is look at any simple books about the industrial revolution to recognize transitions can be painful. Let’s do this one better.
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E-Commerce
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