LinkedIn CEO told me these 3 jobs will explode in the next 5 years

I had 20 minutes with Ryan Roslansky, CEO of LinkedIn and EVP of Microsoft Co-Pilot.

While everyone is arguing about whether AI will take your job, LinkedIn's data shows it's already creating entirely new ones — 1.3 million net new AI-related roles on the platform, over 600,000 data center jobs alone. Ryan pointed to three specific job categories that are about to take off.

Data Annotator — the one nobody talks about. Every time an LLM gets better, it's partly because human experts are reviewing its output. A cardiologist checking heart health answers. A lawyer reviewing legal summaries. Their corrections go back into the model. Multiply that across every specialty, every language. Massive job category.

Data Center Infrastructure — trade jobs, maintenance, hyper-technical roles. Building the physical foundation AI needs to run. You can't automate building a data center. Gen Z is gravitating here because these roles feel resilient.

Forward Deployed Engineer — someone who sits inside a business unit (not IT) and connects what AI can do with what the marketing or product team actually needs. Part technical, part business. A translator role. Companies are hiring for this constantly.

Ryan sits on top of the world's career data, so this is the part I can't get from anyone else. Here's what it says:

So if new jobs are being created and old jobs are shifting, what do you actually invest in?

According to Ryan, the skills that will actually help us in the future aren't technical. They're human, the ones we've been calling "soft skills" for decades and that label is doing real damage, because "soft" sounds optional (spoiler: It's not).

LinkedIn's own data shows that the skills required for a given job title have changed over 25% in the last couple of years. By 2030, they expect 70% change. That's not a small shift.

Ryan breaks it down into five skills — 5 Cs. They're a major part of his upcoming book Open to Work, and honestly I'd print this list and tape it next to my desk.

The hardest one to fake. Some people are wired for it. For the rest of us, the real question is: are you still asking "why?" about your own industry, or did you stop being curious 3 years ago and you've been on autopilot since?

Not the startup-poster version. The kind where you disagree with your manager in a meeting. Where you say "I don't think this is working" when everyone else is nodding along. Ryan framed it as the ability to disagree and commit, which, by the way, is incredibly hard to do well.

To be honest, when people put "creative" on their LinkedIn profile, it tells me nothing. But Ryan's point is different. In a world where AI can summarize and rewrite, the ability to come up with something original is what separates you. AI is great at pattern-matching but creativity is pattern-breaking.

This one surprised me. Not empathy (understanding what someone feels) — compassion, which means doing something about it. In a team, this is the person who notices a colleague is struggling before it becomes a performance problem. I'm running my own team and can see that this skill is rare and it's worth more than most certifications.

You can't just be buried in technology and expect to succeed. The ability to sit across from someone, galvanize a team, explain a complex idea simply — that's not going away. If anything, the more AI handles execution, the more your ability to communicate the vision matters.

I stopped caring about resumes years ago. We recently hired a YouTube strategist purely based on what he was posting on LinkedIn about channel growth. Not his degree or job titles, just his posts.

That tracks with everything in this conversation. Your content is the extension of your profile. It shows what you know and how you think.

One action for this week: post something. It doesn't have to be polished: write about what you're learning right now or what confused you last week.

Someone is making a hiring decision based on that content right now.

Full conversation with Ryan is on our YouTube — 20 minutes and worth every one of them.

Watch the full interview here.

See you next week,

— Marina