Attention MBA Job Seekers: Maryland Smith Unveils An AI Jobs Map With 90% Accuracy

University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business has unveiled an AI job mapping tool. Courtesy photo

It could be the next big thing to help MBA students and grads find jobs in AI: A new AI job mapping tool out of the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland goes beyond using a simple keyword search, pinpointing which regions have the most jobs available and in which sector.

Incredibly, it operates at a rate of 90% accuracy — much higher than similar tools designed to perform the same function.

“Other similar tools have been found to be 70% inaccurate, mostly because they are using a keyword search,” says Professor Anil Gupta, one of the professors behind the tool Maryland LinkUp AI Maps.

Professor Anil Gupta – courtesy photo

SEARCHING FOR ‘A RICH POND TO FISH IN’

“What we did at UMD is, we fine-tuned a large language model that actually reads the job posting the way AI would read any text,” Gupta tells Poets&Quants, “and that determines with a very high degree of accuracy if the job needs AI skills or not.”

The tool was designed not just for MBAs but for any users — from companies to policymakers to non-business graduates. Gupta says the tool proves itself a great resource for “searching for a rich pond to fish in” for those seeking AI-skilled jobs.

Gupta, who has been with Maryland since 1986, has a background in business strategy. Behind the scenes with him in the creation of the AI Map are his faculty colleagues Siva Viswanathan and Kunpeng Zhang, Ph.D. student Hanwen Shi, and a few masters students. The Smith team has partnered with Outrigger Group and LinkUp to gather their most recent data, sourced exclusively from company career pages.

Gupta says they chose LinkUp because half of the company’s clients are hedge funds that rely heavily on accurate and top-tier data sourcing. He notes there are three main buckets that AI work can be sorted into: those creating the technology, policymakers who handle the ethics and governance of AI, and those who are interested in AI and the economy.

REVEALING NEW FINDINGS IN THE AI JOB MARKET

“Our work falls in the third bucket,” Gupta says. “We think our contribution lies in providing hard data on one important aspect — AI and the economy.”

Gupta and the Maryland Smith team update the site monthly, releasing new information mid-month. He and his colleagues have published a white paper to help share their findings, called From the West to the Rest. Based on the data, California is at the forefront of AI jobs and “will likely continue to dominate as the leading region for AI jobs for the foreseeable future,” Gupta says. Following closely behind is the Washington, D.C./Maryland/Virginia area, with the NY/New Jersey region not far behind. Texas ranks fourth, with New England claiming the fifth spot.

The Maryland Smith team intends to publish more findings every few months, and their next paper will explain what’s happening across sectors and industries to determine which have adopted AI more, which have adopted AI less, and at what speed.

A screenshot of Maryland Smith’s AI job mapping tool

THE MOST UNEXPECTED FINDINGS

The most unexpected finding from the data lies in the D.C. region. The share of all jobs is about 6%, while their share of AI jobs accounts for a whopping 12% of all AI jobs. Gupta comments that he knew intuitively that AI is exploding and going viral, but what he didn’t know was the extent to which it is expanding.

“I’ve been in D.C. for a long time,” says Gupta, “and I knew that this is a highly educated community. But I didn’t know how things were playing out in terms of the AI jobs.”

He reached out to a few of his contacts who serve as chief data officers in various agencies to discuss these findings, and much to his surprise, they were not surprised. They had seen the industry trending this way over the past five years.

Looking ahead, Gupta says he and his team plan to broaden their focus to include new sectors and potentially integrate compensation data. “We see this as a live dynamic and ongoing project,” he says.

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