The rapid ascent of artificial intelligence and semiconductor manufacturing has created a paradox: Industries are booming yet they face a critical shortage of skilled workers. Demand for data center technicians, fabrication facility workers, and similar positions is growing. There aren’t enough candidates with the right skill sets to fill the in-demand jobs.

Although those technical roles are essential, they don’t always require a four-year degree—which has paved the way for skills-based microcredentials. By partnering with higher education institutions and training providers, industry leaders are helping to design targeted skills programs that quickly turn learners into job-ready technical professionals.

The new standard for skills validation

Because microcredentials are relatively new, consistency is key. Through its credentialing program, IEEE serves as a bridge between academia and industry. Developed and managed by IEEE Educational Activities, the program offers standardized credentials in collaboration with training organizations and universities seeking to provide skills-based qualifications outside formal degree programs. IEEE, as the world’s largest technical professional organization, has more than 30 years of experience offering industry-relevant credentials and expertise in global standardization.

IEEE is setting the benchmark for skills-based microcredentials by establishing a framework that includes assessment methods, qualifications for instructors and assessors, and criteria for skill levels.

A recent collaboration with the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, for example, developed microcredentials for USC’s semiconductor cleanroom program. USC heads the CA Dreams microelectronics innovation hub.

“The IEEE framework allows us to rapidly prototype training programs and adapt on the fly in a way that building new university courses—much less degree programs—won’t allow.” —Adam Stieg

IEEE worked with USC to create standardized skills assessments and associated microcredentials so that industry hiring managers can recognize the newly developed skills. The microcredentials help people with or without four-year degrees join the semiconductor industry as cleanroom technicians or as engineers with cleanroom experience.

IEEE also has partnered with the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, to create skills-based microcredentials for its cleanroom protocol and safety program.

Best practices for designing microcredentials

Based on IEEE’s work designing microcredentials with USC, UCLA, and other leading academic institutions, three best practices have emerged.

1. Align with industry needs before design.

Collaborate with industry prior to starting the design process. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. Workforce needs vary based on industry sector, company size, and geography. Higher education institutions and training providers build relationships with companies and industry groups to create effective microcredential programs and methods of assessment.

2. Build for flexibility.

Traditional academic cycles can be slow, but technology moves fast. A flexible skills-based microcredentials framework allows programs to create or pivot as new breakthroughs occur.

“Setting up a credit-bearing course is not easy. And in a rapidly changing environment, you need to pivot quickly,” says Adam Stieg, research scientist and associate director at UCLA’s CNSI. “IEEE skills-based microcredentials are a flexible way to keep up our curriculum aligned with an evolving technology landscape.”

Stieg’s team worked with IEEE to build a framework to create microcredentials for its cleanroom protocol and safety program, ensuring it kept pace with the industry’s evolution.

“The IEEE framework allows us to rapidly prototype training programs and adapt on the fly,” he says, “in a way that building new university courses—much less degree programs—won’t allow.”

3. Implement a continuous-feedback loop.

Many of the technical roles companies are looking to fill in emerging fields such as AI, cybersecurity, and semiconductors are still being developed or are quickly evolving. The rapidly changing landscape requires continual communications and feedback among higher education, training providers, and industry.

“We struggle to have feedback loops through the education system to the industry and back again,” says Matt Francis, president and CEO of Ozark Integrated Circuits, in Fayetteville, Ark. Francis, who has served as IEEE Region 5 director, is an IEEE volunteer who supports workforce development for the semiconductor industry.

Creating consistent feedback loops is critical for generating consensus on the skills sets needed for microcredential programs, experts say, and it allows providers to update assessments as new tools and safety protocols enter the workplace.

“If we start thinking about having training frameworks used within companies that are essentially on some sort of standard and align with a microcredential, we can start to build consensus,” Francis says.

Getting started

Through its credentialing program, IEEE is helping higher education and industry work together to bridge the technical workforce skills gap. Contact its team to learn how IEEE skills-based microcredentials can help you fill your workforce pipeline.

• Micron CEO says company is unable to meet current demand
• DRAM production is being prioritized for AI and datacenters
• Consumers are reeling for the cheap RAM of yesteryear

Micron Technology Inc. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra has said that the company “are only able to supply, for our key customers in the midterm, about 50% to two-thirds of their requirements.”

Mehrotra’s statement reflects the growing demand by datacenters for components related to AI compute that will likely worsen the supply of memory.

from the the-kids-are-alright dept

We’ve been covering Australia’s under-16 social media ban since before it went into effect, first noting the confusion and obvious implementation problems as pretty much everyone realized it was a total mess, and then documenting how the ban was actively harming kids with disabilities by cutting them off from critical support communities.

None of this was even remotely surprising. Critics around the world warned about all of it. The government went ahead anyway because doing something tends to poll better than doing something that actually works, especially when the thing that works is harder to explain. And government officials insisted (incorrectly) that the only ones who were complaining were the big tech companies or their proxies.

Now, three months in, the data is starting to arrive, and it confirms what should have been obvious from the start. New data from parental monitoring company Qustodio, provided to Crikey, shows that the ban has barely moved the needle:

While TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat all saw a decrease in use by Australians aged 10-15, the majority of teens who had been using the social media platforms pre-ban remained on the services afterwards.

That’s according to a new snapshot of data provided to Crikey by parental monitoring company Qustodio, adding to early evidence that there’s widespread circumvention of the government’s flagship tech policy.

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The usage drop was only marginally larger than the normal seasonal dip that happens every year. In other words, the “world-first” ban achieved roughly the same effect as summer ending. There was definitely a drop, but it’s just not a particularly big one:

For what it’s worth, others are reporting the same thing. The Courier Mail found that the majority of teens who were using these apps before the ban were still using them afterwards.

Defenders of the ban will usually say something along the lines of: “We had to do something. Children were at risk. Even if it’s imperfect, at least we tried.” That argument might hold some water if the ban merely failed — if it just didn’t work and left things roughly where they were before. A swing and a miss. You dust yourself off and try something else.

But that’s not what happened. The ban didn’t leave things where they were. It made things actively worse, through a mechanism that was entirely predictable.

The ban is basically a test of technical sophistication, rather than a test of vulnerability. The kids who can’t figure out how to get around it — or who don’t have friends or older siblings to help them — are the kids who are already isolated or lack the technical skills to bypass a block. Those are the kids with disabilities who lost their support communities, the ones we wrote about last month. Those are the kids in rural areas or difficult home situations who relied on these platforms for connection. The ban selected for vulnerability and filtered against resourcefulness.

That’s a hell of a result for a child safety measure.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of kids — the ones the ban was supposedly protecting — just learned to route around it. Rather than learning responsible usage and digital literacy, they learned that age verification systems are obstacles to be defeated… which, congratulations, is probably the single least useful lesson you could teach a teenager about their relationship with technology.

Actually, it’s worse: Australian adults now have a false sense of security — the comfortable belief that they’ve magically protected kids from the evils of the internet.

When you pass a ban and declare the problem solved, you eliminate the political pressure to do the things that would actually help. Why fund digital literacy programs when kids aren’t supposed to be on social media at all? Why push platforms to develop better age-appropriate tools and experiences when under-16s are “banned”? Why have conversations with kids about healthy usage of something they’re not supposed to be using?

The ban creates a fiction — kids are off social media — that every politician and regulator has an incentive to maintain, even though the data says the fiction is exactly that. Kids are still using these platforms. They’re just doing it without guidance or access to real safety tools, and with the realization that the adults in charge don’t actually understand how any of this works.

So you end up with the worst possible outcome: nearly universal continued usage combined with policy complacency and zero institutional incentive to teach kids how to use these platforms safely. Kids using social media without supervision or education, while the government pats itself on the back for a ban that exists only on paper.

This was all foreseeable. It was all foreseen. Critics said so publicly, repeatedly, before the law passed. And the Australian government did it anyway, because “ban the thing” is a satisfying political narrative, even when — especially when — it doesn’t work.

And now that it’s failed, rather than admit that the plan was bad and dangerous… they’re doubling down by blaming the tech companies:

An eSafety spokesperson said that social media platforms need to take “continuous action” to find underage users on their platforms, including those who’ve created new accounts.

“eSafety is aware of reports some under-16s continue to access social media accounts and is actively engaging with platforms and their age assurance providers to probe weaknesses and encourage continuous improvement of implementation and settings while continuing to monitor for any systemic failures that may amount to a breach of the law,” they said.

The spokesperson foreshadowed further announcements in the coming weeks, adding: “We will provide further updates on age restricted platforms’ progress in meeting their obligations when it is appropriate to do so but we must be careful to not compromise the regulatory process currently underway or prejudice any enforcement action we may undertake in future.”

The blame will keep flowing toward the platforms. The kids will keep routing around the ban. And the adults will keep congratulating themselves for solving a problem they made worse.

Filed Under: australia, esafety, esafety commissioner, kids, safety, social media, social media ban, teens

• Agentic AI enables PCs to autonomously execute multiple tasks in parallel
• Persistent local AI reduces reliance on cloud computing for sensitive workflows
• Professionals can delegate urgent tasks and wake to completed project summaries

The personal computer has been central to work and creativity for four decades, allowing users to write, build, design, and analyze with professional-grade tools – but PCs have largely remained tools operated directly by humans, opening apps and performing tasks manually.

However, AMD now suggests that Agentic AI could be the killer app for even decades-old PCs, transforming them into systems that autonomously execute tasks and manage workflows.

OpenAI is working toward creating a desktop “superapp” that will consist of its three tools: ChatGPT, the coding platform Codex and the Atlas browser, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. OpenAI executives said the goal behind this new desktop app is to improve the user experience.

The move comes after the Journal reported earlier this week that OpenAI CEO of applications Fidji Simo told employees the company wanted to focus on its core business instead of side projects.

In a Thursday memo to staff reported by the Journal, Simo, who leads development of the new app, said the company was spreading its “efforts across too many apps and stacks, and that we need to simplify our efforts.”

ChatGPT is the signature chatbot from OpenAI, Codex is a coding platform designed for software developers, and Atlas is the AI-first browser from the company, which acts like a traditional internet browser, but with ChatGPT as an assistant.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, parent company of CNET, in 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

By creating a single app, OpenAI hopes to better compete with rivals like Anthropic. Responding to the Journal report in a post on X, Simo said the move is intended to build on the recent success of Codex, a competitor to Anthropic’s Claude Code.

“Companies go through phases of exploration and phases of refocus; both are critical,” Simo said. “But when new bets start to work, like we’re seeing now with Codex, it’s very important to double down on them and avoid distractions. Really glad we’re seizing this moment.”

A representative for OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Earlier this week, OpenAI announced its new GPT-5.4 mini and nano, smaller and faster versions of its ChatGPT 5.4 model. These coding models also highlight the company’s focus on supporting coders and enterprises instead of dabbling in various projects.

If you’re looking for an upgrade to your home audio, but you don’t have a lot of room to spare, the Bose Smart Soundbar is an excellent option. Normally $499, it’s currently marked down to just $419 on Amazon. With full Dolby Atmos spatial audio, a unique musical profile, and all the features you’d expect from a modern soundbar in a small package, there’s a reason it’s our favorite compact soundbar.

The biggest selling point here is the design. The Bose Smart Soundbar has an impressively small footprint, perfect for apartment-sized entertainment centers and cramped living rooms. It’s just 2.2 inches tall, making it easy to slide under basically any screen, and its 27-inch width even makes it a viable option for smaller panels. There are a surprising number of speakers inside, including a pair of proper up-firing drivers, so you get real spatial audio and full Dolby Atmos support, something fairly uncommon for soundbars.

Despite the size, the Bose Smart Soundbar has a great audio profile and feature set that’s just as good as any full-size bar. It has a more musical quality than most, which works just as well for an action movie or catching up on your favorite show as it does for listening to some music while you hang out on the couch. If you have a pair of Bose Ultra Open Earbuds, you can even pair them up for a personal surround setup, a feature unique to the Bose.

If you often have trouble catching what characters are saying, there’s an AI Dialogue mode that boosts the clarity and volume of speech. It’s a feature we’ve seen on other soundbars, but it stands out here with its excellent implementation, bringing any dialog into sharp focus at the push of a button. You can really hear the difference when switching the feature on and off.

If you have a little more space under your TV, or you’re just curious what other options are out there, make sure to check out our full guide to the best soundbars. Otherwise, you can head to Amazon to grab the Bose Smart Soundbar for just $419.