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📬 A focused Sunday briefing to complement your regular issues.
🟣 Sunday Special - Your AI Events, Learning, and Career Briefing
⏱ 3-min read
Issue # 51
This week: 48% of employers would rather buy AI than train a new grad. The entry-level door is narrowing but the AI-skills door is wide open. Here's where to walk through it.
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🆕 New This Week
Nearly half of hiring managers would rather invest in AI than hire a 2026 grad
A new ResumeTemplates.com survey of 1,000 US hiring managers (companies with 101+ employees) shows the entry-level ladder is being pulled up — and AI is the reason.
Image created with AI
Key findings from the survey:
48% would rather invest in AI tools than hire and train a recent college graduate for entry-level work
55% have already shifted entry-level hiring budget toward AI tools
45% have restructured so one senior employee using AI does the work of several entry-level hires
35% won't hire class-of-2026 grads at the same volume as 2025
For job seekers: The bar for entry-level just moved from "trainable" to "already productive with AI." The practical edge now is showing AI fluency directly experimenting with the tools, attending AI events, building agents, and earning selective certifications with clear workplace outcomes. A shipped project beats a tidy resume.
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🧠Builder Signal
How I entered the ElevenLabs hackathon with zero coding experience
No code, 4 hours, $5, Claude as co-pilot. The result: FitCoach AI, a live AI fitness avatar with a face, voice, and real-time conversation.
10 errors hit, 10 fixed — each one just became my next Claude prompt
The hard part wasn't building the app; it was wiring the services together (keys, domains, credits, embeds)
Full step-by-step build — exact prompts and every fix — on the blog.
Know someone who keeps saying "I can't code"? Forward this.
Real-World Ads, Simple to Run
With AdQuick, executing Out Of Home campaigns is as easy as running digital ads. Plan, deploy, and measure your real-world advertising effortlessly — so your team can scale campaigns and maximize impact without the headaches.
🏆 3 AI Hackathons
🔹 Qualcomm × Meta ExecuTorch
⏰ Closes June 15.
Build on-device AI (no cloud) on Snapdragon-powered Galaxy S25 Ultra hardware in San Francisco, June 27–28, with Qualcomm and Meta mentors. Only 150 spots — Quest 3s and Ray-Ban Meta Glasses up for grabs.
👉 Apply →
🔹Band of Agents
Build enterprise workflows where multiple AI agents coordinate, online June 12–19, powered by Band and Codeband. Top projects pitch live at the /function1 Conference in Dubai.
👉 Join →
🔹AMD ACT II
Free hands-on access to AMD Instinct MI300X GPUs plus $100 in cloud credits, online July 6–11, $10K prize pool. Includes a free 1-month DeepLearning.AI Pro membership.
Read less. Know more.
Morning Brew delivers the biggest stories in business, finance, and tech in about 5 minutes — with just enough personality to keep things interesting.
Join 4,000,000+ professionals who start their mornings a little smarter.
📅AI Events — pick the one that fits
🥇 Databricks Data + AI Summit 2026 — June 15–18.
Builders: AI DevSummit New York — June 9–10.
Enterprise AI teams: Info-Tech LIVE 2026 — June 9–11.
Data & analytics leaders: CDAO New York — June 9.
AI executives: Chief AI Officer NY — June 9.
Web3 builders: ETHConf 2026 — June 8–10.
Construction professionals: AI Construction Workshop: Claude at Work — June 17.
🎓AI Learning Opportunities— pick one this weekend
Most useful: Fast & Efficient LLM Inference with vLLM — DeepLearning.AI.
Claude users: Introduction to Agent Skills — Anthropic Academy.
Enterprise agents: Manage Agents with AWS Agent Registry — AWS Skill Builder.
Business leaders: Drive AI Transformation in Your Organization — Microsoft Learn.
AI practitioners: NVIDIA Applications of AI for Anomaly Detection — NVIDIA DLI.
💼AI Career Opportunities
Product Engineering: Software Engineer, Claude Design — Anthropic · $320K–$485K · SF / NY / Seattle.
AI Strategy: AI Readiness Consultant — Harnham · $65–$80/hr · Remote.
AI Coding: AI Deployment Engineer, Codex — OpenAI · $197K–$278K + equity · San Francisco.
AI Safety: Member of Technical Staff, Imagine Safety — xAI · $180K–$440K · Palo Alto.
Research: Research Engineer, Multimodal Reasoning for Information Literacy — Google DeepMind · Mountain View.
Data Science: Principal Data Scientist, CoreAI — Microsoft.
✨ Final Note
The story this week is blunt: nearly half of employers would rather buy AI than train a new grad. The entry-level ladder is being pulled up.
But the same shift building that wall is creating the demand. The people landing offers in 2026 are the ones who can show what they've built with AI — not list tools on a resume.
Read the survey. Build the agent. Pick one course. Don't wait for permission.
