The AI Skills Job Seekers Need

The boom in generative artificial intelligence touched off in late 2022 has changed our lives in a number of ways — and the job market is no exception.

December of that year saw the release of the first consumer version of ChatGPT — an app capable of writing high-school, if not college-level, essays in seconds. Since then, ChatGPT creator Open AI has released several upgrades of its signature software, which hit 100 million users a week within its first year while inspiring a host of other tech companies to enter the field.

Cue existential crisis. Workers began worrying about the impact on their jobs as employers began looking for ways to apply ChatGPT and other AI technologies. It was fair to ask: Is a robot gunning for my job?

The answer: not yet. But there’s no denying that ChatGPT and other generative AI products have already spawned a wave of technological shifts that are unsettling entire industries. It is now fair to say that AI is on the radar of every employer. All of which has led today’s job seekers to consider how they can best use the technology to enhance their job prospects.

“It is no secret that familiarity with and ability to use AI is rising in the ranking of skills needed for career enhancement,” says Mark Booker, vice provost of University of Phoenix. “Job seekers who understand how to leverage AI to support their own productivity will be an asset over the next few years.”

What can job seekers do today to get a leg up on the competition? “I don’t think you need to go back to college,” says Tom Taulli, author of “How ChatGPT and Other AI Tools Will Revolutionize Business.” “But you should have a basic understanding of different categories like machine learning and generative AI. You also need to understand the risks and limitations of current technology, as well as when to use one type of AI versus another.”

In other words, prospects who can wrangle emerging AI technology for their employer’s gain will better secure their own spot on the leading candidate list. While ChatGPT continues to be the dominant platform, familiarity with other apps like Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and BERT will become crucial skills for tomorrow’s job seekers, according to the many recruiting, human resource, and education experts reached for this story. So too will UiPath, Stable Diffusion, Automation Anywhere, TensorFlow, and PyTorch.

“You should know how to construct prompts with these powerful tools to get the best written, image, and even video results,” Tauli says. “Every day there seems to be new innovations, so it’s important to keep up with the latest developments.”

For those unsure about what the future might look like, job seekers need only to look to the recent past. “AI will become an office tool that people are expected to use — just like a computer,” says Marc Cenedella, founder of Ladders, a recruiting website. “To get work in the field, people with an infectious enthusiasm to learn and leverage AI will have a competitive advantage, similar to early IBM employees who tinkered with and learned how to build computers, even though they had only previously worked with typewriters.”

In terms of the most immediate use case, programmers who know how to speed and enhance their coding with AI assistants are leading the charge. “As employers continue to rely more on AI, they will also invest significantly in AI-driven data science and programming,” says Booker. “Individuals skilled in data science and programming languages that support AI such as Python, Java, Julia, and R will do well.”

That’s because AI is having the biggest and fastest growing impact in application development. For example, today’s programmers can now chat with their code for advice, guidance, help with syntax, and help debugging. These intelligent “co-pilots” have shown significant increases in productivity. But they have also helped developers learn new concepts and techniques. “Keep in mind that GitHub Copilot has 1.8M paid subscribers,” explains Tauli. “It’s one of Microsoft’s fastest growing apps – ever.”

Just like yesterday’s machines made humans more productive, AI is doing the same. “The ability to collaborate effectively with both AI and humans is the end goal,” explains Patrick Fan, professor of Business Analytics at University of Iowa. “Obtaining certifications such as Google’s Professional Machine Learning Engineer, IBM’s AI Engineering Professional Certificate, or certifications focused on specific tools like TensorFlow will be crucial.”

But AI will similarly and soon spread to every other type of job, especially service oriented ones. Those include but are not limited to marketing, sales, business intelligence, creative teams, HR, legal, and administrative roles to name a few.

For instance, “Salesforce’s Einstein AI already serves as a co-pilot for sales and marketing professionals,” explains Deborah Piscione, co-founder of Work3 Institute, an advisory firm that helps businesses adapt to new technologies. Current certifications are so in demand, Piscione says, that her own son recently decided to replace a traditional four-year degree with a Certificate in AI for Marketing from Cornell University, which was all online. “Beyond universities, there are AI certifications from reputable organizations and platforms such as Coursera, edX, and IBM,” she adds.

You don’t necessarily need certifications, Tauli says. “But there are various courses on LinkedIn Learning and Coursera that can help you stand out,” he counsels. “You can and should link to these courses on your resume and LinkedIn profile, to show prospective employers that you are being proactive about AI and how it can benefit your value and productivity.”

But it’s not just technical skills that job seekers need to thrive in an AI-assisted world. “Tomorrow’s job seekers will likely need more interpersonal skills, not less,” Fan says, such as human empathy, emotional intelligence, ease of talking in person, and the ability to resolve personal conflicts. You know, all the things humans are good at, while AI increasingly handles the boring stuff. “As AI handles more routine tasks, human roles will focus more on management, negotiation, empathy, and creativity—skills that AI can’t easily replicate.”

So if you want to learn what’s important right now, “Get your feet wet,” Cenedella advises. “I recommend investing 10 hours a week to develop AI skills through research and experimentation. To demonstrate this in an application, you can include a statement in your cover letter like, ‘I read the latest academic papers on Large Language Model (LLM capabilities), participate in OpenAI forums, and experiment with which models work best under various conditions.’”