Want a job? Just put 'AI skills' on your resume

It could just be the new 'proficient with MS Word'

ai-pocalypse For job seekers wondering which AI skills to bone up on, the answer appears to be simple based on a look at the past year of employment data: Just learn to use it. 

CompTIA's yearly Cyberstates workforce report was published Monday. Along with a whole bunch of juicy job data, it includes evidence that when it comes to finding a job, dedicated AI pros aren't gaining much ground over your average proficient prompter.

Job postings for people with AI skills reached an all-time high last month, the training and certification company said, with some 125,000 open jobs in the tech sector mentioning the need. Those user-level skills, CompTIA noted, could involve anything from a marketer using ChatGPT to help develop new language, to a web dev using just a bit of AI to help them generate or debug some code. 

Jobs mentioning AI skills (grey) versus AI jobs (black) from January 2023 to present - Click to enlarge

"For just about every digital or knowledge worker, AI can be thought of as another tool in workplace tool belts," the report said. 

True dedicated AI professionals - your engineers, model builders, architects, and other deep technical types - are certainly being sought, mind you, and sometimes at spectacular salaries. CompTIA noted dedicated AI-title hiring climbed 75 percent year over year. But that's 75 percent of an already small number.

"This hiring typically occurs among large enterprises and accounts for a relatively small share of overall tech hiring," CompTIA said. 

In short, there's no reason to go the software engineer and LLM expertise route, because the AI jobs can be found in the "summarize my boss' emails for me" and "create some marketing campaign mockups with X, Y and Z elements that I couldn't get a human to do" spaces of expertise, not the "build me a new LLM" and "connect this chatbot to this unformatted data and work me a miracle" one. You know - "can you use Copilot?" not "build me a new copilot."

CompTIA didn't make clear what specific AI products businesses may be looking for expertise in, but the trend is clear: AI skills aren't the new "learn to code;" they're the next iteration of "Proficient with MS Word." 

What else has happened in the past year in tech jobs?

CompTIA's yearly review of tech employment didn't just discover how the application of AI skills is shaking down - it found some other interesting data points worth highlighting, too.

Take CompTIA's net tech employment datapoint, which breaks tech employment down into two categories that are often left undescribed in similar research: Employment at tech sector companies, which includes non-technical people working in service of tech, and those with direct technical occupations. 

According to CompTIA's predictions, net tech employment will likely grow this year after a couple of years of declines following a post-COVID hiring surge in 2022. Of that employment, slightly more job gains are expected in technical occupations, CompTIA said. 

Whether AI has had an effect on that ratio is unknown, but it may be part of the reason that CompTIA is forecasting the tech workforce to grow twice as fast as the overall US workforce over the next ten years. 

Not all those future roles will be going to serving AI, of course: Many will have to do with safeguarding systems. 

Tech occupations are forecast to grow at roughly twice the rate of overall US employment over the next ten years. Data science and analytics top the list, followed by cybersecurity analytics and engineering, according to CompTIA. Software development and engineering, software QA and testing, and web/UI/UX design round out its prediction for which of their courses you ought to take as the demand for such jobs increases. ®