Essential AI-enabled skills everyone needs for tomorrow’s jobs
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Thanks to AI, work will look very different in the near future: According to the World Economic Forum, by 2030, 85 million jobs will be affected by AI, and millions of new jobs that don’t exist yet will be created.
In a world where the pace of change is accelerating dramatically, it will be our skills, not our education, work history or past achievements, that define our worth.
Realistically speaking, employers will be less interested in what we knew or achieved in the past and more interested in how we can apply our knowledge and capabilities to solve modern business challenges.
So what does this mean in the age of AI? How do we prepare for a world where machines will perform many of the tasks previously monopolized by humans? And what skills will we need to continue to create value and stay relevant? Let’s take a closer look.
Two Core Skill Sets for the Future of AI
I believe the skills that will be essential for survival in the future can be divided into two groups. Roughly speaking, we can call these AI skills and human soft skills.
First, having AI skills doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll become an AI engineer or a data scientist.
Rather, it requires the ability to use AI effectively, augment your own capabilities, and monitor its output – in other words, to be effective AI collaborators, delegators, and overseers.
As AI becomes more prevalent, the ability to identify and use the best tools will be important in almost every profession.
Second, human soft skills represent capabilities that AI cannot yet perform or cannot perform as well as humans. These skills are rooted in what has made humans so successful as a species from an evolutionary perspective. These skills enable us to work collaboratively, solve complex problems using diverse data, navigate social situations, solve problems creatively, critically evaluate progress, and form emotional connections with others.
As machines become more capable, uniquely human capabilities become more valuable. These two skill subsets complement each other, and developing them in tandem is key to building future-proof skills.
Let’s take a closer look at each skill set.
AI Skills
AI skills is a broad category that encompasses everything needed to use AI effectively.
Of course, that includes the technical data and computing skills needed to design, build and deploy AI systems – but not everyone needs to do that.
We will also cover general AI literacy, which means understanding what AI can do and how to apply AI tools to achieve specific goals.
This involves understanding the AI landscape in terms of available tools and applications, their capabilities and limitations, and proficiency in using and interacting with these tools.
This includes skills such as prompt engineering, which involves the ability to frame human and business problems in a way that AI can address.
A central concept is “augmented work,” a term often used to describe the ability to use AI to automate routine tasks and free up human experts to work more efficiently.
Understanding how to leverage AI to support and enhance creativity is also a valuable skill, including using AI to generate ideas and create multiple iterations of unique ideas for different audiences.
People with the necessary skills to play the essential “human touch” roles of overseeing the AI workforce and ensuring accuracy, safety and fairness will be highly valued in the workforce of the future.
Importantly, people who understand the ethical and legal implications will be equally important, including the ability to recognize when there is risk of bias or privacy violations, and when an organization’s use of AI may be crossing regulatory or legal boundaries.
Soft Skills
As AI handles many of the technical tasks, the value of human soft skills that machines cannot yet perform will increase exponentially.
What matters most is the ability to strategize at a high level.
For example, if you ask an AI delivery optimization algorithm to plan the most efficient route for a van driver to drop off packages, it can do so more efficiently than a human.
You probably won’t consider delivery by drone or suggest reducing the weight of packages to make deliveries more fuel-efficient, because most AI applications are highly specialized and don’t have the “general” intelligence capabilities of humans.
Creative problem-solving is another important soft skill. Humans excel at lateral thinking, connecting different ideas, and coming up with novel solutions to complex problems. Whether technological, social, or environmental, our ability to imagine and articulate a better future is uniquely human. This imagination, combined with our ability to inspire others toward that vision, remains critical in an AI-driven world, allowing us to conceptualize and pursue innovations that AI alone cannot deliver.
Developing plans that encompass long-term goals and take into account the many factors that aren’t necessarily included in the training data will likely be out of AI’s reach for a long time.
Then there’s critical thinking, which involves objectively analyzing and evaluating all aspects of a problem, situation, or opportunity to reach a judgment. AI can critically evaluate plans of action or ideas, but again, it is limited by its training data and may or may not contain the specific insights needed.
Teamwork, leadership and mentorship also require uniquely human skills, including high levels of emotional intelligence – the ability to recognize fellow humans on an emotional level and respond appropriately – which is essential for collaboration and relationship building.
For example, building partnerships is crucial in modern business, and AI’s lack of emotional intelligence will always put it at a disadvantage when it comes to the nuances of negotiation, building trust, and establishing mission and value alignment that are essential to forging effective partnerships.
And human soft skills remain crucial in project management, which requires balancing resources, budgets, time constraints, and a variety of unexpected factors that may arise.
Once again, computer intelligence proves to be too specialized to deal with the many potential scenarios that could thwart even the most carefully laid plans.
Adaptability and lifelong learning
Perhaps more than any other skill, our ability to adapt to change and continually learn and improve will determine our survival in the age of AI.
Technology is constantly evolving, and the AI available in 10 years’ time will likely be far beyond what we can imagine today. No matter how carefully we prepare now, we will be surprised by sudden events. Therefore, the ability to adapt and keep our knowledge and skills up to date is important.
This isn’t just about keeping up with technology, but cultivating a change-oriented mindset so you can continue to perform even as the world becomes more complex and uncertain.
The tradition of upfront education during your formative years is becoming increasingly outdated. Looking for roles that allow for continuous learning and pursuing self-directed learning opportunities will help you cultivate this mindset.
Similarly, the human skills we have discussed – communication, creativity, emotional intelligence – are not innate traits that some are born with and others aren’t: they can all be developed through practice and diverse experiences.
By focusing on developing both human and AI skills, embracing change, and cultivating the habit of lifelong learning, we will be more likely to succeed in the AI era.
