Did you know resumes with AI skills are likely to have a higher success rate? 71% of surveyed employers were more comfortable hiring candidates that had AI skills over candidates with the same job experience but no AI skills. How do you navigate the temporary trends and make sure your AI skills are relevant to your job search? Let’s talk about hiring trends, AI, and how you could use these AI skills for a resume boost!
Why add AI skills to your resume?
If you had to guess, what would you say is the key deciding factor that recruiters base their decisions on? Maybe you think it’s your education, or number of years of relevant work experience that will make the cut. It’s true that used to be the case…but the recruiting world has changed. The recruiting world has found a better currency to score talent: skills.
Companies (in general) are no longer looking for the fanciest alumni credentials, or even the most experienced; they look for smart and skilled recruits that get the job done efficiently, regardless of where they come from. The more skilled you are, the better your chances are of landing a job. The question remains: is this true for all skills? Surely, there have to be some skills that are valued more than others?
The business world shifts to a skill-based economy at the same time that the world is adapting to AI. Artificial intelligence has stirred up the status quo, leaving a lot of questions and uncertainty in its wake.
AI is still fairly young in terms of technology growth. So, while AI may not replace you, it can very quickly leave you replaceable by those who know AI. Knowing how to use AI efficiently is a skill in its own right today, so, if you are looking to make a resume in 2024, you’ll want to make sure there are some AI skills in there.
In fact, 14% of all tech job postings in 2024 specifically mention they are looking for AI skills in your resume, up from 9% last year. It’s safe to say that adding AI skills to your resume will only make your chances better.
5 AI skills to add to your resume this year
Don’t stress – we’ve compiled five of the most highly sought-after (and easy-to-learn) AI skills to add to your resume:
1. Prompt engineering
It’s true – AI still needs that human touch! For AI to generate an output, you have to first feed in an input, aka a prompt. Whether we look at ChatGPT or Midjourney, or even apps developed in AI development environments, AI tools require you to write descriptive and precise commands so they can deliver an outcome. The better your prompt, the better your results! This is what prompt engineers do. Being able to write clear and concise directions that AI can execute will also help you utilize the tool better than your peers.
2. Data modeling and analytics
Essentially, become a data scientist!
Data science has already been around for a decade (or longer), but it’s arguably relevant now more than ever in the wake of AI’s mass adoption.
Why? Data is the crux of AI. Not only does AI thrive on all the data we feed it, data is also what dictates AI’s ability to help us connect the dots. The ability to structure and regroup data into refined structures and to make sense of the insights that AI extracts for us will help us make more informed decisions and steer strategy and market forces.
3. Programming
To understand and improve your experience with AI, basic knowledge of programming will come in handy. After all, AI’s foundation is programming. The very algorithms and models that make AI work relies on programming. We are primarily looking at JavaScript, Python, HTML — although any programming language knowledge you can start with is still valuable. (Editor’s note: Python is fairly intuitive, even if you’ve never programmed before!) As the world continues to adapt to AI, hard tech skills like programming will start to become more common on resumes.
Here are a few more such transferable skills examples that you may have discounted as not-for-you because they feel ‘too technical’. We promise, you can do it!
4. Machine learning
By this part of our list, you hopefully want to put AI skills in your resume.
Want to put really, really tech-proficient “knows what they are doing” types of AI skills in your resume? Get into machine learning.
Machine learning is literally the way we teach machines to think like humans. We use data, algorithms, neural networks, deep learning, and more come up every day! It’s an exciting hotbed for tech innovation with lots of room for new discoveries, strategies and development.
Needless to say, this is going to be a pretty sought-after skill even in the coming future. Studies show that by 2030 machine learning alone will be a $2 trillion industry.
5. Critical thinking & problem solving
We know, we know – all the skills up on the list have been very "tech". While it’s true most folk associate AI as a very tech field, so are there no soft skills that will help your resume?
Ultimately, working with artificial intelligence boils down to thinking and solving. That’s where we can re-introduce two core (human) skills: critical thinking and problem solving. These two traditionally soft skills are attributes that machines haven’t mastered…yet. Don’t be alarmed! We want them to learn how to be creative in their approach, that’s how AI will get closer to delivering the output we need. Right now, AI looks to you to help it improve. We need human supervisors who are able to think critically, swiftly, and efficiently. When a bug arises and the AI stutters or hallucinates, the industry needs practical minds that are solution-oriented.
Always remember, tech skills could land you a tech job, but soft skills are what divide an employee and a star performer. Regardless of the niche or sector you want to work in, you can safely place your bet on AI and soft skills remaining relevant in the future too. These are the types of skills that will remain useful across jobs, even if you switch.
Staying skills-current
It’s a good exercise to update your resume for 2024 trends. An even better exercise to invest in upskilling! Head on to our list of 45 transferable skills to add to your resume and start learning!
As for AI, perhaps the quickest and coolest skills one could learn in just a few hours would be prompt engineering, which you can get great at in a few hours. Want a foolproof start with no trial and error? We’ve got your back with this handy AI Prompting Cheat Sheet!
