How to progress in a job market dominated by AI? These skills are what you need to master

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In the age of artificial intelligence (AI), change is inevitable.

From people’s personal lives to their professional lives, AI continually finds ways to integrate itself into routines, sometimes creating disruption and other times delivering significant improvements.

The rise of generative AI, particularly following the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, has sparked much discussion about its potential impact.

One of the most pressing concerns is the expected job losses due to the adoption of AI in the job market.

“The emergence of human-machine collaborative intelligence creates a new paradigm in which humans are not truly the only source of strength in the workplace,” said Xiaochen Zhang, founder and chief AI officer of AI 2030, at Euronews Next.

Recently, at an event in Zurich, Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, describes the impact of AI as a “tsunami” that will hit the workforce.

According to Georgieva, AI will likely affect 60 percent of jobs in advanced economies and 40 percent of jobs globally, with little time to prepare people for it.

However, despite these impending changes, the era of AI completely taking over human tasks has not yet arrived.

According to Zhang, in today’s market, humans still play a fundamental role and machines have not yet replaced them, with the current focus more on human-machine collaboration.

“Every job will potentially be redesigned according to the concept of human-machine collaborative intelligence,” Zhang said.

“This concept in itself is very powerful in that the machine will take on much larger roles than before, where it is no longer a tool, but part of the work itself,” he said. added.

While the presence of AI in the workplace is not a new phenomenon, more and more research confirms its potential impact on the job market, particularly during the hiring phase.

A joint report of LinkedIn and Microsoft revealed that 66% of executives would not consider hiring candidates lacking AI skills.

Additionally, the report shows that 71% of respondents would likely choose a less experienced candidate with AI capabilities over a more experienced candidate without these skills.

People are taking matters into their own hands by learning to use AI tools and integrating them into their job tasks, with 75% of knowledge workers admitting to using AI in the workplace, according to the report.

The Best AI Skill for Today’s Job Market

Although AI has not yet fully taken over human tasks, not all jobs are expected to be affected equally, and some may even be at risk of disappearing.

“To the extent that humans want to stay competitive in the job market, competing with other humans, AI becomes the differentiator,” Zhang said.

For example, Zhang explains that the creative industry is poised for a huge change as AI technology improves.

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Some tasks, such as content creation, design, research and editing, could easily be done with AI tools that are constantly improving in terms of quality and efficiency.

The solution, according to Zhang, is to master the use of these AI tools and leverage those skills to rethink how work gets done.

For example, users can learn to communicate effectively with extended language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, which are continually gaining more advanced capabilities.

By mastering these skills, professionals can take advantage of the growing demand for mastery of AI tools.

While it’s important to adopt AI tools and learn how to use them, people could also focus on improving the skills that set them apart from AI, experts say.

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Authenticity and human creation, Zhang said, could become more valuable, as human creativity is fueled by life experiences that machines cannot replicate.

But he believes it is up to companies to rethink how work is done to leverage people’s skills for better human-machine collaboration.