The jobs of the future: AI skills that will be in demand before 2030

It should be clear by now that the rise of AI and chatbots will significantly disrupt the job industry as we know it.

A 2023 PWC survey indicates that approximately 70% of CEOs anticipate that AI will transform their business models within three years, necessitating their employees to acquire new skills before 2026. It also indicates that the likelihood of staff reductions due to generative AI is higher in sectors like media, entertainment, banking, capital markets, and insurance. 

One truth that you need to know early: the next job wave will not exclusively be for techies. What that means is that one year from now, the people that will make the most money from AI will not be the usual suspects, i.e. programmers, operators, or other tech executives.

The winners will be everyday folks who have mastered a few key skills. And guess what? You don’t need to be a tech wizard to join them.

This piece is for tech enthusiasts, young people with an entrepreneurial mindset or anyone who wants to future-proof their career and position themselves for future relevance and increased revenue.

I will share some easy but learnable skills that you can acquire today, if you want to stay relevant in the AI age. Let us get to it:

First, new roles for techies and software engineers

The search industry is on the verge of an evolution. AI search chatbots like Perplexity and ChatGPT have insignificant but increasing global search traffic. And, industry watchers believe that their takeover may be imminent.

As the industry evolves, there will be a growing demand for professionals with skills in relevant areas like natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, data science, and AI ethics. If you are a software developer, you should become proficient in building and training large language models.

Learning programming languages like Python, R, and C++ will help you create and improve AI tools and applications.

The industry will also need data engineers skilled in managing and annotating vast datasets. Alongside, there is a growing demand for AI ethicists. These are professionals who are capable of navigating the complex moral and societal implications of these technologies.

As AI systems become more personalised and capable of handling sensitive information, there will be an increased risk of data breaches, unauthorised access, and potential misuse of personal data. Regulators will shift focus to heavy regulations after the early gestation years, as they are doing for social media platforms like Meta, TikTok and others.

Lastly, professionals with expertise in conversational design and user experience (UX) for AI assistants will play a crucial role in shaping the future. If you are a UI/UX pro, you should be taking an advanced course on this as soon as you can.

Prompt Engineering: Make money by knowing how to use AI

Have you tried asking ChatGPT (or any other AI chatbot) for help and got a useless response? Well, you are not alone. The secret sauce is prompt engineering. Prompt engineering is the art of talking to AI in a way that gets you accurate, high-quality, and actionable results.

Simply, knowing how to ask the chatbot, so it gives you gold, not garbage, is a skill, and not many have the talent or patience for it. You can make money from helping others make the best of AI platforms. Think of it like giving directions to a friend who’s never been to a city, for a fee.

First, you need to be great at AI prompting. Here are some suggested steps:

• Tell the AI who to be or the role (“Act as a marketer” or “Act as a lawyer”).
• Add examples to guide output.
• Be super clear about what you want (“Give me a table with pros and cons…”).
• And always, always ask for your answer in the format you need.
  Pro Tip: at the end, ask the ChatBot to generate a prompt that will give you the result after you are done.
• Lastly, share your results and stories on social media. That is how other folks will know what you are capable of.

Similar to this is building software with AI to do the heavy lifting. With the right prompts, you can build chatbots, automate scripts, and create working MVPs for side projects or startups.

Try it: Find a problem people keep complaining about, use AI to build a solution, and you could sell it as a side hustle.

Career upgrades that will lead to relevance

Undeniably, there is a palpable fear about possible job losses in every industry as more companies adopt AI. To survive the onslaught, some people do not need to change career paths. Some just need to improve their honed skills to maximise impact and profitability using the AI technology.

For instance, if you are a copywriter, you can use AI to dig through previous posts, transcripts, brainstorm viral content, and mimic your client’s or prospective client’s unique style. Whether it’s a blog post, sales copy, or social media caption, tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, and Copy.ai help you draft, refine, and rework content.

You can use AI to do the heavy lifting, then sprinkle in your personality. That is how you or your proposal can stand out from the crowd.

If you are a creative designer, you don’t need Photoshop or design school anymore. AI tools like Midjourney, Leonardo, and DALL-E let you generate professional-quality images, logos, branding concepts, UI mock-ups, and illustrations, just by typing what you want.

You can also improve your hand-drawn sketches by uploading them and letting AI enhance, colourise, or digitise them into polished visuals.

Similarly, video editors do not need to hunch over a laptop, cutting out awkward silences. Now, AI does the boring stuff while you spend time. Tools like Runway ML, Pictory, and Descript will help you automatically remove filler words, pauses, and background noise, add subtitles and scene transitions, create talking-head videos from scripts (yes, without recording) and generate B-roll from prompts.

Lastly, you do not need to master all the AI tools at once. So, here is a shortcut:

1. Pick a skill that excites you
2. Watch a 10-minute tutorial
3. Use an AI tool on something you care about
4. Share your result online

In six months, you will be amazed by how much and how fast you have learnt and positioned yourself ahead of 95% of people. And, as someone popularly said, “AI will not take your job, people who leverage AI will”. Be a part of the latter group.