Career Development

Developing AI Skills

AI Competency

Many employers are emphasizing the importance of finding candidates with AI skills. Those who take it upon themselves to develop these competencies have leverage when entering the workplace.

Key skills include:

  • Learning how to craft effective prompts
  • Minimize AI errors
  • Build AI literacy through hands-on experience
  • Understanding the functionalities of AI platforms.

It is important for students to be aware of how AI can enhance workplace efficiency and decision-making, especially as its projected economic impact is up to $4.4 trillion annually (McKinsey). Practical experience through platforms like Notion, PartyRock, and ChatBase allow students to strengthen their AI skills, and use it as a thought partner while integrating AI into real-world tasks. Finally, how AI can reshape the workplace and traditional career skills such as communication, adaptability, teamwork, and the use of independent critical thinking.

 

Developing AI Skills (and How)- Employers Look for Candidates with AI Skills

 

To work alongside AI, you must know how to use AI. Part of that is feeding it information and providing the context correctly so there is a lower likelihood of “false” information being shared. This is called hallucinations. If used to the user’s advantage, prompts can help individuals write outlines, prepare for presentations and review email drafts for tone.

How to develop prompting skills? Be specific, ensure the tool understands what you are trying to say. This can help avoid misleading or inaccurate information being generated. Here are a few prompting examples:

  • Response Clarification:
    • “"Before responding, consider whether you have sufficient context. If any key detail is unclear, ask a clarifying question first."
    • “Do you understand? Summarize my request before we proceed please”
  • System Instructions (one time thing):
    • “I am a career coach at a university. My priorities are assisting students wherever they are at in their career journey and providing the support and guidance along the way. My communication style is bubbly and curious.
    • “I am an IT professional with 5+ years of experience. I am competent in using Java, C++ and Python. I am interested in entering the video game creation space”
  • The purpose of a system prompt can help with a roleplaying scenario, give context to who you are, and how well you respond best to feedback. This also allows the LLM to roleplay as an expert in the field or be creative with their responses. (Ramlochan, 2024)

AI Literacy: Being able to utilize and work with AI. To become skilled user with AI, part of the process is becoming confident with this applied skill. Students have to navigate (and maybe create) hands-on experiences using technology with real world scenarios. AI literacy specifically is a considered as a “soft skill” as can be considered as utilizing technological and digital media platforms. (Grammarly, p. 11, 2024)

How to develop AI literacy further?

If you are curious enough to be exploring AI, it is important to consider different forms of AI literacy: functional, ethical, rhetorical literacy (Stanford Teaching Commons, n.d.).

  • It is important to explore the baseline function of AI, what critiques you may have and the limitations that exist. Utilize critical thinking skills so it can help you when you get
  • As a student, employee or employer consider the ethical impact of the tool. Are you still citing sources? Are you using tools with any preconceived bias? Are you assuming the information received to be true without any review?
  • Reviewing the rhetoric and language with AI is important to keep front of mind. What word choices are you using to ask questions? How is it responding back to you? E.g., Is the chat both using similar verbs and nouns when paraphrasing? Maybe the overuse of diction or symbols, such as an em dash.

Familiarizing themselves with what different AI tools are and how to use them.

  • A great way to begin understanding your familiarity would be to explore why each function is different.
    • What can ChatGPT do that CoPilot can’t? What is the purpose of NotebookLM? Do the LLM’s store my data? What is an AI assistant?
    • If you want to know the answers to any of these questions, this information will not only will expand your knowledge of AI but you are developing stronger critical thinking skills to learn and use AI software to help you stand out from other candidates.
  • Another useful benefit companies and employees have when utilizing AI is the opportunity to reduce manpower hours and increase productivity levels. For a successful business model to standout would be one that gets the work done efficiently. AI is helping improve the quality of this process. Kendra Ramirez is the CEO of KR Digital Agency, she has tested out over 100 AI tools. What she has found to be most beneficial is the summarization and transcription AI can do that would take one person or a team significantly more time. One of her teams saved 1400 hours by applying AI tools. (Blackmore, 2025).

Research from McKinsey identified that Gen AI has the potential to alter the global economy. It would boost the current economy from $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion annually (Grammarly, p. 6, 2024). This can influence business expansion, decision making and push executives to create new opportunities and consider new skills when hiring talent.

AI can be good at prioritizing the simplistic tasks, and helps get the job done quicker. By nature, humans are wanting to be connected with others. The difference with AI is that it can cut some corners to help workflow be faster and save the user or employer money and effort by creating bots that do some of the heavy lifting for them. If AI can mass communicate to 100 people in a matter of seconds, think about how efficient it would be for an individual with the skill set to adapt to change and have AI skills in their back pocket.

  • Notion – AI assistant tool that you can utilize your time better. For example, I utilize Notion and have created a “dashboard” with my day-to-day items. However, I can ask my AI assistant to help me stay on track with my tasks, based on the information it has access to.
  • PartyRock- A space where users can build AI generated apps in a “playground” powered by Amazon. It is a software that you can experiment with and build your own software.
  • ChatBase- Chatbase is a user-friendly chat tool that you can use to build your own AI bots, without previous coding experience. It can be utilized by businesses, students or the AI explorers.

As scary as it may be to some about the ripple effect AI has on our employment, environment and people. There are “uniquely” human skills that AI can’t replace

The 2023 Career-Ready Graduate Report ranked these skills as the top ten most important when hiring strong candidates

  1. Oral communication
  2. Adaptability and flexibility
  3. Working effectively in teams
  4. Critical thinking
  5. Motivation and initiative
  6. Written communication
  7. Working with people from different backgrounds
  8. Creative and innovative thinking
  9. Complex problem-solving
  10. Utilizing technology and digital media platforms (Grammarly, p. 11, 2024)

Not only is prompting important for communication skills, but it should be a reminder to us all that AI doesn’t replace communication and human thought process. It is a tool for people to use to help hard tasks become swifter and simplistic tasks to become streamlined or automated. For example, having a chat bot on a website to ask questions, and redirecting users if their question isn’t answered.