The Lightcast Global AI Skills Outlook

AI is changing the world of work ... but not in the way many imagined.

AI Skills Focus

Executive Summary

The continued innovation and adoption of AI technologies is transforming the world of work. But how is this being reflected in global labor markets? Where are the changes most apparent? What are the implications for organizations as they try to plan for a future-ready workforce? The Lightcast Global AI Skills Outlook is a highly interactive page looking at employer demand for AI skills across 16 labor markets in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific to provide answers to these questions. The top three key takeaways are:

Job Augmentation
#1 JOB AUGMENTATION

AI is not currently replacing jobs, but rather augmenting them. In terms of planning a future-ready workforce, expect AI to become a normal part of most jobs, with durable skills playing a key complementary role.

New Career Pathways
#2 NEW CAREER PATHWAYS

AI skills open up new career pathways. Identifying which AI skills help people progress in their careers is key for training, upskilling, and reskilling them to make them more employable, productive, and future-ready.

Global Hotspots
#3 GLOBAL HOTSPOTS

The US is outstripping other nations for the highest demand for Generative AI. Identifying global AI skills hotspots is vital for employers seeking to understand where to source or locate their future-ready workforce.

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AI DEMAND

Is AI demand on the rise, decline, or settling in? All the above. AI has increased across all 16 labor markets for most of the last decade, with Singapore leading the way, followed by the US. Yet in 2022-2023 there was actually a decrease in most countries. Given the media headlines on AI, this seems to contradict what we might have expected. However, this is in part explained by a number of top AI employers scaling back their overall job postings, along with changes to the composition of roles, which makes the increase in demand for AI over the past five to ten years more important than year-on-year comparisons.


Key takeaways:


    The most in-demand AI skills across all 16 labor markets in 2023 were Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Apache Spark.


    Demand for AI skills has increased across all 16 labor markets over the past 10 years, with Singapore and the US leading the way.


    Demand for AI skills fell in 2022-2023, as top AI employers scaled back postings and role composition changed. Within AI occupations, however, demand was stable or growing.

AI Skills Focus Demand
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AI AND CAREERS

AI is not currently taking over jobs, but is rather augmenting tasks, suggesting the future will be more about harnessing these new technologies to enhance human creativity and improve productivity, than how to deal with robots taking our jobs. This has profound implications for education providers, community leaders, and employers. The conversation about how to prepare a future-ready workforce becomes far less about mitigating potential job losses, and far more about how to upskill people with AI tools and complementary durable skills (sometimes referred to as soft skills) to improve their career mobility and productivity.


Key takeaways:


    The frequency with which AI skills are being requested by employers in both tech roles and non-tech roles is increasing.


    This suggests that AI is changing tasks not jobs, which has important implications for organisations looking to plan a future-ready workforce.


    Employers requesting AI skills in roles often pay significant salary premia compared to the same jobs where AI skills are not requested.

AI Skills Focus Careers
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AI HOTSPOTS

Countries and the businesses within them have different flavors of AI skills demand. Hotspots for Generative AI skills demand are heavily concentrated in the US, which is home to almost half the top 50 cities with the highest share of demand for these skills. Generally, the US is dominant in both tech and non-tech jobs that require AI skills, but less so in some roles such as Research Associate and UI/UX Designers, where Germany is a close second.

Key takeaways:


    Employer demand for Generative AI skills is highly concentrated in the US, which has 31 cities in the top 50, followed by Germany with five.

    The US dominates AI skills demand in many tech roles, with 17 cities in the top 25 for Cyber Security Analyst and 19 in the top 25 for Data Scientist.

    Germany also has significant demand for AI skills, with eight of the top 25 hotspots for Research Associates and UI/UX Designer.

AI Skills Focus Hotspots
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What's Next for Organizations Involved in Planning a Future-Ready Workforce?

The findings in the Lightcast Global AI Skills Outlook are profound. But as AI continues to transform the world of work, how can education providers, community leaders, and employers respond as they prepare to build a future-ready workforce?

Education Providers
Education Providers

Look for opportunities to include the teaching of in-demand AI skills and key complementary durable skills in your courses and programs, informed by the kind of up-to-date insights on the future-ready workforce we’ve presented in the Lightcast Global AI Skills Outlook.

Community Leaders
Community Leaders

Look to harness the power of data to understand the AI skills-related interventions that are needed in your area, so that you can invest in training, upskilling, and reskilling your local population to equip them to take their place in the workforce of the future.

Employers
Employers

Look to build a future-ready workforce by integrating AI tools into your workplace, along with the appropriate training to upskill your workforce in both AI and complementary durable skills, creating clear career pathways for your staff and enhancing productivity.

How We Built the Lightcast Global AI Skills Outlook

Our Data
How we built the data

For over two decades, Lightcast has been a pioneer in big-data analysis of job postings. The data we've used throughout this page is sourced from the Lightcast Global Job Postings dataset, which is a library of billions of job postings collected daily from thousands of job boards, newspapers and employers sites across the globe. These postings are cleaned and deduplicated to ensure only one posting is counted for each opening, before being classified to extract meaningful information about the location, industry, occupation, skills required and any other relevant insights, using a combination of official and proprietary taxonomies. The advantage of using online job postings is that, unlike official statistics, they present a unique opportunity to get insights from a large amount of almost real-time data on employers’ needs.

Our AI Skills
How we defined AI skills

To capture demand for AI skills in online job postings, we built a definition of AI skills using the Lightcast Open Skills Taxonomy, which includes over 32,000 different skill terms, organised hierarchically in 32 categories and 400 subcategories, capturing all the skills employers mention in job postings. From this taxonomy, we identified approximately 200 AI skills, and grouped them into a range of skill clusters. Job postings mentioning at least one of these AI skills were considered to be AI postings. This custom definition of artificial intelligence job postings is the same used in a long-standing collaboration with the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, with which Lightcast has partnered in publication of the AI Index Report since 2020. 

Our Tools
How we deliver this data

All the data throughout the Lightcast Global AI Skills Outlook were extracted from the Lightcast Global Job Postings Dataset, which includes over two billion current and historical job postings in over 150 countries. This dataset also offers far more granular geographical levels than we’ve shown in this page, as well as far greater occupation specificity through the Lightcast Occupation Taxonomy, which includes over 700 occupations and 1,900 specialized occupations. The really exciting thing, however, is that we don’t just keep this data to ourselves. Rather, we offer it to our customers through a variety of software tools, as well as via Snowflake and API. Get in touch today to talk about how your organization can become future-ready by accessing our comprehensive datasets through these tools.

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