Employers Are Looking for AI Skills; Here’s What I Did To Learn More

By Kimberly K. Estep

Proficiency in AI is no longer just an optional skill for jobseekers. My organization, Western Governors University, recently surveyed more than 3,000 employers around the country and found that more than half are testing new applicants for skills in AI, and 25% are prioritizing candidates with some measure of AI fluency. This seems to be only the beginning of a trend.

AI has made a significant impact on the business world and has cooled the job market for many looking to find careers. It is a time of uncertainty.

An important lesson I’ve learned is to lean into education in times like this, and I decided to do the same with this AI boom. Even after working in higher education for decades, I enrolled in the AI Skills Fundamentals Certificate program at my own school to learn more.

Over a three-month period, the program guided me through the basics of Artificial Intelligence, like the structure of a Learning Language Model (LLM) and the foundational concept of iterative prompting to refine my search results.

I also learned about AI tools and how different ones align with specific types of work more effectively; some have abilities to create visuals, others have strength with coding, and some excel with writing, which is a daily task in my field.

I often create PowerPoint presentations to help explain my thoughts and illustrate points to a larger audience. The course tasked me with prompting an AI tool to create a presentation on a certain topic, and despite my low expectations, blew me away with the quality and accuracy of its work.

The program challenged me with performance assessments, where I was required to apply skills I had learned in real time. The course assessments closely model what most job-seeking candidates are receiving from employers to evaluate their AI fluency.

Upon completing the certificate, I gathered one main takeaway: AI won’t replace people, but it will replace expectations. I believe the assumption moving forward will be for professionals to use the AI tools available to them to level up their work efficiency.

To me, AI is just another in a series of tools that have come along in my lifetime. It made me think about my work life before emails, the World Wide Web or Excel.

What’s exciting to me is the opportunity to dive deeper into AI in specific disciplines or professions. Nurses at WGU’s Leavitt School of Health use AI avatars to simulate intake conversations with patients, something that was impossible to do in a virtual environment just a few years ago.

As time goes on, both the hiring trends discussed earlier, and the effectiveness of AI tools, will increase. AI will continue to become faster in creating content, more accurate in producing information, and better at aggregating data.

Inspired by completing the program, I’ve been further integrating AI into my day-to-day work, noticing improvements in my efficiency with research, writing and presentations.

AI has altered the world of work and changed how employers find personnel. Every knowledge worker will be expected to show fluency in a wide range of AI tools, just like knowledge workers today must have facility in word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation software. Leaning into education and learning to leverage AI can make you a better candidate or an irreplaceable worker in today’s new age of technology.

Kimberly K. Estep, Ph.D., is Southeast regional vice president for nonprofit online Western Governors University. A version of this article originally appeared in the The Tennessean.