AI-related skills still driving new job postings

Excitement around generative AI doesn’t seem to be slowing down among employers or those seeking work, according to recent reports from LinkedIn and Upwork.

LinkedIn said English-language job postings mentioning AI tech like “ChatGPT” and “GPT” have ballooned 21-fold since the OpenAI chatbot first debuted last November, while the number of users listing related skills on their profiles has grown an average of 75% each month between the start of the year and June.

Upwork, meanwhile, reported that AI-related work was the fastest-growing category on the freelancing platform in the first half of the year, but that companies are less fixated on ChatGPT in particular as their understanding of the technology grows.

The reports come as companies continue to look for ways to commercialize the latest wave of language and image generation AI, from coding to content creation. Previous data from jobs sites showed that while some jobs may be displaced, employers were also expanding hiring because of the new tech, including in the type of low-wage gig work needed to train AI.

Top terms: LinkedIn’s report noted spikes in AI-related applicant skills like question answering (a task important to the training or prompting of language models), classification, recommender systems, and computer vision.

Upwork found terms like “AI content creation,” AI user interface platform Gradio, Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI cloud service, convolutional neural networks, and large language models were the fastest-growing searches on the platform in the first half of the year.

Kelly Monahan, managing director of Upwork’s research arm, told Tech Brew the list was a sign that companies were moving away from a focus on ChatGPT to a broader spectrum of the technology.

“It’s following a very similar adoption to what we’ve seen from other emerging technologies…where when it’s first really released broadly to the public, we see that singular tool adoption,” Monahan said. “But as we actually analyze the quarter-over-quarter growth…we are beginning to see our fastest-growing AI-related searches being beyond just a singular tool, and much more into general content creation, much more application services.”

Ranking by job: LinkedIn’s researchers also analyzed job skills that might be assisted by generative AI tools. The top jobs with skills that could be augmented by AI included software engineers (96%), customer service reps (76%), salespeople (59%), and cashiers (also 59%.) AI was least relevant to oil field operators (1%), environmental health safety specialists (3%), and nurses (6%).

Monahan said Upwork is not expecting the initial hype wave around the tech to let up soon, although she said the field could take some time to mature as it follows a similar trajectory to other emerging technologies.

“We’re comparing it right now to cloud adoption, NFTs, and blockchain as examples, and so I expect this to become a maturing category within our platform,” Monahan said. “I expect to see, as a trend, broader application and use cases. Once that happens, we will begin to see much bigger adoption, and it will become less of this emerging niche category that we’ve seen and much more one of our main categories.”