What do employers really want? For job seekers trying to get hired and fill one of 8.1 million job openings in the U.S. right now, it can often be difficult to gauge. The demand to learn new AI skills has dominated the labor market discourse over the past year, but human-centric skills may be just as important when it comes to landing a new role, according to a new survey.
Certainly specialized AI skills remain in high demand, according to a new report from Upwork, an employment marketplace. The data is based on freelancer earnings in the United States from January 1 to October 31, 2024, within Upwork’s database.
Generative AI modeling and AI data annotation grew 220% year-over-year. But there has also been a 74% year-over-year rise in career and development roles, such as personal and career coaching, which points to the importance of flexibility and leadership as businesses reskill their workforce to adjust for technological advances. (Year-over-year growth was estimated by comparing freelancer earnings in 2024 to freelancer earnings over the same period in 2023.)
Upwork’s freelancer data was used to find the top 3 fastest-growing skills per industry. While results varied by category, there was an overarching emphasis on technical skills, human development skills, or some combination of the two. For example, the top 3 fastest growing skills for accounting and consulting companies were, in order: personal coaching, career coaching, and training and development. Within coding and web development professions the fastest growers were scripting and automation, web design, and UX/UI. For data science and analytics, the winners were AI data annotation and labeling, knowledge representation, and generative AI modeling.
“What is unique–and that we’re not talking enough about—is the rise of learning skills. Learning how to learn,” Kelly Monahan, managing director of the Upwork Research Institute, tells Fortune. “What I actually think the workforce needs right now is learning how to navigate and build resilience and agility to navigate the change.”
And Monahan believes AI skills aren’t purely technical. “As we think about the generative AI narrative, it’s much more than just efficiency and making the workforce productive, which I often see tied to the headlines,” Monahan says. “It’s actually supposed to be a tool that’s helping us rethink the very nature of how we do our jobs, why we do our jobs, and what value we can provide in light of that.”
For those looking to gain a competitive edge in the job hunt, Monahan says that there are resources everywhere you look to brush up on your technical skills. “Learning has never been more democratized. It’s not simply access to information. I mean, you can go on Coursera, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Amazon. There’s so much access. Any tech company that wants you to begin to utilize their tools is offering the necessary skills and training that’s required to credentialize what you need.”
