- AI skills are now required in most ICT job listings, a new report found
- Companies are also seeking more experience with those skills
- However, there's a critical talent gap for more than a dozen in-demand skills
A new report released by the AI Workforce Consortium revealed a stunning statistic: more than three quarters of job listings in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector require technical AI skills.
The group’s second annual report looked at job postings from Indeed and Cornerstone across Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. Notably, it did attempt to account for so-called “ghost job” listings.
As Cisco Chief Learning Officer Marci Paino told Fierce, the research team filtered out job listings that were “open for more than a typical hiring period. We also cross-validated with actual hiring data where available and looked at company-level hiring velocity metrics. Additionally, we weighted adjustments based on industry ghost job estimates.”
According to the report, 78% of the 50 ICT roles examined for the report required AI skills. But interestingly, ICT job posters – more than posters in other industries – are also seeking more years of experience with those skills as well.
“The growing emphasis on technical skills is contributing to the increase in years of experience required for many roles, since developing these skills is a process that takes time,” Paino explained. “The roles analyzed include technical capabilities like data analysis and machine learning as requirements, which existed before the rise of LLMs and agentic AI.”
Hot knowledge
Over the past two years, the report noted the focus for AI skills has shifted from “traditional machine learning to strategic foundational generative model orchestration.”
In particular, it cited growing demand for skills around multi-agent LLMs, vector databases, model context protocol (MCP), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), LangChain and edge-focused deployment methods.
Among the fastest growing in-demand skills are LLM Security & Jailbreak Defense and Responsible AI Implementation — with growth rates of 298% and 256%, respectively – Foundation Model Adaptation (267%) and Multi-Agent Systems (245%).
Demand for skills in AI Governance (150%) and AI Ethics (125%) is also growing exponentially across the 50 job roles analyzed.
However, the report identified a “critical” gap between employer demand and the supply of qualified professionals in 14 in-demand skill areas. The critical designation applies when only 30% of demand can be met.
Skills in the “critical” gap category spanned LLMs and their architecture, prompt engineering, conversational AI, GenAI, RAG systems, vector databases and AI governance, ethics and security.
So, what does this all mean for job seekers?
Paino said based on the report, “entry-level ICT workers should be focused on hands-on technical skills, like AI tools knowledge and machine learning model development, while mid-level talent requires operational and strategic responsibilities across MLOps, strategy, project management and ethics.”
She added: “We also recommend that entry and mid-level employees focus on developing the right AI skills — AI literacy, prompt engineering, ethical AI understanding, and agile methodologies — to remain competitive.”
Consortium members – including Cisco, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Intel and SAP – have pledged to help upskill 95 million people over the next 10 years. But the required skillset will depend on what role employees are seeking, which brings us to the next major finding of the report.
High-priority roles
The top five fastest growing job titles were AI Risk & Governance Specialist (234%), Natural Language Processing (NLP) Engineer (186%), AI/ML Engineer (145%), AI Business consultant (134%) and AI Infrastructure Engineer (124%).
AI-related roles were the top in-demand ICT positions in four of the seven countries surveyed. In all seven countries, at least one of the most in-demand ICT jobs was AI-related, and in five of the seven countries at least two of the top five roles were AI-related.
Silicon Valley in the U.S., London in the U.K. and Toronto in Canada had the biggest increase in AI-related ICT jobs.