and Wiley shows that artificial intelligence and machine learning skills are not only among the fastest growing and widest spreading skill sets across industries in the job market—but having them can mean workers get paid more, rather than less in their jobs.
“The notion that automation is this lurking menace on the horizon is something we should rethink,” says Matt Sigelman, president of the labor market research nonprofit Burning Glass Institute. “We’re seeing that people whose work involves leveraging automation skills get paid significantly more than those who don’t.”
Still, he acknowledges that skills are shifting rapidly in the average occupation, and those who don’t keep up with skills development could be at risk. “The kind of displacement we see may have less to do with jobs going away than with jobs demanding entirely new sets of skills that people in the workforce today haven’t yet mastered.”, published Dec. 1, offers some ideas.
From that analysis, four skill clusters emerged as not only fastest growing but also widest spreading . Due to their rate of growth and reach, these four skill sets—artificial intelligence and machine learning; cloud computing; product management and social media—are the ones disrupting the job market and offering the biggest opportunities for workers, Sigelman says.
“These are the sets of skills that are most likely to get integrated into the work that you’re doing,” he says. In 2021, one in eight job postings required one of the four skill sets, the report found.