#workforce-skills

#workforce-skills

For the past three years, the conversation around artificial intelligence has been dominated by a single, anxious question: What will be left for us to do? As large language models began writing code, drafting legal briefs, and composing poetry, the prevailing assumption was that human cognitive labor was being commoditized. We braced for a world where thinking was outsourced to the cloud, rendering our hard-won mental skills, writing, logic, and structural reasoning relics of a pre-automated past.

Artificial intelligence is transforming not only the jobs people hold, but also the skills they rely on to do them. New data from LinkedIn shows that 85 percent of U.S. professionals could see at least a quarter of their skills affected by AI. In other words, a significant portion of workers' expertise may need to evolve to keep pace. As a reflection of this shift, the most in-demand skill over the past year, unsurprisingly, has been AI literacy.

While over half of all Americans rate math skills as "very important" in their work (55 percent) and personal (63 percent) lives, only 38 percent of young people (ages 18 to 24) said math skills are very important in their work life and 37 percent in their personal life, according to a December survey of 5,100 U.S. adults.