For IT workers, AI literacy—especially AI prompt engineering—is quickly becoming essential to the job. Unfortunately, only 12% of IT professionals have sufficient prompt engineering abilities to fully utilize AI, despite 81% of them claiming they are comfortable with the technology. Leaders are well aware of the dangers to their organizations if their IT professionals do not have the needed capabilities. 

For example, 60% of IT leaders are citing a lack of AI skills as their largest shortcoming, and are beginning to discriminate in the hiring process against people who are not comfortable with these tools. Workers are well aware of this shift – 70% acknowledge the pressing need to update their skill set in order to match these changing needs. Due to this demand, there is now a 50% hiring gap between qualified applicants and AI job positions. 

Professionals can become more competitive by fully learning how to prompt engineers. This term describes the ability to create exact instructions that enable generative AI systems to carry out a task with full efficiency. Some examples of prompt engineering strategies include chain-of-thought, produced knowledge prompting, least-to-most prompting, and non-text prompting. Most professionals would be hard pressed to describe the difference between any of these methods, clearly demonstrating the need for some upskilling.