Will AI take my career?

...and if it's possible, what skills will keep me competitive?

At Perfectit, we get to have many interesting conversations.

We talk to buyers of talent, who put a lot of effort into thinking about what they can do to attract the best and brightest people into their organisations.

We also talk to people who are selling talent, who are focussed on finding and developing the people that organisations need.

Also, we have a lot of one-on-one conversations with people from many different backgrounds who are looking for jobs too. Typically these people are looking for advice or ideas about what they need to do to stand out above all others so that they are the one who successfully lands that dream role, even when the competition is tough.

They are prepared to do what it takes to improve the odds that they are the person who is selected, as the best and brightest available in the pool of applicants for the role.

Recently there's a theme that keeps coming up. It's a topic that everyone is talking about for one reason or another. This is both the opportunity and the danger, concerning Artificial Intelligence (AI) and what it will mean for jobs.

“Will an AI take my job?”
“What should I study to have a good career in an AI world?”
“What skills do I need to thrive in an AI powered future?”

These are all valid concerns, for every level of professional, regardless of whether you are just starting out or enjoying a successful career today. Is this worry being overhyped? Or should we accept that this is an urgent, serious risk, that requires critical thinking in order to adapt and mitigate?

It depends on who you talk to. Maybe a better way to describe the risk, is not so much that an AI itself is going to take your job, but rather that a person who is effectively using AI might.

One of the first voices to ring the alarm on the threat of AI causing massive job displacement was Kai-Fu Lee, who made what was considered an alarmist claim when he said it back in 2018 – that about 50% of jobs would be taken over by AI and automation within the next 15 years. In 2024, he doubled down on this position in an article in Fortune magazine, stating that his prediction is proving uncannily accurate.

Lee believes the impact will be felt the most in white-collar jobs first, rather than blue-collar jobs, noting in an AI report published by Goldman Sachs' that:

Highest Exposure White-collar jobs

Lowest exposure Blue collar jobs:

The following comment from Noam Chomsky in 2023, on comparing the human mind to AI, was a reassuring and typically contrary insight for which he is rightly famous:

The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probably answer to a scientific question.

On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations…
...let’s stop calling it “Artificial Intelligence” then and call it for what it is and makes: “plagiarism software” because “it doesn’t create anything, but copies existing works, of existing artists, modifying them enough to escape copyright laws.

So will this view hold true? To an extent, sure, there's a lot to agree with Chomsky on this. If you spend time using AI, you do quickly find that there's a certain "repetitive tone" or "consistently unoriginal" feel to the answers it provides, or the summaries it will produce if you provide the content.

I read a comment from a colleague working on a thesis that using ChatGPT was like having a friendly, slightly drunk professor you could ask questions of at any hour, who'd promptly forget the previous conversations you'd had. I can relate to this assessment and do not yet feel that AI is a tool that I can't live without.

However, you’d have to be living under a rock not to realise that the rate of change with AI is rapid and still accelerating.

Are the capabilities of AI to actually reason, already a lot further along than many had predicted? We'll be diving further into that topic in a follow-up article, looking at "Artificial vs. Human Intelligence – & the key differences between them"

It is also becoming apparent that our understanding of the differences between human and machine intelligence is evolving rapidly too. The measures used to assess AI capabilities are becoming redundant very quickly. Researchers in the field must now continually develop new benchmarks, as they are quickly surpassed.

So which key skills do differentiate us humans from AI? Our research leads us to a surprisingly simple answer. It's the skills we all need and use to get on with other people, known as ‘Soft Skills’. 'Soft Skills' are adaptable, they are capabilities that can be applied to nearly all job roles, regardless of sector. It is perhaps a misnomer to call these capabilities 'Soft Skills' because they are harder to teach.

Yet according to LinkedIn’s Global Recruiting Trends report, Soft Skills rank just as high or higher than Hard Skills with 91% of hiring managers polled valuing demonstrable Soft Skills.

Our co-founders, who have built and managed high-performing teams for several global companies, definitely agree with this view. We see soft skills such as Communication, Adaptability, Critical Thinking, Problem-Solving, etc. as extremely valuable attributes, which we would hire for, taking the view that the hard skills can be trained for on the job.

So our advice to our clients and peers, in order to be successful in an AI world, make soft skills acquisition a key element to your learning strategy. Not only will you be more appealing to hiring managers in today's job market, but you’ll stay ahead of the AI game….for now!

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