Seizing AI job opportunities in the United Kingdom | Daily Reports Online

Is AI taking our jobs?

Even as Artificial Intelligence displaces a significant number of roles in the United Kingdom, it’s clear the net-positive impact on the job market remains favorable.

A new study estimates that evolution in AI technologies could create as many as 610,000 new jobs by 2028.

What’s more, employees can look forward to not just more jobs but better ones; an analysis of over 500 million job advertisements from 15 high-income countries revealed that employers in the U.K. were willing to pay 14% more to workers with AI skills.

People with AI skills also have an expanding choice of roles, as organizations in every industry look to hire data scientists, machine learning engineers, computer vision specialists, AI trainers, human-machine teaming managers, AI ethicists and compliance officers and more.

AI is increasing the job market

In the highly digitalized U.K. financial services sector, 75% of organizations are already leveraging AI and another 10% plan to adopt within a few years. The wide range of AI use-cases spanning process optimization, cybersecurity, fraud detection, customer support, credit scoring and compliance management etc.is opening up a variety of opportunities for job seekers with relevant skills.

20% of education sector professionals in the U.K. are using AI in their current role to improve learning content, motivate students and accommodate their different needs, or even to complete administrative tasks. As roles combining technology and education evolve, there will be a need for skilled learning experience designers to create effective learning platforms, content creator managers for ensuring educational content meets quality standards, and specialists who leverage AI tools to create and manage online communities for learners.

Even in healthcare, where human expertise and in-person interaction are highly valued, there’s a huge need for AI professionals, in the near future, to build algorithms that can generate personalized treatment plans and predictive analytics models that identify disease patterns and risk factors. With telemedicine becoming common, the healthcare industry will require staff who can operate AI-enabled remote patient monitoring systems.

The use of smart health assistants, AI-based medical imaging and intelligent hospital workflow optimization tools will create a demand for medical professionals with varying degrees of AI capability and also for medical AI specialists, telehealth coordinators, and data analysts for managing and processing massive volumes of health data.

But where are the skills?

In a recent UK survey, 68% of IT decision makers said that insufficient skills and expertise was their top challenge in implementing AI projects, more problematic than integrating disparate data and fragmented systems. Training is the obvious answer, but it appears that 19 percent of the U.K. workforce – 6.31 million employees – have not been trained in how to use AI tools at work.

Organizations need to take urgent measures to prepare their employees to deal with the change that AI will bring to their work and workplaces. Besides training employees in functional AI skills that enhance productivity, employers should build capabilities in communication, empathy and problem finding to optimize the performance of human-machine teams.

Training with and for AI

Traditional training methods, involving scheduled classroom-based lessons with standard curricula, are ineffective for AI technologies, which are evolving at a blistering pace. Organizations need to establish an environment of continuous, lifelong learning where employees can learn new skills on the job, throughout their careers.

AI-powered learning platforms support this by providing rich training materials that employees can access from anywhere, and at any time, to learn what they want, when they want it. Importantly, training also addresses cultural barriers to AI adoption, such as apprehension about learning new technologies.

Next Steps

To successfully bridge the AI skills gap, employers should follow best practices, including integrating AI literacy in different functions to prepare employees across the enterprise for a future in AI and partnering with educational institutions to offer learning programs aligned with business and market needs.

The U.K. government can play a major role in building an AI-ready workforce by offering incentives to organizations investing in AI training and also providing internship opportunities for young people to gain practical experience in AI tools and technologies. This is also in the administration’s interest because AI has the potential to increase GDP by £550 billion over the next decade.

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