3 new and emerging jobs you can get hired for this year

Generative AI is not only generating stories and images - it’s also generating new jobs.

Companies and even a children’s hospital are recruiting for ‘AI prompt engineers’, a new job role that involves coming up with the right questions to put to AI, as experts explained during a session at this year’s World Economic Forum Annual Meeting on AI and White Collar Jobs.

It’s a skill we might all benefit from learning - and it’s one of the 97 million new roles estimated to emerge from the shift in the division of labour between humans and machines, according to data gathered by LinkedIn, Coursera and the Forum in the Future of Jobs Report 2020.

Prompt engineering is not the only new job on the block in 2023. Here’s what you need to know about it - as well as some other ‘jobs of the future’ that are being recruited for right now.

“Right now, it would be downright dangerous to use [generative AI programmes] without having a human in the loop, but I think even going forward we are going to develop a new job, the job of prompt engineering,” Professor Erik Brynjolfsson, Director of the Digital Economy Lab at Stanford University, told the audience at Davos 2023.

“You will all be hearing about it soon. Prompt engineering is the idea that when you work with one of these large language models, you can write different kinds of queries and it turns out that depending how you write the query, you get dramatically different results.

“Even the inventors of these technologies are surprised at some of the things you can get them to do if you ask the question the right way.”

Axios asked ChatGPT to define prompt engineering and it said it was: “critical for generating high-quality outputs from generative AI models, as it can help ensure that the model generates content that is relevant, coherent, and consistent with the desired output.”

The transport sector desperately needs drivers - with a global shortage of 2.6 million commercial truck drivers, according to transport organization, the IRU.

Europe alone could have a shortage of more than 2 million truck, bus and coach drivers by 2026, due to an ageing driver population, with efforts needed to make the profession more appealing to women and young people.

Operators will control self-driving trucks remotely from a base, meaning more manageable hours, and fewer security concerns.

“We're looking at one remote operator who could be monitoring 10 vehicles,” Linnéa Kornehed Falck, founder of autonomous freight technology company Einride, told the Forum.

“And this gives an opportunity for drivers to work in another type of set-up so they could be closer to home. It could be more like normal office hours. And it just becomes a completely new type of work. There's so many benefits to this new type of position.”

As countries ramp up action towards emissions reduction targets, a whole raft of new green jobs is likely to emerge.

More than 100,000 clean energy jobs have been announced in the US alone since President Joe Biden signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2023, according to non-profit Climate Power, including in wind power.

It’s estimated a total of 568,800 trained wind technicians will be needed between now and 2026 to construct, install, operate and maintain the growing fleet of global onshore and offshore wind turbines.

Last year, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics put the growth rate of wind turbine technicians over the coming decade at 44%, compared to the average growth rate across all occupations at just 5%.