What we got right in 2024, what’s changed since, and what belongs on your resume now.
Back in 2024, we wrote about which AI skills were worth adding to your resume. Two years — and a few full AI hype cycles — later, we went back to check our own work. Some of it held up better than we expected. Some of it is already out of date. Here’s the honest scorecard, plus what belongs on your resume today.
What We Got Right
The demand for AI skills didn’t just grow. It accelerated.
In 2024, we pointed to job postings requiring AI skills growing 3.5x faster than postings overall since 2016 (see our original post). That trend didn’t level off — it sped up. As of April 2026, U.S. job postings requiring AI skills were up 144% year over year. If anything, we understated it.
Baseline AI literacy became the expectation, not the exception
We said employers would come to expect a basic working knowledge of AI from every tech professional, not just specialists. That’s now the norm across nearly every function: 72% of enterprise leaders say basic AI literacy is important for day-to-day work, and most expect moderate AI proficiency to be standard across non-technical roles within the next two years.
Showing impact still beats listing tools
Our core advice in 2024 — don’t just list AI keywords, show what you did with them — is truer now than it was then. With skills-based hiring on the rise, recruiters increasingly want a specific result: a system you shipped, a process you automated, a cost you cut. Quantifiable evidence is still the differentiator.
The wage premium for AI skills kept climbing
We flagged a growing pay gap between workers with AI skills and those without. It hasn’t slowed down: the average wage premium for AI skills hit 62% in 2026, up from 57% the year before.
What’s Changed Since 2024
Prompt engineering didn’t disappear — it got absorbed
In 2024, prompt engineering was a stand-out skill and, for some, a job title. In 2026, the standalone “Prompt Engineer” title has declined by roughly 30%, but the underlying skill hasn’t lost value — it’s been embedded everywhere. Prompt engineering now shows up as a required competency in roughly 78% of AI-related job postings, up from under 20% in early 2024. It moved inside AI Engineer, AI Product Manager, and AI Trainer roles, where writing a good prompt is table stakes, not the whole job. The differentiator now is judgment: knowing when, where, and how to use AI, not just how to phrase a request.
Agentic AI is the new frontier skill
This is the biggest shift since 2024. Postings mentioning agentic AI — systems that plan, call tools, and act rather than just respond to a prompt — are up roughly 280% year over year, making it the fastest-growing skill cluster in the market. New roles have emerged around it: AI Engineer, Forward-Deployed Engineer, AI Forensic Analyst, Head of AI. And the bar for proving this skill has changed too — recruiters say a single concrete artifact (an agent you developed and deployed, the eval that proved it worked, the postmortem when it broke) now outweighs a resume full of generic “AI experience.”
Human judgment skills now command their own premium
The labor market has split into two tracks. Roles where AI automates routine work and human expertise, judgment, and strategic thinking take center stage — what PwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer calls “professionalized” roles — are growing at about twice the rate and showing roughly 42% faster salary growth than roles where AI is simply replacing tasks. In other words, technical AI fluency gets you in the door, but communication, leadership, and sound judgment are what are pulling ahead in pay.
What Hasn’t Changed
The fundamentals we recommended in 2024 are still worth having on your resume:
- Core technical building blocks — Python, NLP, computer vision, and deep learning frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch.
- MLOps and deployment experience — knowing how to get a model or system into production, not just build one.
- Natural, ATS-friendly keyword usage — relevant terms woven into real accomplishments, not stuffed into a skills list.
What to Add to Your Resume Now
- Agentic AI / AI orchestration — experience designing, deploying, or evaluating autonomous, tool-using AI systems.
- Applied prompt engineering within a domain — paired with subject-matter expertise, not as a standalone skill.
- AI evaluation and governance — testing, monitoring, or auditing AI systems for reliability and risk.
- A specific, shipped result — one concrete example beats a long list of tools every time.
- Judgment and cross-functional skills — communication, leadership, and decision-making around when (and when not) to use AI.
The Bottom Line
The skills changed. The strategy didn’t. In 2024, we said AI fluency was becoming a baseline expectation, and that proof of impact would matter more than buzzwords. Both are truer today than when we first wrote this. The resumes standing out in 2026 aren’t the ones with the longest list of AI skills — they’re the ones that show exactly what someone built, deployed, or improved with it.
Looking to hire AI talent or update your own resume for today’s market? SSi People can help on both sides of the table.