Prompt Engineer: Analyzing Hard and Soft Skill Requirements in the AI Job Market

Abstract

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has created a new job role: the Prompt Engineer. Despite growing interest in this position, we still do not fully understand what skills this new job role requires or how common these jobs are. In this paper, we present a data-driven analysis of global prompt engineering job trends on LinkedIn. We take a snapshot of the evolving AI workforce by analyzing 20,662 job postings on LinkedIn, including 72 prompt engineer positions, to learn more about this emerging role. We find that prompt engineering is still rare (less than 0.5% of sampled job postings) but has a unique skill profile. Prompt engineers need AI knowledge (22.8%), prompt design skills (18.7%), good communication (21.9%), and creative problem-solving (15.8%) skills. These requirements significantly differ from those of established roles, such as data scientists and machine learning engineers. Our findings help job seekers, employers, and educational institutions in better understanding the emerging field of prompt engineering.