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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- The age of AI doesn’t have to mean an era of unemployment.
- Skill up in key areas, such as prompt engineering and data reliability.
- Hone your communication, collaboration, and management capabilities.
As we discovered recently, it’s hard not to feel anxious about the future of work if you’re a mid-level professional.
Add qualitative evidence of fears about the ever-increasing use of AI to complete white-collar roles to quantitative figures of layoffs, and the result is simple: a growing sense of dread among professionals about the future of work.
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However, experts suggest the age of AI doesn’t have to mean an era of unemployment. Here are five ways to protect yourself and improve your career prospects.
1. Shift to owning outcomes
Bola Rotibi, chief of enterprise research at CCS Insight, said professionals should take practical steps to protect themselves.
“Get fluent in prompts, verification, and basic data ethics and rules, such as GDPR and audit trails,” she told ZDNET. “Shift from coordination to owning an end-to-end outcome. Define the task, select the tool, verify the result, and sign off. That human failsafe of design, integration, and governance is where resilience lives.”
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Rotibi also encouraged professionals to keep things simple as they look to develop their skills for the age of AI.
“For example, a solid course and keeping a prompt checklist for a weekly task would be a good start. From there, you could trial automating a specific workflow with controls and show the impact,” she said. “Tracking pre- and post-metrics would be an essential requirement to demonstrate ongoing value. Ultimately, being tool-agnostic, outcome-specific, and insisting on the training and time will make this career transition possible and practical.”
2. Hone your survival skills
Karim Morgan Nehdi, CEO at consulting and training specialist Herrmann International, said professionals must recognize that AI has uneven superpowers.
“It can write sophisticated code, but fails at basic common sense. It excels at analytical pattern recognition, but struggles with understanding context,” he told ZDNET. “AI is heavily weighted toward analytical thinking, moderately good at structured implementation, but weak in the interpersonal and visionary thinking domains that define human advantage.”
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Nehdi encouraged professionals who want to protect themselves to exploit AI’s weaknesses.
“The people and companies that will thrive are the ones figuring out how humans and AI complement and even amplify each other,” he said. “Where AI handles the analytical heavy lifting while people focus on the complex, interpersonal, strategic work that still requires uniquely human capabilities, that’s not just better for workers, it’s better business.”
Nehdi said the upshot is AI won’t take your job, but someone who knows how to work with AI will. He said future-proofed professionals need two things.
“First, get hands-on with AI tools in your actual work. Not someday, now,” he said. “Second, figure out the unique thinking superpowers that make you irreplaceable in the age of AI: your relational intelligence, your creative judgment, your ability to create order in ambiguity. These aren’t soft skills anymore; they’re survival skills.”
3. Master prompt engineering
Bev White, executive chair at technology and talent solutions provider Nash Squared, said professionals can’t be passive. The threat of losing your livelihood can be terrifying, paralyzing people into inaction.
She encouraged professionals to channel their nervousness into productive research, self-improvement, and thoughtful planning about future career paths: “Upskill yourself in AI. Lean into it, don’t shy away from it.”
White told ZDNET that there are many online tools professionals can use to hone their skills, most of which are inexpensive or free. She referred to prompt engineering, which is critically important for AI use and is hugely in demand right now.
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“Work hard on mastering that capability because it is a defining skill. Many people are lured by the relatively casual language of AI engines into using casual language themselves in their prompts, but this can result in hazy answers and workslop,” she said.
“Invest time in really upskilling yourself in the art or science of prompting, learn how to write prompts using precise language and terms. Experiment and assess the differences. If you can show yourself to be a skilled and effective prompter, you have just hugely boosted your employability skills.”
White said the same rules apply to data reliability. “Those disclaimers at the bottom of an AI response that it may include mistakes aren’t a small detail,” she said.
“Upskill yourself on data governance and architecture, and how data can be kept current so that you can use these tools in a reliable way to drive the business forward.”
4. Develop open communication
Career expert Jasmine Escalera said that professionals who focus on AI-complementary skills, such as communication, strategic thinking, creativity, adaptability, and emotional intelligence, will continue to demonstrate tremendous value in the workplace.
“These are the skills that allow professionals to innovate, collaborate, and lead effectively as AI adoption accelerates,” she said. “Professionals can also strengthen their value by gaining a basic understanding of how AI tools function and building familiarity with the technology so they can use it more effectively in their work.”
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Escalera told ZDNET that open communication is essential. Professionals should engage their managers or company leaders in conversations about how AI is being integrated across the organization and what that means for their team and role.
“It’s also valuable to seek external support from mentors and industry leaders on how AI is shaping their roles and fields. Ask questions like, ‘How do you see AI changing our field?’ and ‘What skills will be most important for professionals in my position?'”she said.
“These discussions can offer valuable insights into the direction the industry is heading and how to stay ahead of AI adoption.”
5. Inspire a sense of creativity
Richard Corbridge, CIO at property specialist Segro, questioned whether companies are hiring fewer staff or seeking people with different capabilities.
“High empathy, human connectivity, the art of collaboration, and creativity with an eye on the future will become the high-value skills of the future,” he said.
Corbridge told ZDNET that the IT industry has traditionally promoted technologists into people manager roles to guarantee these individuals deliver value from their wages.
The age of AI could be a step change, and up-and-coming professionals and their managers must prepare for this shift.
“Maybe this AI revolution will at last be the moment that things change, and the salary value related to the skill of the person who is delivering will come to the forefront,” he said. “The C-suite has a great deal to learn in this space, and it will be on digital leaders, the masters of transformation, to help their staff take the journey to this new reality.”