Career success tips

20+ Courses to Build Your AI Skills and Help Future-Proof Your Career

December 9, 2024

Photo of a woman sitting in a cubicle at her computer, taking a course to build her AI skillset.

Will AI replace [insert job title]? 

How will AI affect [insert industry]? 

Searches like these have skyrocketed in recent years, and it’s easy to see why: People are unsure of how the rise of new AI tools will affect their careers.

In reality, it’s not so much that AI is taking jobs, it’s that AI is changing jobs. But it’s not necessarily AI we should worry about, says UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School professor and AI strategist Mark McNeilly. 

“You won’t be replaced by AI,” he says. (Phew!) “You will be replaced by someone with AI skills.” (Gulp.)

Essentially, if you’re proactive about developing your AI skills now, you’ll likely have more security and more freedom to steer your career in the direction of your choosing. Because let’s face it: None of us can control where AI goes from here, but all of us can control how we evolve with AI, and we can start evolving today. 

What types of skills will become more valuable as AI advances? 

With virtually every job and every industry undergoing rapid change, reskilling and upskilling have taken the form of a dance craze: Everyone’s aware of it, many are doing it, and those most annoyed by it are those who refuse to try it. 

For those willing to dance, these are high-energy, revolutionary times. Anyone with internet access can improve their AI skills and thereby increase their demand as professionals. Never before has future-proofing one’s skill set been this egalitarian. 

Let’s also not forget that AI is creating new jobs. In recent years entire job markets have taken shape for people who interact with AI in an ever-expanding variety of ways. So it’s not really about saving your job from AI. It’s about harnessing AI to pursue the job you want. 

You may be thinking, but technology has never been my strong suit. As you’ll see below, you don’t need to be a techie to attain AI skills. In fact, if you’re not a techie, AI may be a blessing because it can narrow gaps between those with advanced technology skills and those without. 

Ready to discover new skills that can help you thrive in the age of AI? Let’s get started. 

Start with your adaptability

Chris Shipley is a former tech journalist who’s been covering AI since the ‘80s. She also teaches the LinkedIn Learning course, Building an Adaptability Mindset in the Age of AI. Chris’s keen understanding of AI leaves her with “no doubt that humans will continue to drive business creativity, innovation, and value creation well into the future.” 

No matter how much AI advances, no matter how ever-present it becomes in the workplace, it still can’t compete with humans in critical aspects of business, Chris maintains. “Humans excel in the messy and complex problem solving that comes from insight, creativity, observation, empathy, ingenuity, and our relationships,” she says. “That’s the stuff of business value creation, and that’s one area where AI really struggles.”

So, in the context of future-proofing your career skill-set, adaptability is now a “superskill.” (And LinkedIn’s skill of the moment for 2024.) By improving your flexibility and agency — your ability to produce the desired effect via your actions — you are building foundational AI skills. 

Furthermore, whereas the demand for specific hard skills will fluctuate based on hard-to-predict trends, adaptability will always be in style. Your adaptability is what will ultimately enable you to rise to each moment, year after year, one AI advancement after another. 

For advice on how to improve your adaptability, check out the full learning path, Building Adaptability in the Age of AI, where you’ll find courses on building resilience, cultivating a growth mindset, increasing your flexible thinking skills, and developing mental agility. 

Learn how to learn

Why is it that some people can speak a language fluently within weeks while others who’ve been studying the same language for years struggle with comprehension? One possibility is that the person who develops fluency faster isn’t necessarily smarter, they just have a smarter learning strategy.

As Stephen Hawking once said, “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.” And right now the biggest change happening in the business world and the job market is intelligence: artificial intelligence. 

In introducing her LinkedIn Learning course, Strategies to Learn and Upskill More Effectively, cognitive scientist and educator Janell Blunt empathizes with those of us who think we’re bad learners, or think we have a bad memory that causes us to make too many mistakes while learning. 

“In reality,” says Janell, “just like a bad exercise routine may leave you wondering why you’re not seeing results, bad learning strategies may be at the root of all your learning difficulties.” Consequently, becoming a “good” learner may be as simple as picking up a few learning strategies you can carry with you for the rest of your life. 

Here are a few more courses to help you discover and improve upon your optimal learning strategy: 

Develop your soft skills

In light of our changing state of work, you may be tempted to rush out and add some hard skills to your set. And you shouldn’t be discouraged. Certain hard skills are hard to come by, and having these skills can help you get your foot in the door. But “it’s soft skills that ultimately open [the door],” notes HR leader Lydia Liu.

While AI can accomplish breathtaking feats, it simply cannot compete with soft skills. Don’t get us wrong, hard skills matter a great deal. And having the right hard skills can significantly increase your demand. But having a number of soft skills to accompany your hard skills can make you a hot commodity until the day you decide to retire. 

LinkedIn’s latest Global Talent Trends report found that 69% of U.S. executives say they plan to prioritize hiring candidates with soft skills. Meanwhile, employees skilled at using generative AI are five times more likely than others to develop those key soft skills, including creative ideation, design thinking, and emotional intelligence. 

“As AI increasingly takes on the less complex, more repeatable tasks being done by the workforce,” says Erin Scruggs, LinkedIn’s vice president and head of global talent acquisition, “companies will need to hire talent who have broader, uniquely human skills.”

Courses for improving your soft skills:

Learn how to talk to the AIs

Having a powerful tool is one thing. Knowing how to wield that tool to bring about its full potential is another. For instance, any golfer can own the same wedge as Tiger Woods... 

So it goes with AI. 

While most of us can take advantage of AI with relative ease, some of us command it with an expert’s flourish. There are AI whisperers out there who can apply just the right touch of assertiveness and encouragement to get AI to perform magic. If there’s an exact point where hard skills meet soft skills, prompting AI might be it.

These people aren’t AI magicians. They’ve simply taken a special interest in AI and have been intentional about practicing their AI skills. By learning prompting skills, you too can become an AI whisperer.

Most of us could benefit from learning how to design better prompts in general. Introductory courses like Microsoft Copilot: The Art of Prompt Writing with Garrick Chow and Nano Tips for Using ChatGPT for Business with Rachel Woods can help you create better prompts within minutes. 

Then there’s the next level of prompting: prompt engineering. Whereas prompt design is about creating quality prompts, prompt engineering is a more process-oriented, more rigorous way of controlling and managing those prompts. 

Prompt engineering is definitely the bigger undertaking of the two. That said, the effort could be worth your while. “Prompt engineering is growing so quickly,” writes AI expert Xavier Amatriain, “that many believe it will replace other aspects of machine learning, such as feature engineering and architecture engineering for large neural networks.”

Prompt engineering usually requires some technical skills. One such skill is Python, a programming language that’s intertwined with most AI technology. 

A simple search of “Python” in LinkedIn Learning will display a multitude of options for getting started. From here, you can choose courses based on your current knowledge level, interest, or application. If you’re new to Python and not sure where to start but curious to learn more, Python for Non-Programmers with Nick Walter is a good course for beginners. 

Once you’ve acquired a bit of technical know-how, here are a few courses that can help you get started with prompt engineering:

Build your own digital assistant

Imagine you’re in a job interview a year from now. You’re explaining to the interviewer how you’ve effectively built an AI-powered digital assistant to vastly improve your productivity. 

If that seems far-fetched, it shouldn’t — people everywhere are powering up their work lives with AI as you read this. There’s no question you can do it, too. The only question is how you’ll do it, because building your “AI buddy” can be a highly personal, highly creative endeavor. 

There’s really no better way to practice with AI than to apply it to your own life. Then, as your situation changes and you encounter new scenarios, your ability to develop intelligent solutions should only improve over time. 

You can start building your digital assistant right now by adding AI power-ups to the tools you frequently use, or would like to use more effectively. Suppose Excel is one of those tools. Courses like AI-Powered Excel: Mastering Built-In Automation Features with George Mount and Excel and ChatGPT: Data Analysis Power Tips with Chris Dutton may enable you to automate aspects of your work to accomplish exponentially more in a fraction of the time. 

Here are a few more courses that can teach you how to use AI to improve your personal productivity:

If you’re looking for more AI-related courses and learning paths than what we’ve mentioned above, head over to LinkedIn Learning, place your cursor in the search bar, and type Learn AI AND [insert passion or curiosity].

Woman writing in a notebook sitting in front of a laptop

Topics: Top skills and courses Career success tips

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