They want people with AI skills but the whole point of AI is to eliminate the meanial and the repetitive "do key work" to do the high value work.
In other words employers still need professionals and Subject Matters Experts to tell the AI how to do things, what a good job looks like, how to check it, where the AI is shit, what to change etc etc.
I used AI every day. I program with AI every day. I used the same agents everyone can access but I get better results because you need to know what good is, you need to know how to define it, check it, explain it, target it, what research is relevant and what is an AI hallucination and so on.
Telling people how to use the AI is easy. Telling them to be engineers is hard/impossible.
When your AI solution runs out of context or tells you "Yes, I'm sorry that was the wrong DB table" you still need that human expert.
Microsoft word did not make printers extinct. Excellent did not eliminate accountants. CNC machines did not eliminate carpenters etc.
If anyone asks you to have AI skills on a job interview ask them what training they provide to do the role they are advertising. Claude doesn't know about their specific company, their process, their policies, their documents pack and that annoying quirk they have in their systems because #Reasons - that has to be covered by training.
The best employers look for the right people with enough knowledge to be able to absorb the training at a reasonable period of time and start running.
