Leadership, Cybersecurity, and Gen AI Are the Fastest Growing Skills, Coursera Says

IBL News | New York

Coursera released this month its third annual Job Skills Report, identifying the year’s fastest-growing competencies.

It highlights that leadership, AI, and cybersecurity are the skill areas that have witnessed the most remarkable surge in the Coursera platform.

The report is based on insights from five million enterprise learners affiliated with 3,000 businesses, 3,600 higher education institutions, and governments in over 100 countries.

Many of Coursera’s fastest-growing skills align with WEF’s fastest-growing global jobs, including AI and machine learning specialists, business intelligence specialists, information security analysts, and data analysts. Fastest growing skills for 2024 were:

  1. ChatGPT
  2. Cybersecurity
  3. HTML/CSS
  4. UX design
  5. Front-end development
  6. Bookkeeping
  7. Data integrity and governance
  8. React Native
  9. Database management
  10. Generative AI modeling and development

The Job Skills Report of 2024 identifies eight trends:

#1: All leadership skills for supporting teams are a growing priority, particularly those on empathy, strategic leadership, and employee development. Managers are encouraged to increase their focus on leading teams with empathy, team building, and team management.

#2: AI-related skills drove record-breaking course enrollment. Coursera’s 800 AI-related courses attracted 6.8 million total enrollments this year. The course Generative AI for Everyone from DeepLearning.AI was the fastest-growing course in 2023.

Over 450,000+ learners are enrolled in AI-translated content.

The other top genAI courses published on Coursera in 2023 were:

  1. Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT (Vanderbilt University)
  2. Generative AI with Large Language Models (AWS; DeepLearning.AI)
  3. Introduction to Generative AI (Google Cloud)
  4. Generative AI for Everyone (DeepLearning.AI)
  5. ChatGPT Advanced Data Analysis (Vanderbilt University)

#3: The demand is surging for cybersecurity and information security skills. There’s an estimated shortfall of nearly 3.5 million cybersecurity workers.

#4: The fastest-growing skills are business skills, particularly in digital marketing and customer experience.

#5: Data visualizations and overall skills to read, understand, analyze, work with, and communicate with data continue to be among the fastest growing. Data literacy and storytelling to achieve organizational goals are in huge market demand.

#6: Web development and cloud computing skills remain high. Investments in these skills can help meet ongoing skill shortages and the need for technical employees to stay current with emerging technologies.

#7: Audit, copyright, and data skills for providing oversight and compliance are increasingly essential, particularly among learners affiliated with government programs.

#8: Curated learning paths, like Professional Certifications and Specializations, are driving the largest skill rank changes. These curated learning paths can improve business productivity, boost student employability, and improve internal mobility.

The most popular courses in Coursera in 2023 were:

  1. Foundations: Data, Data, Everywhere (Google)
  2. Foundations of Project Management (Google)
  3. Foundations of Cybersecurity (Google)
  4. Foundations of Digital Marketing and E-commerce (Google)
  5. The Science of Well-Being (Yale University)
  6. Ask Questions to Make Data-Driven Decisions (Google)
  7. Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design (Google)
  8. Financial Markets (Yale University)
  9. English for Career Development (University of Pennsylvania)
  10. Technical Support Fundamentals (Google)
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