There are 10 foundational AI skills education leaders should embed in their curriculum to ensure graduates are ready for the workforce, a new Coursera report contends.
Student interest in generative AI is exploding as employers across industries make the technology a key part of daily operations.
Participation in Coursera’s generative AI courses has increased by 234% over the last year, while professional certificate enrollment jumped by 91% as employers wish to verify what job candidates are learning.
The fastest-growing, non-technical AI skill is creating content that promotes a business’ strategy or services.
Courses that focus on critical thinking around responsible and ethical AI use have grown by 185%. Critical thinking is increasingly taught in STEM disciplines, including data, IT and software development.
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Higher education leaders should integrate foundational generative AI skills into non-technical coursework to ensure students excel after graduation, Coursera wrote.
The 10 fastest-growing, non-technical AI skills
Coursera analyzed its enrollment from 2023 to 2025 to identify these 10 most sought-after AI skills:
- Content creation: Producing and sharing articles, videos and social media posts to engage with different audiences across multiple platforms.
- AI personalization: Using data about a customer’s actions to make content and online experiences more relevant to them.
- Generative AI agents: Crafting prompts that let AI systems work independently.
- Image analysis: Teaching computers how to “see” and make sense of pictures and videos.
- Information privacy: Protecting personal data from unauthorized access
- Critical thinking: The ability to evaluate information and situations to make good decisions and solve problems.
- Debugging: Finding and fixing problems in software or hardware.
- Multimodal prompts: Giving an AI instructions with different types of information, such as text and images, to get better and more relevant results.
- AI product strategy: Using technology to help plan, build and manage products.
- LLM application: Using large language models to create chatbots that can understand and respond to human input.