Why mastering Generative AI is the fastest way to boost your career and salary
World Bank data shows Generative AI skills now attract wage premiums of up to 36 per cent worldwide, as vacancies surge across ICT and white-collar roles, especially in the US, France, India and emerging markets.
Artificial intelligence is transforming global labour markets at an unprecedented pace.
New World Bank data shows that Generative AI (GenAI) skills now attract some of the highest wage premiums across both technical and non-technical professions.
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According to the lender, workers with GenAI development competencies earn 7–9 per cent more in technical roles.
Meanwhile, GenAI literacy skills—such as prompt use, workflow integration and AI-assisted analysis—offer an even larger 25–36 per cent wage premium in non-technical white-collar jobs.
This comes amid surging global demand for GenAI talent.
“Vacancies requiring GenAI skills surged ninefold globally from 2021 to 2024 as companies raced to develop and deploy GenAI solutions,” reads the 2025 Digital Progress and Trends report.
Qualification requirements
The boom has pushed employers to raise qualification requirements, making AI-related positions among the most academically demanding.
In 2024, 51 per cent of AI job postings required at least a master’s degree—almost twice the share for other advanced digital roles—while more than seven per cent required a PhD.
The rapid expansion is most pronounced in high-income countries, with the United States and France accounting for nearly half of all GenAI-related vacancies in 2024. The US alone posted 84,000 openings, up from just 3,000 three years earlier.
Emerging markets, however, are accelerating quickly.
Lower-middle-income countries recorded a 23-fold increase in GenAI postings, driven largely by India, which contributed 80 per cent of all vacancies in this income group.
The Philippines and Brazil saw the fastest expansion globally, rising 115-fold and 82-fold, respectively.
Non-technical fields
While labour demand remains dominated by ICT roles—such as software developers, data specialists and systems analysts—the report notes that GenAI skills are spreading rapidly into non-technical fields.
In high-income economies, AI-related vacancies are increasingly emerging in education and healthcare as digital transformation accelerates.
Globally, non-ICT occupations such as writers, graphic designers, university lecturers, film directors and marketing professionals are among the fastest-growing roles now requiring GenAI competencies.
Even with this momentum, the report emphasises that GenAI’s overall labour-market impact remains limited.
“Despite the rapid expansion, GenAI is still in the early stages of affecting the labour market,” the report reads.
“It has created new occupations, such as prompt engineers and LLM engineers, but these jobs total only a few thousand globally and have a limited effect on overall job creation.”
Despite the surge in postings, GenAI-related roles accounted for just 0.2 per cent of all job advertisements worldwide in 2024, the report adds.
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