Following on from our article on the challenges and growth of the AI job market, this second article looks at the top 5 AI job market trends and emerging skills needed.
Top 5 AI job market trends
- Generative AI adoption is accelerating role creation. Job postings requiring generative AI skills have risen sharply with Lightcast reporting an increase from just 55 in January 2021 to nearly 10,000 by May 2025.
- Skill-based hiring is displacing strict degree requirements. In the AI sector, mentions of university degree requirements have declined by approximately 15%, while employers place growing weight on demonstrable skills. Test Gorilla’s “The State of Skills-Based Hiring 2025” report reveals that 85% of employers are using skills-based hiring practices, an increase from 81% in 2024.
- Cross-disciplinary expertise is becoming a must. AI roles increasingly span ethics, linguistics, and data privacy, not just coding. New job titles in Europe already include AI Ethicist, Prompt Engineer, and Policy Advisor.
- Broader adoption across non-tech sectors. The use of AI is shifting from core tech into other sectors including finance, healthcare, supply chain, and logistics. While firms are integrating AI into operational and strategic functions, not just R&D.
- Ethics, trust, and regulation become part of the job. With the EU AI Act and rising public scrutiny, roles that ensure fairness, privacy, and compliance are gaining importance. A report by Deloitte “Understanding European consumers’ and employees’ trust in generative AI” reveals that data confidentiality and security rank as top priorities for 66% of GenAI users, and 53% of GenAI users in Europe believe adoption would increase if their governments properly regulated the technology.
Top 5 emerging AI skills
- Generative AI development and implementation
Europe is seeing a steep rise in demand for talent who can build or fine-tune large models and generative systems. The Tech Skills Index reveals that European demand from companies for AI projects grew by 230%, while the number of AI expert freelancers only rose by 31%, between 2023 and 2024. - Machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and neural network expertise
The OECD “Emerging Trends in AI Skill Demand across 14 OECD countries” highlights that core ML/DL skills remain the most listed technical competencies, with almost 35% of online vacancies require ML skills, such as knowledge of neural architectures, model training, optimisation and deployment - Natural Language Processing (NLP) and multilingual AI abilities
With European markets being multilingual and culturally diverse, NLP skills are vital. According to the research report “Europe Natural Language Processing Market Outlook, 2030”, the Europe NLP market is expected to reach a market size of more than USD 27.80 Billion by 2030. - Data engineering, data analytics, and model evaluation
Knowing how to gather, clean, process, and interpret data is essential, and employers want people who can build and evaluate models, to ensure performance metrics, data pipelines, and overall robustness. - AI ethics, governance, bias detection & responsible deployment
Following the implementation of the EU AI Act, ensuring data privacy, fairness, transparency, and accountability is mandatory. Companies are therefore increasingly looking for people who understand the ethical implications, compliance requirements, and bias mitigation methods.
The AI job market in 2025 offers unprecedented opportunities, but success depends on staying informed, acquiring the right skills, and embracing continuous learning.
The EIT Deep Tech Talent Initiative has assembled a catalogue of over 230 courses and training programmes (as of September 2025). These offer a great opportunity for European professionals to improve their knowledge and expertise in their preferred areas of interest. And, in terms of the AI job market, 93 courses are dedicated to Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning (including big data).
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