Your AI skills are becoming part of your market value

Your AI skills are becoming part of your market value

AI skills are starting to show up in salaries, hiring decisions and the shape of jobs themselves.

PwC's 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer analysed more than one billion job adverts across six continents. It found that jobs requiring specific AI skills grew 69%, compared with 9% across the overall jobs market. The average wage premium attached to AI skills reached 62%, up from 57% the previous year.

That does not mean learning a few prompts will increase your salary by 62%. PwC calculates the premium by comparing advertised salaries for comparable roles with and without specified AI skills. The useful point is simpler: employers are putting a measurable value on AI capability.

For anyone thinking about their next role, promotion or career move, that creates a practical question: how good are you at working with AI today?

Using AI regularly tells you very little about your level

It is easy to mistake frequency for capability. You can use ChatGPT every day and still accept a confident answer containing a bad assumption. You can write detailed prompts and miss an unsupported claim. You can know the latest tools without knowing where they genuinely improve your work.

As AI becomes more common at work, judgement matters more, not less.

PwC's research points in the same direction. The skills required in the most AI-exposed jobs are changing more than twice as quickly as those in the least exposed jobs. In highly AI-exposed entry-level roles in the US, employers are also asking for traditionally senior skills such as judgement and leadership far more often.

The useful skill, then, is broader than knowing how to operate an AI tool. You need to know how to give it enough context, recognise a weak output, check what matters and decide when the result is good enough to use.

Those are workplace skills. They can be tested.

Start by finding out where you stand

We built the AQ Assessment because most people have no useful benchmark for their AI capability.

AQ gives you a score from 1 to 10 based on how you work with AI. The assessment takes around four minutes and combines behavioural questions with practical scenarios. Some of those scenarios show you AI-generated work containing real problems and ask you to identify what is wrong.

That distinction matters. Self-reporting alone is a poor way to measure a skill. It is very easy to say you verify AI outputs; spotting the problem when one is put in front of you is different.

The assessment is also role-specific. The situations that matter to someone working in finance are different from those faced by a marketer, product manager or data analyst. Your score should reflect the kind of AI judgement you need at work rather than how much AI terminology you know.

A score is useful when it tells you what to do next

There is no prize for getting a 10, and a lower score is not a verdict on your career. AQ is meant to give you a starting point.

If you are strong at prompting but weak at verification, you know where to focus. If you can catch errors but struggle to give AI enough context, that is a different problem to work on. If your score is already high, the next step may be learning how to apply that capability to more valuable parts of your role.

This matters because the market around you is moving quickly. PwC found that jobs which AI is 'professionalising' — where routine work is automated and human expertise becomes more important — are growing faster and seeing stronger wage growth than jobs where AI makes specialist work easier for non-experts to perform.

The people who benefit most from AI are unlikely to be those who simply use it most often. The advantage comes from knowing how to use it well enough to produce better work, while keeping the judgement to know when the machine has got something wrong.

Finding your current level is a sensible place to begin.

Test your AQ: https://aq.etiq.ai

It is free and takes around four minutes.

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