Andela Research: More than Half of AI Job Postings Seek Skills That Don’t Match Job Title

Andela, a New York-based company with an AI-native talent and services platform, announced that its newly launched Emerging Skills Research found that the industry is inventing roles faster than companies can name them or accurately match skills to job titles.

Andela’s Emerging Skills Research analyzed 47,101 technical job postings from Fortune 500 companies and scored 2,026 distinct skills.

Among the roughly 1,832 postings titled for roles like “AI Engineer” and “ML Engineer,” 53% require skills drawn from at least two different established roles. For familiar titles like “AI Engineer,” companies are seeking a different, unnamed role that includes skills such as LLM orchestration, autonomous agents, and vector databases.

The study also found that 23 skill bundles were identified that recur across Fortune 500 hiring, but don’t map to any standardized job title. Within these findings, Andela identified 8 genuinely new roles, 14 hybrids of old and new, and 1 discarded for accuracy. Two example new roles are MLOps Pipeline Engineer, which bridges five established roles, and LLM Application Engineer, a contemporary AI engineer who builds on foundation models rather than training them.

Of all the emerging skill combinations, 6,758 job postings carry the LLM Application Engineer skill bundle without naming it, reflecting a lag between the technology frontier and what companies know how to hire for.

The findings underscore the challenges companies face, driven by the unprecedented speed of change in the post-AI era, to accurately identify emerging skills, name them, and attach them to job roles. Mismatches result in lost time, money, and opportunity for both employer and employee, according to the company. Job descriptions written for yesterday’s roles filter out the candidates companies actually need. Companies that fail to see emerging needs for human skills, especially as AI changes what it can do, will continually chase the wrong thing, and companies who hire today for yesterday’s roles will likely accrue “talent debt” alongside technical debt.

The most emerging tech roles identified in the research include: MLOps Pipeline Engineer, LLM Application Engineer, FinOps Reliability Engineer, Docs-as-Code Engineer, Product Front-End Engineer, Lakehouse Analytics Engineer, DevSecOps Security Engineer, and SecOps Observability Engineer.

Channel Impact^®
MSPs and client companies need to exercise caution in developing titles and language that truly reflect their needs.