Learn AI before you send another CV

Like most parents, we often talk about what AI means for our kids' futures. Twenty years out, if we're honest, all any of us can do is guess.

But 2026 isn't twenty years out. For anyone applying for a job this year, the answer is already obvious — because the people doing the hiring have said it out loud.

Microsoft and LinkedIn survey around 31,000 workers and executives every year for their Work Trend Index. Two findings are hard to ignore. 66% of business leaders said they would not hire someone without AI skills. And 71% said they'd rather take a less experienced candidate who has AI skills than a more experienced one who doesn't.

Read that second one again. Seven out of ten hiring managers will pick the junior with AI skills over the veteran without them. Not someday. Now.

The degree still matters. Just not the way it used to.

Before every graduate throws their certificate in a drawer: your qualification is not worthless. Quite the opposite, and I'll get there in a minute. But its job has changed. A degree used to be the deciding factor. Today it's the entry fee. Everyone in the pile has one. The question that actually decides the shortlist is what you can get done in a day, and AI has quietly rewritten the honest answer to that question.

An applicant who works well with AI drafts in minutes what used to take hours, checks their own work, and arrives at the interview having researched your company better than some of your staff. Same salary as the person who can't do any of that. Employers noticed.

Why remote jobs feel it first

Open any batch of remote job ads and AI skills sit at or near the top of the requirements. There's a simple reason. Remote work is measured in output. Nobody sees you being busy; they only see what you deliver. And when a job can be done from anywhere, you're competing with applicants from everywhere. "Uses AI daily" is often the line that decides which hundred CVs actually get read.

Now, the part nobody puts in the headline

Here's where I push back on the hype, because the junior with AI skills isn't the most valuable person in the room either.

AI doesn't know your business. It writes, codes and calculates at frightening speed, but it can't tell you what's worth writing, which problem the code should solve, or whether the number it just produced makes any commercial sense. I see it in my own practice every week. A coder with AI can produce code all day; somebody still has to know what to build. AI drafts a report in thirty seconds; someone with actual knowledge has to catch that it's confidently wrong on page two.

So experience isn't being replaced. It's being amplified. The person who genuinely knows their field and can use AI is worth more than the expert who won't touch it, and worth more than the AI whiz who's never met a real client. If you have a master's degree and twenty years behind you, the maths is heavily in your favour: the AI-skilled junior needs a decade to learn what you know. You need about a month to learn what they know.

A month. That's the whole gap.

How fast, exactly?

This is the part I find almost unfair. A degree takes years and costs a small fortune. Working AI fluency takes a few weeks of evenings and costs nothing.

Basics over a weekend: open a free Claude account, do a short course, learn what a decent prompt looks like. Then use it on real work every day for two or three weeks. Emails, summaries, spreadsheets, your CV. By week four you'll be feeding it your own documents and, more importantly, spotting when it's wrong. That last skill is what separates "has AI skills" from "played with ChatGPT once."

Then put it on your CV with proof, not adjectives. "Used Claude to cut report preparation from four hours to forty minutes" beats "familiar with AI tools" every single time.

Where to learn it, free

• Anthropic Academy (anthropic.com/learn) — official free Claude courses with certificates you can put on LinkedIn. Start with the AI Fluency course.
• Claude.ai — the free plan is enough to build real fluency. The trick is using it daily on real work, not reading about it.
• DeepLearning.AI short courses (deeplearning.ai/short-courses) — free, one to two hours each, several built with Anthropic.
• Career Essentials in Generative AI by Microsoft and LinkedIn — free, and the certificate shows up on your profile where recruiters search.

The tools are free, the courses are free, and the time is a few weeks of evenings. The only expensive thing here is waiting, because the people doing the hiring have already told us who they're going to choose.

If you're job hunting this year, start this weekend. If your kids are job hunting, send them this. It's less painful than another rewrite of the CV, and it will do considerably more.

Brandon Iverach is a professional accountant (SA). The hiring statistics come from the Microsoft & LinkedIn Work Trend Index.