Through the 2010s, coding took the highlight as one of the crucial desired expertise within the job market. The coding craze unfold shortly, from dad and mom badgering their children to drop the English main and go for a STEM diploma—and former President Barack Obama even urged individuals to be taught to code. Obama additionally grew to become the primary president to jot down a line of code as a part of the “Hour of Code”—a web-based occasion to advertise Laptop Science Training Week.
However, English and liberal arts majors grew to become the topic of scrutiny, some dubbing them “barista” levels from the idea that pursuing these majors would inevitably confine one to a job at a espresso store, assuming such levels have restricted profession prospects.
However the insurgence of AI is definitely upending these assumptions. That’s a minimum of what Palantir cofounder and billionaire Peter Thiel thinks. In a resurfaced clip from a 2024 interview with economist Tyler Cowen, Thiel stated the chances are falling out of favor for STEM people.
“It seems much worse for the math people than the word people,” he stated.
Storytellers are sizzling on the job market
The billionaire’s feedback replicate an rising pattern in as we speak’s labor market. LinkedIn launched a expertise research earlier this month titled “LinkedIn Skills on the Rise 2026: The fastest-growing skills in the U.S.” that exhibits rising demand for communications and artistic considering expertise. Communication, together with management and folks administration, are a number of the most sought-after expertise in as we speak’s labor market, in accordance with the report.
“Companies are increasingly looking for great communicators, because strong writing, clarity, and judgement still matter,” a LinkedIn spokesperson instructed Fortune. They famous “storytelling” has develop into an particularly fascinating ability as we speak. “On LinkedIn, we’ve seen job postings mentioning ‘storytellers’ double over the last year.” In actual fact, some corporations are shelling out greater than $1 million for storytellers and high-level communications professionals. Anthropic, for instance, is hiring for a head of communications with a $400,000 beginning wage, and Netflix is providing between $656,000 and $1.2 million for a senior director of communications.
To make certain, the report doesn’t essentially function a affirmation to shred your STEM diploma. LinkedIn additionally discovered a number of technical expertise are sizzling available on the market, together with AI immediate engineering and information annotation. These expertise, although, diverge from the bread and butter of STEM levels as they’re oriented round coaching AI slightly than constructing it. Whereas some AI immediate engineer job openings name for information of programming languages—together with Python and JavaScript, in addition to a background in massive language fashions—the postings additionally emphasize sturdy linguistic and artistic expertise to optimize AI outputs, and pay a mean wage of $128,000, in accordance with job platform Glassdoor.
As AI improvement advances, many leaders and AI specialists predict AI will dramatically reshape the job market, and with it, the most-valued expertise. With that improvement, some math and different STEM expertise danger turning into out of date.
Boris Cherny, the creator of Anthropic’s Claude Code, admitted he hasn’t written a single line of code since November (though he nonetheless checks the code he has AI write). In the meantime, AI are more and more increasing into fields occupied by STEM specialists, together with fundamental programming and information evaluation.
Rumblings within the labor market
Whereas the labor market has confirmed significantly dire for all latest school graduates—surpassing the unemployment price for all staff in 2022 and hitting 5.6% in 2025—some STEM-oriented careers have an particularly excessive unemployment price, in accordance with lately printed information from the New York Federal Reserve. Laptop engineering ranks as the main with the second-highest unemployment price,at 7.8%, after anthropology.
However some STEM graduate unemployment charges hover under the common for all school graduates of three.1%, together with for aerospace engineering and engineering applied sciences majors, at 2.2% and 1.7%, respectively.
Nonetheless, through the 2024 interview, Thiel argued that even in STEM fields at present untouched by AI automation, utilizing math expertise as a bar to entry will fall out of style because of AI.
“If do you want to go to medical school, we weed people out through physics and calculus,” he stated. “As a neurosurgeon, I don’t really want someone operating on my brain to be doing prime number factorizations in their head while they’re operating on my brain.”
