Top Generative AI Skills and Education Trends for 2025
Early signs of value with gen AI
From a technology perspective, generative AI was the dominant topic of interest throughout 2024. Everywhere you turned, someone was talking about it and trying to understand the implications for their business. While we can expect more of the same in 2025, the conversation is evolving as many generative AI proof-of-concepts will move into production, or as more organizations experiment with generative AI.
In fact, two out of three organizations said that they are increasing their investments in generative AI due to early signs of business value, according to a Deloitte study. The greater investment in generative AI means businesses will need more people with AI skills to execute on their AI strategies and roadmap, which in turn requires leaders to continue providing AI skills training for their employees in 2025. We saw significant demand in 2024 from AWS’s customers and partners who want to help their employees gain AI fluency, which enabled us to train two million people globally with free AI skills in just one year – as part of Amazon’s AI Ready commitment. The demand for AI skills training will continue to rise.
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Top 5 skills trends
Let’s dive into five skills trends you can expect to impact you and your employee talent strategy this year.
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Generative AI skills remain critical, but don't neglect soft skills
As more companies adopt generative AI in their business to drive innovations and improve workflows, there’s no doubt that leaders will spend more time understanding generative AI fundamentals. However, they will also refresh their soft skills like effective communication, decision-making, manager coaching, and change management. With change comes uncertainty, and there’s a lot of pressure for leaders to help their workforce prepare for and understand the organization’s point of view on the generative AI evolution. Employees need clear guidance and encouragement to be part of the change—including the psychological safety to try new things and fail safely. Now’s the time to harness the power of emotional intelligence and inspect your culture to ensure it supports ongoing learning, critical thinking, and experimentation at all levels of the organization. Generative AI is going to do more for us than we ever imagined. Build your organization’s culture anchored by these critical soft skills to accelerate your opportunities with generative AI.
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Generative AI-powered learning is on the rise
Generative AI will transform how we learn in 2025. Technology advancements have continually lowered barriers to help more people access quality education. Generative AI-powered learning will open even more opportunities to level the education playing field. Not everyone can have a dedicated, in person tutor, but with generative AI, anyone can have this type of experience embedded in a digital learning system. Research shows that one-on-one tutoring vastly improves student performance, and a body of research is starting to show the value of AI tutoring. The generative AI-powered tutor assists you as you learn, understanding your current knowledge and skill level, where you need additional support, and providing recommendations and coaching along your personalized learning path.
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Digital learning assistants accelerate business outcomes
It’s not just students who will benefit from AI tutors or learning assistants, employees who are upskilling and reskilling will too. For leaders this means your investment in digital training modalities for your employees will generate even greater return on investment. According to a Harvard study, adding AI tutoring for “active learning” in its classrooms increased student engagement, motivation, and post-test performance. Your employees can gain that same enhanced learning depth through digital training, allowing you to quickly develop a workforce that has the critical skillsets to contribute to business growth. Simply put, the faster and better your workforce is able to learn new concepts and skills through the power of generative AI, the faster they will be able to help your business innovate and improve the bottom line. I encourage you to check out AWS SimuLearn in AWS Skill Builder.
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Cohort-style training drives long-term business impact
One of the best ways to keep up with the pace of technology is to invest in organization-wide upskilling initiatives that build an engaged culture of learning. However, it can be tough to know how and where to invest in order to maximize your organization’s immediate innovation need. With the interest in generative AI, in particular, we’re seeing more organizations deploy short-term, highly-focused training initiatives on a specific topic, area, or team. The key is to organize a collaborative, cohort-style training that includes dedicated ideation, hands-on learning, and soft skills education. These sessions have a couple of key benefits. First, employees come away with actionable use cases that maximize the newly developed skills, giving them priority focus areas that might not have been possible without the collaborative, hands-on learning. Second, with priority initiatives identified, leaders can make quick decisions about redeploying newly-skilled talent into new roles, or investing in additional reskilling. Third, the short-term and focused nature of the training gives the organization quicker results, which reinforce the business benefit of skills development. This leads to greater leadership buy-in for workforce skills initiatives. Given the success we’ve seen in short-term generative AI trainings, I expect more leaders will adopt this approach as they continue to upskill their workforce in 2025 and beyond. Given how quickly generative AI is evolving, speed matters more than ever in the world of technology and business.
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Measuring productivity gains from training efforts
With the rapid pace of technology innovation, training your workforce is no longer a nice-to-do, but a must-do. Ensuring your workforce has the skills to maximize this productivity gain is essential. However, measuring the increased productivity from training, in particular generative AI skills remains elusive. Customers often tell us they don’t know how to measure skill competency or tell if their training is working. This is not a new challenge. But as more leaders recognize the strategic investment in ongoing skills training, it’s resurfacing the need for measurable business value to assign to training initiatives. The short answer is: it’s not always about productivity. It’s a long-game. You are ensuring your team has the right skills to complete the project or initiative so you don’t have to recruit new talent, outsource the work, or worse, shelf the project altogether. Generative AI will absolutely make employees more productive, giving you the ability to add new responsibilities to their scope when other, more automated tasks fall away. Measuring the business impact of ongoing training comes down to what can be accomplished that was not possible without the skills development. This takes into account your teams’ engagement, retention, efficiency, collaboration, and confidence to take risks.
Evolution of gen AI
None of us can know exactly what the future will bring, given how quickly AI, and its impact on your business and people, is evolving. What you can control is the environment you create that allows your workforce to take on new challenges and opportunities with confidence. Investing in your employees empowers them to build skills that will be paramount to your success, no matter where your roadmap is leading you.
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About the author
Maureen Lonergan, VP, AWS Training and Certification
Maureen Lonergan is Vice President of Training and Certification for Amazon Web Services (AWS) leading a global team that helps learners and organizations build and validate in-demand cloud and emerging technology skills to leverage the power of the AWS Cloud.
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