(18 Aug 2026) What does it mean to be ready for the AI workplace? While there is enormous collective attention on students’ and workers’ skills with using AI, it is less clear what “AI skills” should encompass. AI skills are as new to employers as they are to graduating students, and the technology itself is changing so quickly that many may struggle to remain on the cutting edge. Establishing a specific, actionable, and assessable framework for what constitutes AI skills is a necessary first step in aligning efforts to sufficiently support students as they transition from higher education to employment in the age of AI.
To that end, we embarked on one of the first major efforts to vet a comprehensive framework of what constitutes AI skills with college and university instructors as well as to understand how instructors prioritize these skills.
The survey also included questions about whether instructors personally taught each of the skills in their courses. Two-thirds of instructors teach the transparency and attribution skill, likely in the context of academic integrity and scholarly attribution. Roughly half of the respondents also teach skills related to the responsible and cautious use of AI and its outputs (responsible use of AI, proactively reviews output quality, reinforces human accountability), reflecting the value that academia places on critical thinking and centering the human role in AI use. One instructor suggested teaching an “approach to AI that distinguishes the dignity and inherent worth of humans over their tools.”
Far fewer instructors taught skills in the workflow evaluation and redesign and technical integration categories. These are also the areas where instructor and employer prioritization had the largest divergence. This dissonance is the strongest evidence that there is an AI skills gap between higher education and employers. There are whole categories of skills which employers value that instructors do not, and likely as a result, do not teach in their courses. One instructor spoke directly to this difference in priorities, saying, “…many of these [survey] questions stress workflow and productivity, I would stress to my students the importance of fact-checking and cross-referencing.”
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