Why Upskilling as a Prompt Engineer Could be your Ultimate Career Power Move

With Generative AI being the buzzword in every industry, a niche and new career path has emerged: the Prompt Engineer. While the term might still be unfamiliar to some, prompt engineering is one of the most in-demand jobs of today, and opportunities are vast as organisations look at ways to harness Generative AI in their business processes. 

    Burgeoning roles in Prompt Engineering

In a CNA article from December last year, the concept of the Prompt Engineer was introduced, but not yet taken seriously in the region. Today, a quick search for “Prompt Engineering jobs in Singapore” found jobs such as this Prompt Engineering Machine Learning Engineer role, are gaining popularity, as are ones similar to this AI Prompt Engineer position at a Singaporean venture studio, which doesn’t require any programming knowledge.

This is a growing trend, even in Singapore, compared to just half a year ago where these prompt engineering jobs didn’t exist in postings anywhere. While a first glance at job search results may suggest that Prompt Engineering is a component of developer job scopes, more and more non-technical roles are listing prompt engineering as a bonus skill to have in one’s arsenal. And the good news for everyone is that prompt engineering has less to do with technical “engineering”, and much more to do with the written “prompt”.

The job scope of a Prompt Engineer

    Prompt Engineering Skills That Set You Apart 

Upskilling to become a prompt engineer could very well be the best decision you make for your professional journey. Besides the hefty salaries that have been advertised, prompt engineering is a fairly new profession, with the demand exceeding the supply of good prompt engineers.

Prompt engineering salaries of up to six-digit figures in various US organisations

What sets a successful prompt engineer apart is not a prior knowledge of programming and coding. While a foundation in coding languages such as Python comes in useful, successful prompt engineering requires strong natural language skills, the additional ability to understand delicate linguistic nuances, and to break down text instructions step-by-step to guide the machine in producing the specific result that is desired. Andrej Karpathy, former head of AI at Tesla and now working for ChatGPT creator OpenAI, was quoted as saying, "the hottest new programming language is English."

In Straits Interactive’s prompt engineering course, participants are taken through different types of prompt techniques to see what sort of results are produced. Then, with their new knowledge, they are tasked to create an AI chatbot. What they need to fine-tune and tweak the