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 output is not just language skills, but a creative mindset. 

In terms of value creation with Generative AI, prompt engineering has to do with content generation and information extraction/distillation.

Equally essential are good communication skills and the ability to collaborate with interdisciplinary teams, coupled with an analytical approach to dissect and solve intricate prompt engineering challenges. 

Take for instance, a Customer Service department at a delivery company that wants to improve their customer satisfaction rate for delayed deliveries. Say, they have an internal AI chatbot that allows staff to query the company’s own database. 

Someone who is inexperienced with the various prompting strategies may use the most straightforward Zero-shot prompt technique and simply ask: “Develop a plan to improve the customer satisfaction rate.” 

Now, someone who is more experienced might instead use Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting which is better suited for more difficult reasoning tasks that conventional prompting approaches might not be able to handle well. There are two methods of CoT that one can employ – Zero-shot CoT and Few-shot CoT. In both cases, the idea is to get the model to break down complex issues into simpler, more manageable chunks, then allow it to reason through each stage and build up to the solution.

 Embarking on a Prompt Engineer’s Journey of Learning First

While the prospect of getting a job in prompt engineering might seem both exciting yet daunting, numerous learning resources are readily available. A structured suite of courses that feed into an Advanced Certificate in Generative AI, Ethics and Data Protection are available to kickstart your journey and help you to master the intricacies of prompt engineering through natural language. Online, specialised communities within Stack Overflow and GitHub provide a platform for resources, code repositories, and collaborative projects that facilitate hands-on learning and skill honing.

Hear what one of our course participants have to say

    A World of Boundless Possibilities in Prompt Engineering

Where can prompt engineering take you? From writing sequenced code to develop advanced virtual assistants or chatbots, to sentiment analysis, prompt engineering as a career can span across various sectors, including healthcare, education and different functions, such as HR and digital marketing. 

A prompt engineer essentially facilitates harnessing the power of Generative AI to create a seamless, intuitive workflow. By nurturing a diverse skill set, aspiring prompt engineers can position themselves at the forefront of innovation, making significant contributions to the ever-evolving landscape of AI and natural language processing. In a sunrise industry, seizing this opportunity could just be the best thing you could do.