2026 Skills Roundup: What Employers Can't Find (And Will Pay For)

You've got seventeen browser tabs open. One says AI prompt engineering is the future. Another insists soft skills are all that matter now. A third promises that a six-week data bootcamp will transform your career. Your notes app is full of half-finished lists: skills to learn, courses to take, certifications to research.

It's been three months and you still haven't started anything.

Brian Schmucker has watched these cycles for nearly 30 years. As Vice President of Analytics and Technology at Kelly, he talks to employers every week about what they actually need. And right now, even they're struggling to articulate it.

"Everybody is asking for AI," he says. "I'm not sure that anybody even knows what AI skills are."

If you've felt paralyzed by conflicting advice about which skills will actually pay off, you're not imagining the problem. The headlines shift weekly, and the biggest opportunities often sit in the gap between what employers desperately need and what most job seekers are chasing.

Here's what Kelly recruiters see every day.

Technical skills that pay premium rates

In today’s job market, you don’t necessarily need to learn to code, but you do need to learn to use technology to solve real problems.

AI and automation literacy. Professionals working with AI tools earn salaries nearly 18% higher than their peers. But that doesn’t mean you need to build machine learning models. Employers want people who can use AI assistants to draft documents, analyze data, and automate repetitive tasks. The skill is knowing when AI helps and when it doesn't, and being able to check its work.

Data analysis. The specific skill Schmucker recommends learning this year: pulling information from multiple sources and combining it into something useful. Your company might have customer data in one system, sales numbers in another, and inventory in a third. If you can connect those dots—even using basic tools like Excel or Google Sheets—you become the person everyone asks for help.

Cybersecurity awareness. There's a global shortage of 4.8 million cybersecurity workers, and the gap keeps widening. Even if you're not going into security, understanding the basics—phishing red flags, password hygiene, data handling protocols—makes you a safer employee and a more attractive hire.

Cloud and collaboration tools. Knowing your way around platforms like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Slack, or project management tools like Asana isn't optional anymore. Employers assume you can collaborate across locations and time zones without hand-holding. Bonus points if you can help teammates who are less tech-savvy get up to speed.

Your next step: Identify one technical tool adjacent to your current work—whether that's a database, an automation tool, or an AI assistant—and spend an hour learning the basics.

Soft skills that always remain valuable

Skills that involve doing the same thing the same way every time are losing value. Skills that require judgment, interpretation, and knowing when something doesn't look right are gaining value just as fast. The data supports this:

Communication appeared in nearly 2 million job postings in December 2024, making it the most-requested skill across industries. Can you explain a complex problem to someone who doesn't share your expertise? Can you write an email that gets a response?

Problem-solving ranked number one in employer surveys, with nearly 90% of employers seeking evidence of it on resumes.

Judgment and decision-making is becoming vastly more valuable as AI advances. "If there's a decision point in it, then it's probably still going to need a human touch," Schmucker explains. "AI has a risk of hallucination. So being able to look at something afterwards and go, does that make sense? Does it work?"

AI can summarize a meeting, draft an email, analyze a dataset. What it can't do is decide whether the output actually makes sense for your specific situation. That's still you.

Your next step: Document three situations from the past month where you used judgment to make a decision with incomplete information. These examples become interview gold.

Industry expertise is the great differentiator

Generic skills get you in the door. Industry expertise gets you the offer.

"The biggest thing I've seen employers looking for recently is experience within their industry," Schmucker says. "They're okay with outside experience, but if you have experience in the industry, they're willing to pay a premium for that expertise."

Two-thirds of managers say their recent hires weren't fully prepared for the role. And the most common gap wasn't technical skills, it was experience. Employers want people who understand how work actually gets done in their specific context.

The challenge is that your industry expertise often feels invisible to you. You've accumulated knowledge about how your field operates, what the common pitfalls are, which shortcuts actually work. It feels like common sense because you've lived it. But to someone outside your industry, it's specialized knowledge that takes years to build.

►Your next step: Make a list of things you know about your industry that would take an outsider months to learn. That list is more valuable than you think.

The ultimate advantage: combining it all

Anyone can pull a report. But if you can look at that report, understand what it means for the business, and recommend what to do next? That’s where the magic happens.

"We have billions of terabytes of data that are available," Schmucker says. "Being able to interpret that and put it into actionable items—people need to be able to take data and create an action from it versus just 'here's what the data says.'"

Think about your own work. Maybe you're the accountant who figured out how to automate routine reconciliations, and explained to leadership why it mattered. Or the nurse who became the go-to trainer when the hospital adopted new software. Or the manufacturing supervisor who spotted an inefficiency and got buy-in for fixing it.

Today, 85% percent of employers use skills-based hiring. They're looking at the full picture, not just your degree or your last job title, but what you can actually do.

►Your next step: Identify where your technical knowledge, soft skills, and industry expertise overlap. That intersection is your competitive advantage.

How to spot the skills your industry will need next

By 2030, 70% of the skills used in most jobs will change. That sounds alarming until you realize it's also an opportunity. If you can see where things are heading, you can get there first.

A few ways to get ahead of the curve:

• Read job postings for roles one level above yours. They signal what your current role will require in two years.
• Pay attention to what your company is investing in: new software, new markets, new processes.
• Talk to recruiters who specialize in your field. They see hiring trends months before they become obvious.
• Take on stretch projects at work. Volunteer for the pilot program, the new system rollout, the cross-functional initiative.

"The people that are excelling are those that are accepting of change," Schmucker says. "Everybody's role is going to be very, very different two or three years from now."

►Your next step: Set a monthly calendar reminder to spend 20 minutes scanning job postings in your field. Notice which skills keep appearing that you don't have yet.

Done scrolling through conflicting advice?

Connect with a Kelly recruiter who specializes in your industry. They see what employers are paying premiums for right now, and they can help you focus your energy where it counts.