AI Skills That Get You Promoted in 2026 and Beyond

Erica Anderson Rooney is an ex-CPO turned executive coach and AI educator on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there. She is the author of The AI Gap (2026), host of the Glass Ceilings & Sticky Floors and AI Voice or Victim podcasts, and NC Chapter Lead for Women Applying AI. Her SNAP and AI Continuum frameworks are taught to thousands of women through CHIEF, WICT, and Fortune 500 leadership programs. She is the sought-after speaker at the intersection of women, AI, and leadership.

You did the AI training your company offered. Maybe it was a lunch and learn or maybe it was a forty-minute video and a mandatory quiz that you had to pass. Through that, you learned how to write a prompt, you started using it for things like “writing better emails”, and you felt like you had finally caught up.

Then a report landed last week that tells me the bar has already moved. If you want to know the AI skills to get promoted in 2026 and beyond, the answer changed sometime around January of this year, and most companies did not give you an update.

Here is what it found.

The Job Description Moved and Nobody Told You

Workday, the HR and payroll software company, released its Global Workforce Report on October 5, 2026. It pulls from job postings at roughly 550 employers, a survey of about 6,000 workers and leaders, and HR data from its own customers. You should know, Workday sells software to HR teams, so read it as company research. I still think every woman in a corporate job should see these numbers, because they describe what I hear in coaching calls every single week.

Here is the part that I found interesting. Employer demand for basic AI skills, the simple prompting most of us were trained on, climbed through late 2025, it peaked in January 2026, and has fallen 25 percent since. Over roughly the same stretch, from September 2025 to July 2026, demand for hands-on AI skills rose 51 percent. Workday defines those as building AI tools, automating workflows and AI engineering.

So the AI skills your company trained you on last year is the skill it doesn’t find so important.

And look at what else dropped. Mentions of management and leadership skills in job postings fell 7 percent. Mentions of training skills, meaning the ability to teach other people, fell 13 percent. The people writing job postings are asking for builders and asking less often for the leaders who grow other people.

Promotions Are Flat and the Inside Track Got Narrower

If that were the only finding, I would tell you to take a course and move on but it is not the only thing you need to know.

Workday found that promotion rates were roughly flat worldwide. Internal moves to new roles fell at 57 percent of employers compared with a year earlier. Nearly 4 in 10 employees said their company went through a reorganization or restructuring in the past year. (I don’t think that surprises anyone.)

About half of employees did not even try to move internally last year. The ones who did try ran into the same three walls over and over: hiring for the role was paused, their manager did not support the move, or the selection process felt unfair.

If you read that list again every one of those is a decision that someone else made.

Meanwhile, most leaders in the survey are not planning to replace people with AI. Forty percent of business leaders said they expect AI to help them get more out of the employees they already have. Twenty-eight percent said they expect it to reduce headcount.

And when I hear “get more out of the people they already have” I interpret that as you, doing a bigger job, with the same title.

Your Company Thinks You Are Further Along Than You Are

This is what would have made me furious as a Chief People Officer.

In the Workday survey, 79 percent of workers said they know which skills they need to succeed. Only 66 percent said their employer helps them build those skills. That is a 13-point gap between knowing what you need and getting any help to get there.

Now put that next to what IBM found when it surveyed 2,000 CEOs and senior leaders in 33 countries this spring. The CEOs said only 25 percent of their workforce uses AI regularly as part of the job. In the same survey, 86 percent of them said they believe their employees have the skills to work with AI.

One in four people using it regularly. Eighty-six percent of CEOs are confident the skills are already there. In my experience, that disconnect is how training gets skipped. If leadership believes you are already skilled, nobody upstairs feels urgency to pay for the next level.

What I am seeing today, in my work as an AI Transformation Leader inside Fortune 500 companies, is that leaders are rolling out an AI policy, a quick video that sometimes has a mandatory quiz, and they are calling their people “trained.” What they aren’t doing, is monitoring what the true skills are, what changes have been made to workflows, or how those new “skills” are impacting business. It’s like a checkbox that doesn’t drive results. (Raise your hand if you have seen that!)

The AI Gap Shows Up Long Before the Promotion Conversation

The Workday report doesn’t break any of this out by gender. So I went looking, because it’s my whole mission to see how these things impact women, and what it means for our future.

The McKinsey and LeanIn.Org Women in the Workplace 2025 report, published in December 2025, surveyed about 10,000 employees. Only 21 percent of entry-level women said their managers encourage them to use AI tools. For entry-level men, it was 33 percent.

The same report found that for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 93 women were promoted. That first promotion is the rung where the pipeline into leadership starts to thin.

Put those together with Workday's numbers. Employers now want hands-on AI skills. They are training less than workers need. Promotions are flat. And from the very first rung, women get less encouragement to pick up the tools at all.

This is what I mean when I talk about The AI Gap. It is the distance between who gets invited to learn the tools and who gets left to figure it out alone, and it compounds every year it goes unaddressed. Right now the people with the encouragement, the time and the budget are the ones building the skills employers just started asking for.

You're not crazy for feeling like the rules changed mid-game. They did.

What Are the AI Skills to Get Promoted Right Now?

Here is my answer, based on what the Workday data says employers are asking for and what I see working for the women I coach. The short version: what gets you promoted now is using AI to make real work run without you, and teaching your team to do the same.

Prompting is the floor. You still need it. It no longer sets you apart. But the basics are understanding how to talk to the machine. If you don’t know how to prompt effectively, go read about my RGCCC prompt framework.

And if using AI at work makes you feel like you are cheating, you are in good company. I talked about why so many women feel like cheaters using AI at work on my podcast.

The skills that are rising are the ones where you use AI to make something run without you. Automating a report that eats two hours of your busiest day. Building a simple tool your team uses to answer the same twelve questions. Setting up a workflow that pulls data from three places into one summary before your staff meeting. That is what "hands-on" looks like for a woman who does not work in tech and never wants to write code.

The second set of skills is the one employers mentioned less in job postings this year: leading people and teaching them. I think that is a mistake on their part, and it is an opening for you. When everyone on your team needs to move from typing questions into a chat box to building with these tools, the person who can show them how to become the person leadership calls first.

So the combination I would bet on is this: build one thing with AI that saves real time, then teach your team to use it. Then make sure your name is on both and you are getting the credit for it. Capture your win.

Five Moves to Make Before Your Next Review

1. Read the job postings for the role you want next

Pull up your own company's open postings for the level above you, plus two or three at competitors. Paste them into ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot and ask: "List every AI-related skill in these postings and group them into basic use, hands-on building, and leading others." You will see, in your own industry's words, exactly where the bar sits now. That map is already public.

2. Build one thing that saves your team an hour a week

Pick the most annoying recurring task on your team's plate. The weekly status roundup. The intake form nobody fills out right. The first draft of the monthly report. Use the AI tool your company already approved to automate one piece of it. Keep it small enough to finish in two weeks. Then measure it: hours saved, errors avoided, turnaround time. A measured result is what goes in your promotion case.

3. Ask for the training in writing, with a number attached

Remember the 13-point gap. If your company is not helping you build the skills, ask for that help in a way that is easy to approve. Name the skill, name the course or program, name the cost, and name the business result you will bring back. Send it as an email so it exists in writing. This is a negotiation, and it is one you are allowed to have. If your company has a professional development budget, it was set aside for exactly this kind of request.

4. Teach it, and make sure people know you taught it

Once your small build works, run a twenty-minute session for your team. Show the before and after. Then send a short recap to your manager and your skip-level with the result and the names of the people now using it. Teaching is the skill the postings mentioned less this year, and your team still needs someone to do it. Being the person who brought your team along is a visible, promotable thing, and you want it attached to your name.

5. Put it in your promotion case with receipts

Promotions are flat, so the women who move up will be the ones who walk in with proof. Keep a running document: what you built, what it saved, who you trained, what changed for the business. If you don't have a receipt, it didn't happen. When review season comes, you hand them the case.

What This Means for Women and the Companies That Want to Keep Us

I want to be fair to employers here. Workday's report says voluntary turnover runs about 16 percent a year and about 70 percent of employees are still with the same company two years later. Plenty of people are staying put. Workday also found that employees who plan to stay are less likely to recommend their employer, so a lot of people are staying without telling their friends to apply.

If you lead a team, this report is on your to-do list too. Look at who on your team has been encouraged to build with AI and who has been left to figure it out on lunch breaks. Look at who gets the stretch assignment to pilot the new tool. Those small choices decide who has the skills when the next promotion opens up.

Women should not have to pay their own way into these skills on nights and weekends. The companies that want to keep us should be funding it.

What I Want You to Take From This

The skills that get you promoted shifted this year. Your company may not have caught up, and it may not plan to. That gap is real, it is measurable, and you can close it on your own terms.

Build one thing and teach it. Get the training paid for. Keep the receipts. Your authority at work grows every time your name is attached to a result someone else can see.

You Do Not Have to Build This Alone

This is exactly why HER Collective exists. Every week we meet live for group coaching, and the membership includes hands-on AI training built for women who do not work in tech, plus custom AI tools for career work like a skills-gap analysis. You get a room of women who will tell you what they asked for and what they got. If your company has a development budget, there is a ready-made letter on our site you can send your manager to ask them to sponsor your membership. Join us at https://www.joinhercollective.com/joinher. You can sit with us.

I am cheering you on.

Erica

Frequently Asked Questions

What AI skills do employers want in 2026?

Workday's October 2026 report found that demand for basic prompting peaked in January 2026 and has fallen 25 percent since, while demand for hands-on skills like building AI tools and automating workflows rose 51 percent. The skills that stand out are using AI to automate real work and teaching your team to do the same.

How do I ask my employer to pay for AI training?

Put the request in writing and make it easy to approve. Name the skill, the program, the cost and the business result you will bring back. Many companies have a professional development budget for exactly this, and HER Collective has a ready-made sponsorship letter you can send your manager.

What is The AI Gap and how does it affect promotions?

The AI Gap is the distance between who gets supported to learn AI at work and who is left to figure it out alone. McKinsey and LeanIn.Org found only 21 percent of entry-level women say their managers encourage them to use AI tools, versus 33 percent of entry-level men. That gap shows up later in who is ready for promotion.

About the Author

Erica Anderson Rooney is an ex-CPO turned executive coach and AI educator on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there. She is the author of The AI Gap (2026), host of the Glass Ceilings & Sticky Floors and AI Voice or Victim podcasts, and NC Chapter Lead for Women Applying AI. Her SNAP and AI Continuum frameworks are taught to thousands of women through CHIEF, WICT, and Fortune 500 leadership programs. She is the sought-after speaker at the intersection of women, AI, and leadership.