In today’s artificial intelligence age, it’s easy to assume that mastering ChatGPT and other tech tools will give you a leg up in today’s competitive labor market. But according to workforce experts and hiring leaders, the qualities that increasingly separate top candidates from others aren’t just technical—they’re human.

As AI becomes more capable, experts say employers are looking beyond traditional hiring credentials like degrees, job titles, and technical expertise when making new hires. Instead, they’re looking for candidates with essential skills that can complement and utilize AI, but can’t be replaced by it. These include knowing how to lead and work on a team, navigate change, and make sound decisions quickly, just to name a few.

“It's sort of an inversion of where we've been historically,” said Brian Elliott, future of work strategist and CEO of the think tank organization Work Forward. “We've usually valued the depth of expertise in a specific field of knowledge and now it's going to be more about the combination of experience and learning mindset and leadership capability. So it's a sizable shift, especially for those who've spent a couple of decades building up just expertise.”

With a global LinkedIn survey showing that one in five professionals feel that not having the right skills is making their job search more challenging, Forbes spoke to Elliott, as well as other workplace leaders and an economist, about the skills workers should be working to build right now in order to get ahead.

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According to the Graduate Management Admission Council’s (GMAC) 2026 Corporate Recruiters Survey, which included........

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