AI is the fastest-growing skill in the UK and globally, but data from five million learners has revealed an emerging gender skills gap that must be addressed if the UK is to become a world leader in this area.
Course enrolments to build AI skills among employees, job seekers and students grew by 866 percent year on year globally, but only 28 percent of these sign ups were from women in 2024, according to the Job Skills Report from provider Coursera.
The report said six of the ten fastest-growing tech skills are around cybersecurity and risk management, as organisations experienced a 71 percent rise in cyber attacks from 2023 to 2024.
The AI skills most in demand among job seekers were related to generative AI, workplace technologies and analytics.
UK’s most popular training
The provider said that a course titled ‘Google AI Essentials’ was the most popular AI training among British people on its platform, which account for 4.2 million of its 162 million learners.
Courses titled ‘AI for Everyone’ and ‘Supervised Machine Learning’ were also in the top 10 for the UK.
Looking globally, the report found that 54 percent of genAI course sign ups were from people in India, Colombia, and Mexico. Researchers said this indicates a shift in the globalisation of AI talent and the availability of such skills in emerging markets.
The findings come as the UK government unveiled its 50-point AI Opportunities Action Plan with the goal of “turbocharging” UK productivity.
Boosting AI skills are a core part of the plan as it states that the UK must be prepared to train tens of thousands of additional AI professionals in the next five years.
The plan also calls for the UK to diversify the AI talent pool as “only 22 percent of people working in AI and data science are women”, it said.
“Achieving [gender] parity would mean thousands of additional workers” the plan said. This point is particularly interesting in the context of the ongoing retreat of big tech from ‘corporate diversity, equity and inclusion’ in the United States ahead of Donald Trump’s second term as president.
Concerning gender gap
Coursera’s report said that the relatively low number of women signing up to develop AI skills is “concerning” as 79 percent of working women—compared with 58% of working men—are employed in jobs vulnerable to the impact of AI.
Marni Baker-Stein, chief content officer at Coursera, said: “When you look at the tech landscape today, it is clear that the gender gap remains pronounced. The gender gap in STEM has long been a problem, and now it’s becoming increasingly apparent in the field of AI.
“With only 22% of AI and data science professionals being women, the gender gap is a significant barrier that has consequences for both social equity, and the overall effectiveness of AI technology. Women cannot afford to be excluded from the global AI upskilling revolution. Encouraging women to pursue AI skills through educational initiatives and workplace policies will be crucial to narrowing the gender gap and ensuring AI benefits everyone.”
The report also found that 22 percent of recruiters had updated job descriptions to include the use of genAI, while courses like ‘Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT’ and ‘Generative AI: Prompt Engineering Basics’ were among the top five genAI courses taken by students and job seekers.
As these skills are now essential for effectively using AI tools in diverse professional contexts, prompt engineering has become “a critical competency” for staying competitive in an AI-driven job market, the provider said.
Education reimagined
Nikolaz Foucaud, managing director EMEA at Coursera, said: “The announcement of [prime minister Keir] Starmer’s AI action plan to ‘mainline AI into the veins’ of the UK has put serious weight behind Britain’s AI ambitions. But turning this vision into reality hinges on a fundamental reimagining of our educational landscape and how we prepare our workforce for an AI-driven future.”
He said that in addition to the gender skills divide and knowledge gaps there are “systemic issues” that come from lack of policy in higher education. He pointed to recent Coursera research that found that 48 percent of educators said their university has a policy in place to manage it, while almost two-thirds (62 percent) said higher education is unprepared to handle AI usage.
“With the government’s plans to supercharge the economy through AI, it’s clear that proper skilling and strategy needs to be tackled first. If there isn’t a level playing field in terms of access to learning and development across men and women, and also obstacles for students in higher education to develop job-ready skills for AI, then the UK will be on the backfoot when it comes to capitalising on emerging technologies.”
