Prompt Engineer: Skills, Learning Roadmap, and Salary

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We all know that Generative AI is on the tip of everybody’s tongue. Companies are looking into new ways to integrate it into the business. Some companies are looking into building their own tools. Machine learning engineers are looking into ways to transition as prompt engineers. Everybody wants a piece of the cake.

The generative AI market will continue to grow and become more popular. One of the major aspects a lot of people are looking at is how they get into the $45 billion market.

The foundation of mastering generative AI is all about prompt engineering. And as the market grows, the market of prompt engineers will also grow.

Prompt engineering is the best practice for designing inputs for generative AI tools that aim to produce optimal outputs. Companies want these optimal outputs so need the best in the game to do it!

Prompt engineers are in high demand and are making a great career out of it: AI Prompt Engineers are Making $300k/y

What Skills Does a Prompt Engineer Need?

The main hard skills a prompt engineer needs is technical proficiency in:

• Artificial Intelligence
• Machine Learning Models
• Natural Language Processing
• GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer)

Along with these hard skills, they will also need soft skills in linguistic acuity:

• Language
• Grammar
• Syntax
• Semantics

How Can I Become A Prompt Engineer?

As this is a general blog post, some of you may already be in the tech space as a machine learning engineer whereas some of you may be just starting out. Therefore, I will create a roadmap to help you become a prompt engineer from start to finish.

Machine Learning

Link: Machine Learning Specialization

Firstly, you will need a good understanding of machine learning. Stanford offers this course and DeepLearning.AI is specific for people who want to break into AI by mastering the fundamental concepts of machine learning whilst also being able to develop practical machine learning skills through a 3-course program.

Natural Language Processing

Link: Natural Language Processing (NLP) Specialization

Once you have a good foundational understanding of machine learning models, you now want to understand the beauty of language and how it is processed in computers. Taking on what you have learned from the machine learning specialization, you will learn how to master cutting-edge NLP techniques through four hands-on courses.

Generative AI and LLMs

Link: Generative AI with Large Language Models

Now it is time to combine the two. Take your knowledge of machine learning models and natural language processing and fuse it together to understand large language models. You will gain foundational knowledge, practical skills, and a functional understanding of how generative AI works whilst also creating value with cutting-edge technology with guidance from AWS experts.

Generative AI and Transformers

Link: Generative AI Language Modeling with Transformers

Imperative to your career to becoming a prompt engineer is learning about transformers. Transformers help machines to understand, interpret, and generate human language. In this course, you will be able to explain the concept of attention mechanisms in transformers and also be able to describe language modelling with the decoder-based GPT and encoder-based BERT. You will then move on to implementing positional encoding, masking, attention mechanism, document classification, and creating LLMs like GPT and BERT.

Prompt Engineering

Link: ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers

And when you have all this knowledge under your belt, you want to learn prompt engineering. The last aim of your career transition is to understand and build intuition around best practices for prompt engineering. There are a lot of resources out there to help you perfect it. In this case, this is where your soft skills will come into play and your ability to understand language and also understand tools such as ChatGPT and how they interpret language.

Prompt Engineer Salary

Depending on the company, location, and years of experience, your salary for any job will vary.

If we’re looking at Prompt Engineers in the UK, London, entry-level prompt engineers start between £30,000 – £40,000. As you start to gain a few more years of experience, you can expect to earn £40,000 – £50,000. At senior levels, prompt engineering salaries range from £50,000 – £70,000.

With that being said, in the States, some Prompt engineers are making $350,000 a year at some of the leading companies.

If you want to make bank and are eager to pursue a career in prompt engineering. Have a look into more niche skills within prompt engineering such as multimodal prompt engineering, prompt security, and prompt testing automation.

Wrapping it Up

If you’re looking into prompt engineering, now is the time to execute the transition. The generative AI market will only continue to grow and need people to meet those high demands.

Nisha Arya is a data scientist, freelance technical writer, and an editor and community manager for KDnuggets. She is particularly interested in providing data science career advice or tutorials and theory-based knowledge around data science. Nisha covers a wide range of topics and wishes to explore the different ways artificial intelligence can benefit the longevity of human life. A keen learner, Nisha seeks to broaden her tech knowledge and writing skills, while helping guide others.