Artificial Intelligence is, undoubtedly, one of the most lucrative fields for young professionals. But whether you are a fresher just starting out on your journey or a mid-career professional, there are certain must-have skills that will ensure that you have a long run in the job market. Based on what companies are saying, here are the five skills that you must develop to succeed in your AI career.

• Ideation and innovation: Design thinking is an iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. Design teams use five phases — Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test – to tackle ill-defined/unknown problems because they can reframe these in human-centric ways and focus on what’s most important for users. Of all design processes, design thinking is almost certainly the best for “thinking outside the box”. With it, teams can do better UX research, prototyping and usability testing to uncover new ways to meet users’ needs.
• Critical and analytical thinking: Professionals must be able to identify and define problems and extract key information from data. One must then be able to develop workable solutions for the problems identified in order to test and verify the cause of the problem and develop solutions to resolve them.
• Active learning strategies: One must learn to unlearn the old ways and embrace the new ways – this is the only way to stay relevant in today's world. As the half-life of knowledge is decreasing rapidly, upskilling is no more the choice of just the ambitious, it is a mandate for the whole of the workforce. We have reached a stage where no one can afford to stagnate in their journey in the tech field.
• Leadership and social influence: It is pertinent to be people smart – you will have to work in teams, whether you like it or not. Understand that diversity brings out the best in any team, and for a diverse team to succeed every team member must have empathy.
• Technology design and programming: One must learn to develop their ideas into a robust step-by-step solution using adequate technology. Computation thinking helps in this area by to teaching how to develop ideas into flowcharts, algorithms and convert them into programming language.

• Written with inputs from Nibedita Saha