iCIMS Finds Self Taught AI Skills Rising Among US Job Seekers

September 10, 2026
Nearly half of surveyed US job seekers worked on their AI skills during the past six months, while employer training remained largely unchanged.
iCIMS Finds Self Taught AI Skills Rising Among US Job Seekers

iCIMS said in a press release that the share of US job seekers teaching themselves AI skills rose from 22% to 30% over the past year, while employer provided training held flat at about one in six workers. The September 2026 Workforce Report combines a survey of 1,000 US job seekers with platform data covering more than 3.1 million users and 691 million candidate profiles.

The report puts the share of respondents who worked on their AI skills in the previous six months at 47%, up from 41% a year earlier. That figure describes people actively looking for work who answered a recruiting platform's survey, not the workforce as a whole, and self reported skill building is the kind of answer a job seeker has reason to give. The self teaching against employer training comparison is the more useful one, because both halves come from the same respondents.

Among respondents, 61% reported proficiency mainly with general purpose tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini, compared with 18% for prompt engineering and 17% for machine learning or model development.

US job openings rose 1% in August from July and were 13% above the August 2025 level. Hiring declined for a second consecutive month, while the average time to fill a role reached 40 days and applicants per opening fell to 30. AI related roles accounted for 4% of US hiring demand, compared with 2.7% in the UK and 1.2% in France.

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