Did you know that prompt engineers earn up to $370,000 a year?

Imagine earning a six-figure salary by teaching computers how to understand human language — welcome to the world of prompt engineering!

This rapidly evolving field is about optimizing human-machine interactions.

Why are companies hiring prompt engineers, and how can you become one?

Let’s dive in.

What is Prompt Engineering?

Prompts are the instructions you give AI tools like ChatGPT.

As a prompt engineer, your job is to write clear and detailed instructions, so that ChatGPT knows exactly what to do when you ask a question.

For example, to tell ChatGPT to choose a movie to watch, a basic prompt is, "Find a movie."

A better prompt is, "Find a list of the top 5 family-friendly movies from 2021 with high ratings." Your role as a prompt engineer is to write better prompts.

This way, ChatGPT knows exactly what to look for and how to respond.

Whether it's optimizing ChatGPT for customer service or tweaking DALLE-2 for artistic creation, prompt engineering is crucial.

Becoming a prompt engineer puts you at the forefront of technology, giving you the power to influence how AI interacts with people daily:

• Impactful Work: Influence how millions interact with technology.

• Hybrid Role: Blend creativity with technical skills in a high-impact field.

• Frontier: Work at the cutting edge of AI development.

Job Market for Prompt Engineering

Salaries range from $95k to over $370k depending on expertise and location.

For example, the company Anthropic offers $250,000 to $335,000.

The demand for skilled prompt engineers is growing.

We’ve seen a 36x increase in job posts referring to "generative AI" and a 51% increase in postings that include "GPT" from 2021 to 2022.

Grand View Research estimates 32.3% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the North American market for prompt engineering.

AI adoption continues to pick up pace across many industries, from healthcare to finance, from tech to real estate, from education to law.

A growing market means more opportunities for you to earn 6 figures!

Real-World Examples

There are many real use cases for ChatGPT and prompt engineering:

For example, companies are increasingly using ChatGPT to manage online customer service.

Traditionally, customer service is an expensive cost center for most companies. Streamlining customer service with AI reduces costs for companies and improves the experience for customers.

As a prompt engineer, you would develop instructions to help ChatGPT understand customer issues and respond effectively, thereby reducing wait times and increasing customer satisfaction.

Another high-growth use case is leveraging ChatGPT to create content for:

• Blogs

• E-books

• Social media

• Product descriptions

ChatGPT can help with brainstorming, editing, and finding relevant articles. You can use visual AI tools, such as Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, which also require prompts, to generate images related to the content.

I searched LinkedIn for job posts containing the term “prompt engineering” on April 30, 2024 and found over 100+ results in the US alone:

I recommend searching for opportunities on Glassdoor, Indeed, and LinkedIn.

Read all the job descriptions.

You’ll get a better idea of the many diverse real-world use cases for ChatGPT and prompt engineering.

How to Become a Prompt Engineer

If you’re seriously interested in this 6-figure opportunity, keep reading.

Sometimes, not always, a bachelors degree in a technical field is required.

But the unique mix of skills involved in prompt engineering makes a background in liberal arts or linguistics is valuable.

Here are real examples of Qualifications required in 2 different high-paying prompt engineer job posts.

Notice a technical degree is not required!

If you don’t need a technical degree, how do you become a prompt engineer?

1. Learn the Basics: Understand what ChatGPT, Bard, and DALL-E are. Free resources are plentiful — start with Coursera or Khan Academy. Communities like Reddit and Quora often have helpful tips and advice. X user @theresanaiforit compiled an awesome list of free courses.

2. Hands On Experimentation: Create prompts for ChatGPT and see how different prompts affect outputs. If you’re not sure what prompts to write: go to Upwork, find a ChatGPT project, and try to accomplish it. You don’t need to apply to the project, just simulate doing it as if you were assigned the project.

3. Build Portfolio & Resume: Compile your ChatGPT and prompt engineering efforts. Build a new resume with an AI tool, Careerflow.

4. Apply: Look for openings via LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and Indeed, as well as freelancing platforms like Upwork and Fiverr.

As you build your prompt engineering portfolio and resume, you’ll want to highlight these areas:

• Technical Proficiency: Knowledge of multiple AI platforms, such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney, Bard, Llama, and Stable Diffusion.

• Linguistic Ability: Strong command over language to design clear, effective prompts.

• Analytical Thinking: Ability to analyze and articulate how different prompts affect output.

Is Prompt Engineering A Long-Term Option?

To offer a balanced view, I should mention some AI experts argue prompt engineering as a career isn’t sustainable.

However, I disagree.

I believe prompt engineering is here to stay as a meaningful career.

I believe prompt engineering will evolve organically as AI capabilities mature, and the role title may change, but at the core:

• Prompt engineering will expand to accommodate multimodal prompts, incorporating different types of inputs: text, images, audio, and video.

• As AI can handle more complex multi-step tasks, the ability to engineer effective prompts will drastically impact output quality.

• In highly sensitive regulated environments, such as healthcare, there will often be humans-in-the-loop reviewing AI prompts and outputs to ensure quality and accuracy, thereby minimizing risk and errors.

• Prompt engineers will need to perform continuous testing, not only to monitor and enhance accuracy, but also to prevent bias or harm.

• As enterprise AI adoption ramps up, prompt engineers will be tasked with guaranteeing safety, privacy, IP protection, and compliance.

• In order to leverage AI to auto-improve prompts, you still need training data to use for optimization. Prompt engineers will be responsible for curating training data, giving feedback back on the direction of tasks, and monitoring and validating optimizers to achieve desired results.

Conclusion

Although relatively new, prompt engineering is a creative and analytical role, shaping the dialogue between us and machines.

As various industries increasingly embrace AI, prompt engineering remains crucial to improve outputs, continuously ensure quality while minimizing risk, and satisfy complex enterprise requirements.

If you want to embark on this six-figure career at the frontier of technology, start exploring online courses and playing around with ChatGPT.