Prompt engineers specialize in making the most of artificial intelligence (AI) platforms. These professionals understand the ins and outs of how AI platforms think, designing the most efficient prompts for achieving desired results.
Prompting roles appear to have a promising future, too. The global prompt engineering market size is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 33% from 2024 to 2030.
If this sounds like a career with your name on it, read on to discover everything you need to know about how to become a prompt engineer.
What is prompt engineering?
Prompt engineering is the science of adjusting AI prompts to get system algorithms and models to better understand our desired output. Prompt engineering roles lean on your creativity and problem-solving ability to ask language models better questions and help them learn more.
Ultimately, your job is to connect humans with AI. The questions you design help AI models sift through their sea of possible outputs to find the ones that give us exactly what we want.
What does a prompt engineer do?
It seems easy enough to log in to an online AI tool and ask the questions you want answered. Prompt engineers go deeper than that to extract the best results from the AI platforms we use daily. The key is understanding the inner workings of AI language models—how they think—to frame questions in ways that get the most out of generative AI platforms.
One of the ways prompt engineers can do this is by asking AI to position itself. For example, you could log in to ChatGPT right now and ask for a snippet of Python code. You may have some luck asking for your code directly, but people who understand prompt engineering might preface their request with something like, “Act as a Python developer teaching a junior developer how to write…”
Asking questions like this enables prompt engineers to use the deepest level of an AI model’s computing power. Engineers understand these nuances because they spend a lot of their time coming up with prompts to test and refine AI models before they go to market.
Daily responsibilities of a prompt engineer include:
- Weighing the moral side of prompts (i.e., cultural sensitivity, ethics, bias, and fairness)
- Submitting various prompts to AI platforms to fine-tune outputs
- Leveraging human intelligence to see what outputs are missing and adjusting prompts to fill in those gaps
- Collaborating with stakeholders across various departments to create AI products
- Advocating for the use of generative AI platforms within internal workflows
- Manage and monitor the performance of AI systems
Skills required to be a prompt engineer
Prompt engineers require a background of technical knowledge and experience. Let’s explore some of those skills.
Programming skills
Python is a programming language fundamental to AI technology. Being a prompt engineer sometimes requires not only knowing but mastering this coding medium.
As a prompt engineer, you’ll often review outputs from language models that leverage Python. Learning Python also gives you insight into natural language processing (NLP) since it’s also one of the most popular codes for these applications.
While Python is instrumental in powering AI technology, there are other programming languages that are helpful to know. A few of these languages are:
- Java: A robust, portable, and open-source platform, making it a great medium for teams to collaborate on larger AI projects.
- R: Great at handling large datasets and performing complex operations like data manipulation or analysis and creating predictive models.
- C++: The longevity of C++ means it offers a wide range of programming tools and functions, making it a great medium for solving complex AI problems.
AI basics
Like any profession, learning how to become a prompt engineer for AI starts with understanding the basics. Dig deep into AI’s core philosophy and start to understand as many of its subfields as possible.
AI concepts like large language models (LLM), machine learning (ML), deep learning, and NLP all intertwine to make the more complex platforms we use operate. While you won’t normally be responsible for creating these things as a prompt engineer, understanding them will undoubtedly be part of your job. Wrapping your head around the technology behind them is a great way to strengthen your career prospects.
Machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP)
Natural language processing (NLP) is an AI system’s ability to process words and sentences as a human can. This technology is essential to AI’s ability to produce human-like output in response to prompts. As such, understanding how NLP works goes a long way toward designing the most effective prompts possible.
From the NLP basics, you’ll start to branch out into more complex topics like text summarization, tokenization, and sentiment analysis.
Machine learning, a field of AI that involves creating systems and algorithms that can learn patterns and insights from data, is another important concept for prompt engineers. ML goes hand-in-hand with NLP when creating one of AI’s core systems, LLMs.
LLMs essentially become an AI platform’s brain. They are the structure for how generative AI thinks and sees the world. So, without an understanding of both NLP and ML, it can be challenging to engineer prompts that maximize AI’s effectiveness.
Prompting techniques and language models
Language models are a complex system of data and algorithms that make up an AI platform’s brain. These LLMs consist of “building blocks” known as pre-trained models. These pre-trained models learn by being fed large datasets, which they then draw upon and analyze when it’s time to create AI output.
Familiarizing yourself with these models and how they operate is similar to getting inside the brain of AI. Once inside, it becomes much easier to frame or phrase prompts that trigger artificial intelligence to respond with the most in-depth outputs possible and provide end users with thoughtful, accurate answers.
Steps to become a prompt engineer
There are a number of possible paths for how to become a prompt engineer. But regardless of which you choose, you’ll need to start with a solid foundation through some sort of formal prompt engineering study.
Earn credentials
Prospective prompt engineers typically begin their journey by earning credentials. This may mean pursuing traditional education and obtaining a degree at a four-year university. Some may opt to learn how to become a prompt engineer without a degree by enrolling in an online self-study course. These courses are a great option for those who may have some basic real-world knowledge already or have extenuating circumstances, like working odd hours, needing to stay at home with family, or requiring accessible learning accommodations.
Build engineering skills
Find opportunities to hone your skills outside your formal learning track. This experience could look different for everyone and might come in the form of internships, freelancing, volunteer opportunities, or possibly an apprenticeship.
Regardless of how you get your experience, be sure your body of work focuses on skills like programming, NLP, machine learning, and the basics of AI. You’ll also want to look for opportunities to develop non-technical skills like problem-solving, verbal communication, and collaboration.
Find prompt engineer jobs and build your portfolio
When working your first prompt engineer jobs (or even on coursework), keep a running collection of the prompts you create and problems you solve for various clients. Assemble them all on an IT portfolio site like GitHub or Behance, so you have one clear, consolidated link to submit to future employers as your career progresses.
Stay up to date with the AI landscape and technologies
Lastly, do whatever you can to stay knowledgeable about the latest in all things AI. There are countless newsletters, organizations, and social media channels you can tune into to stay ahead of the curve. Being able to discuss (and have a stance) on these topics will go a long way toward impressing interviewers as you navigate the prompt engineer application process.
Find a prompt engineer job or other tech career
Our hope is that this blog helps you decide whether a career as a prompt engineer is right for you. If it is, focus on the core skills of programming, understanding the basics of AI, learning ML and NLP, and going deeper with language models to get the most out of your career
Visit our Intuit Careers page to see if there are any tech-related openings available. Not only will you get an opportunity to work on solving challenging problems using AI every day, but you’ll also be part of a team that prides itself on being at the forefront of technology.