Tuesday 28 August 2018 4:53 pm | Updated: Friday 24 May 2019 7:45 pm

Revealed: The skills that will get you jobs with the highest salaries

Automation isn’t just putting lower-earning jobs at risk; it’s a threat to higher-earning roles too.

While AI is putting the likes of customer service agents’ roles are under threat , the technology could replace up to half of banking jobs too, according to Barclays’ former boss Antony Jenkins.

Meanwhile, the Bank of England expects automation to lead to a “hollowing out” of the job market, saying people will need to learn new skills to find work.

So if the robots are taking your job, what should you train to become?

Luckily, UK charity Nesta has done the hard work of deciding what skills to learn for you.

Its analysis of 41m job adverts has helped it rank and classify skills for UK jobs based on the salaries they command and the potential for growth in their respective industries.

Two of the top skills groups – data engineering and web development – show IT skills are very much in demand, while roles in the ailing shipping industry and (alas) journalism are ripe for automation.

Employers are most in need of digital skills that underpin roles that are creative and varied, focused on problem-solving over routine tasks, Nesta found.

Principal policy researcher at Nesta, Eliza Easton, said climate change, globalisation and even Brexit are among the factors affecting the skills the UK needs.

She added:

“We have created the UK’s first publicly available data-driven skills taxonomy because, more than ever, we need to create an informed labour market. Informed in the sense that education providers, workers, students, employers and policy makers understand how skills are changing and are empowered to react to these changes.

“New technologies may put jobs at risk but one of the great benefits of the technological revolution is that we now have the opportunity to create a labour market fuelled by data and evidence. We now need to act on this evidence to protect the most vulnerable to these shifts in the labour market – ensuring they have access to lifelong learning and retraining schemes.”

The top five skills groups with the highest salaries and highest growth are: