As Saudi Arabia continues to pursue its Vision 2030 goals, advanced technologies and skilled talent play a crucial role in shaping its future economic landscape.

Per LinkedIn data, the Saudi workforce is increasingly embracing digital skills. The country leads the MENA region in several advanced digital skills, including development tools, materials sciences, and nanotechnology. These skills are pivotal in developing new technologies expected to significantly impact the labor market in the coming years.

On an aggregate level, Saudi Arabia ranks second in digital skills across the MENA region, trailing only the UAE. The kingdom excels in applied digital skills such as animation and computer graphics, ranking in the upper percentile within the MENA region and surpassing the global average in animation. Saudi Arabia also outpaces the global average in cybersecurity trends, with 3.1% compared to the global average of 2.5%.

Additionally, 79% of employees believe that AI will significantly change how they work in the next year.

“The latest data on labor market trends provides further insights into how Saudi Arabia is transforming into one of the most attractive places to work in the region as it marches towards Vision 2030. The insights are indeed a nod to the kingdom’s efforts to establish itself as an AI and data leader and signal a growing tech industry that is curating a savvy and adaptive workforce,” Ali Matar, EMEA Growth Markets Leader and Head of LinkedIn MENA, said.

KSA is already on an upward trajectory in its AI talent pool, having doubled this pool between 2016 and 2023. This trend also looks to be accelerating, with the ratio of AI talent hiring relative to overall hiring growing 24% year over year.

With regard to AI skills penetration, Saudi Arabia jumped five positions in the last year alone to the 30th (from 35th in 2023). Part of this has been attributed to the increased migration of AI professionals into the country. As per LinkedIn data, the country has a positive net flow of AI talent, ranking 15th globally in AI talent attraction relative to population size, up from 24th last year.

New data supports the upward trend by showing how AI skills are being adopted nationwide. LinkedIn’s data highlights that the fastest-growing AI skills in Saudi Arabia are ‘reinforcement learning,’ ‘pattern recognition,’ ‘predictive modeling,’ ‘supervised learning,’ and ‘PyTorch,’ all supporting the development of Generative AI.