JOBSHIFT / THE SCIENCE / SOURCE REVIEW
AI-related roles lead LinkedIn's US growth ranking
Jobshift's findings summary, reviewed October 21, 2026. This is an independently written summary, not a LinkedIn-issued report or PDF.
Verified finding: Four of the top five roles in LinkedIn's US Jobs on the Rise 2026 ranking are AI-related. This is evidence of growth in AI-related work, not a measure of the number of net new jobs created by AI.
Source and access
Publisher: LinkedIn News. Publication date: January 7, 2026. Geography: United States.
LinkedIn Jobs on the Rise 2026: The 25 fastest-growing roles in the U.S.
The public article and methodology were successfully downloaded and read as HTML. No separate LinkedIn-issued downloadable PDF was identified in the retrieved article. Use the original link for the full report; this self-contained summary can also be printed or saved as PDF using a browser.
The top five
| Rank | Role | AI connection |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | AI engineers | Develop and implement AI models; also called machine learning engineers. |
| 2 | AI consultants and strategists | Plan and implement AI technologies in organizations. |
| 3 | New home sales specialists | Not AI-related in this comparison. |
| 4 | Data annotators | Label and review datasets used to train AI and machine learning models, often on a project basis. |
| 5 | AI/ML researchers | Design and test models and algorithms. |
Methodology and reference period
LinkedIn Economic Graph researchers examined millions of jobs started by members from January 1, 2023 through July 31, 2025 and calculated growth by job title. To qualify, a title needed positive growth across the membership base, sufficient job postings in the past year and a meaningful size by 2025. Identical titles at different seniority levels were grouped.
Internships, volunteer positions, interim and student roles were excluded, as were roles whose hiring was dominated by a small handful of companies. The ranking describes observed LinkedIn member activity. It is not a representative national employment census, a ranking by absolute job creation, or a forecast. The 2026 publication date must not be confused with a full-year 2026 measurement period.
Implications for the simulator
- Direction: AI-related roles are growing, including implementation, strategy, data preparation and research. This supports showing opportunities alongside displacement.
- Scope: AI engineering, machine learning research and data annotation existed before ChatGPT. Growth in these broad titles cannot establish how many people work in genuinely new jobs arising since early 2023. Classify by substantive new duties rather than assuming an AI title means a newly created occupation.
- Scale: Four of five means four ranked titles, not 80% of workers, vacancies or net new employment. The article does not publish the title-level headcounts or numerical growth rates needed to calibrate Jobshift's category.
- Net versus gross: Jobs started may include workers switching occupations. Transitions are not automatically an increase in total employment, and project-based work should not be treated as permanent full-time headcount without evidence.
- Time and geography: A historical US ranking cannot establish a twenty-year trajectory, permanent human comparative advantage, or employment totals in other countries.
Model treatment
This source is included as observed directional evidence. It does not validate the illustrative US baseline of 30,000 genuinely new LLM-era workers or annual net growth scenarios of 3%, 7% and 12%. Those assumptions remain low confidence and unchanged. Do not extrapolate a short-period ranking into millions of future jobs or add all existing AI engineers to the narrower post-2023 category.
Prepared for Jobshift. Findings are attributed to the linked primary source; model interpretations and cautions are Jobshift's.