Trying to pick one skill to bet your next year on? Everyone’s shouting different answers, and half of them are already dead weight in the AI era. I found a ranking video from Dan Martell, the founder who runs an AI venture studio and hires people every single day, and his tier list flips a lot of “safe” advice on its head.
What I love is his method. The creator scores every skill on three simple questions before ranking it. That’s the framework worth stealing, even if you disagree with where things land.
The three criteria he uses:
- Barrier of entry: Can you learn it fast, or does it take years?
- Defensibility: How likely is AI to show up and replace you?
- Profitability: Will people actually pay top dollar for it?
Here’s the part that surprised me. He refused to hand out a single S tier. His reasoning: nothing today is easy to learn, safe from AI, AND wildly profitable all at once. If it were, everyone would already do it.
Winners vs losers, the short version 📈
- Public speaking (A tier): Hard to learn, impossible for a robot to fake on stage, and the highest-paid career on earth. He knows people paid a million for one speech.
- Sales (A tier): The “meta skill” he says applies to everything. AI is creeping into closing, but great closers still write their own check.
- Video editing (high, controversial): The tools will do the grunt work, yet he ranks the taste and storytelling near sales because media and distribution run the future.
- Cyber security, software development, AEO, AI automation (B tier): Defensible or money-rich, but each carries a real “hard to learn” tax.
What’s falling off a cliff 📉
- SEO (F tier): He calls it the new newspaper ad. Nobody clicks blue links when the AI just answers.
- Day trading (F tier): Most people never make money, same bucket as pro sports.
- Graphic design, copywriting, email marketing, data analysis (D tier): Still useful, but the budgets are collapsing because “good enough” AI output is free.
- Prompt engineering (C tier): Hot a year ago, basically commoditized now.
One twist I didn’t expect: the original poster puts trades like electrical work above media buying. His logic is blunt. You can make 300 grand wiring a data center in Texas, and nobody pays that for a media buyer anymore. A year and a half ago, he says, it was the opposite.
His recommendation, if you want mine on top of his: don’t chase all of these. Pick the intersection that fits you. If you want raw earning power and speed, sales and public speaking win. If you want defensibility against AI, lean toward cyber security or trades. If you want to ride the new wave, AEO is his “new social media.”
How to actually start (his exact advice)
- Take the list and notice which one makes you curious.
- Ask the AI to teach it to you, step by step.
- Spend more real time inside the AI tools, not just reading about them.
- Pick one and go deep instead of dabbling in ten.
His closing line stuck with me: he’d rather disrupt himself before AI disrupts him. Simple, and it reframes the whole list from scary to useful.
Want the full tier-by-tier reasoning and the calls I skipped? Watch the whole breakdown, then decide which one skill you’re going all in on this year.