Evaluating the Change in Workforce Education Needs for Software Engineers post-LLMs

The widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed the software engineering landscape in ways that require reevaluating workforce education needs. However, we lack evidence of how software engineers themselves perceive this shift. We report results from a study exploring how LLMs are transforming software engineering, how engineers use LLMs throughout the software development life cycle, and how they recommend students learn to code with LLMs. We highlight the 'fundamental skills' software engineers believe students need to master, even though LLMs might be good at doing them. We conducted interviews with software engineers from the United States and Nigeria between August 2024 and January 2025 to create a current and inclusive report across diverse socioeconomic contexts. We performed manual thematic analysis, and used Latent Dirichlet Allocation(LDA) and BERTopic models to capture additional insights. Our hypothesis was that 2 years post-LLMs, there would be a significant change in the skill requirements for software engineers, which in turn will influence what students need to learn. We found that most of the core skills for software engineering are still relevant. However, they are now augmented by AI for a faster and more seamless software development process.