Formal prompt engineering certification?
Lol. Lmao even
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2026
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Those must exist by now
From paper mills? Probably. Accredited? Unlikely.
Yeah none that I would respect, but I bet you could buy a qualification
Cisco has a prompt engineering course that counts for CE credits. I know because it was one of two free courses available that I used to recert recently. Welcome to hell.
as much as i loathe llms, i feel like that kind of education is necessary nowadays. it should teach people how useless llms are.
Just ask chatgpt to make you one
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This might be the dissenting opinion but they do. My friend has a cert from CMU for Prompt Engineering.
You can work much faster with AIs than is shown on wall clock time.
Just make sure that you’re working with 9 LLMs at once and you can get that 9 years experience in just one year.
just have your ai manage ais and iy’s ais all the way down
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Guess who wrote that job description
LLM?
tbh, I'm not sure LLMs are that stupid.
Calling them 'prompt engineers' has to be a real kick in the nuts to actual engineers.
Software engineer is still insulting to a lot of mechanical engineers
All engineers know that their specific field of work is the most important, most difficult and most complex type of engineering there is.
Most of them are wrong of course, because the aforementioned field is PLC design and programming. Which is coincidentally, what I do.
I can see the xkcd comic for this
Anyone that's completed an actual engineering degree/diploma knows that there is a significant difference between completing an engineering course and being an engineer. Unfortunately, there's lots of people that haven't done either and still use the name.
PLC? You mean the fisherprice toys of electrical engineering?
I create my own PLC from scratch, and it's the hardest engineering field.
really? I don't know anyone that feels that way. mechanical, mechatronics, and software are my closest friend groups.
maybe it's just that the additional professional qualification of engineer in my province adds a clear distinction between engineering graduate and professional engineer
Idk I guess I didn't finish my degree but it felt very engineering focused, I'm not going to guess your knowledge but software engineers build systems that can basically do anything.
The word "relevant" suggests that the only people who can possibly meet those qualifications are the authors of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Is_All_You_Need, which was published just about 9 years ago
It says "AI/LLM". so I guess they count non-llm as well. So they could probably count everything that uses a MLP, which have been around for some time.
Well, I wrote my first if in 1998...
EDIT: Actually, I think it was 1996
8 or 9 years is about right for when modern LLMs started. Do people really think LLMs just sprang into existence a few years ago with giant corporations pushing them?
The tech is decades old depending on how you look at it, and even under a rather strict definition it's pushing at least a decade.
To be fair to qualify for all of that unless your a researcher on transformer models or something I really doubt your going to find anyone that fits all those points for that length of time.
Do we really think those on the cutting edge of AI and LLMs a decade ago are applying for prompt engineer roles...with their mandatory prompt engineer cert.
That one "AI dungeon" videogame from like 2019 was using gpt2 and it was still better than current "exponentially improving" chatgpt at most things. Was just a bit more porn oriented that's all.
You had 3 prompts to nut before it just started giving Wikipedia articles.
It knows what I like
I remember fucking with an image generator in 2021
Yeah, that kinda crap has been around for forever, I know I ran into these same types of HR written BS requirements back in the 2000 when I was searching for jobs and .NET and Java was the latest hotness, been out for just a few years and was running into job postings requesting 5 - 10 years of experience.
As a mobile dev, I remember seeing jobs early on that would have years of experience required that predated android/ios.
Good thing I've used ELIZA my whole life.
It says overall experience. Just say you worked two simultaneous AI jobs for the last five years and you're good!
Machine learning/LLM actually was around 10 years ago, it just didn't have the farcical "AI" moniker.
Yeah.
The groundbreaking "Attention Is All You Need" paper, in which transformer architecture was proposed, was published 9 years ago. It was obviously part of a much longer running conversation around how to use linear algebra to find machine learning applications. If you're looking for someone who understands the underlying math and processes at a lower level, this isn't an unreasonable ask.
It is, however, an unreasonable ask of someone for a "prompt engineer" job though.
Ironically, I have literally implemented backpropagation from scratch like three separate times at this point (once before the famous CUDA impl) but I'd probably fail this interview for not knowing enough of the current agentic meta.
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Well, actually, we've had the tech since the 80s
How many people working on that >9 years ago are applying for positions like this, though?
4,852
Just kidding, idfk
I've got like 30 years experience with AI if you include street fighter 2 turbo edition single player mode
I was a PM and wrote specs, that's prompt engineering.
We could go pretty far back depending on how you define it. We had less useful items that still could qualify in the same category as a modern LLM 7-8 years ago which gets us close... You could potentially stretch the definition to something like Megahal which is pushing pretty close to 30 years old.
Paper on artificial neural networks from 1943: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Logical_Calculus_of_the_Ideas_Immanent_in_Nervous_Activity
There were technically ais back then. They just didn't do much and just spout nonsense sentences
That's more experience than Big Balls had to go through everyone's shit.
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