Yesterday I showed you the job posting I didn't apply for.

Today I want to explain why that keeps happening to smart, experienced developers.

It's not because VLMs are impossibly complex. They're not. It's not because you're behind. You have skills most people don't.

The problem is what I call the "Single Skill Trap."

Here's how it works:
Two years ago, if you knew CNNs and object detection, you were valuable.
Companies needed that skillset and not many people had it.

Then GPT-4V dropped. Gemini started understanding images. Claude got vision capabilities. Meta shipped multimodal LLaMA.

Suddenly, "computer vision" wasn't a specialty anymore. It became a component.

The engineers getting hired now aren't pure CV specialists OR pure LLM specialists. They're the ones who can connect both. Hiring managers figured this out fast.

Their job filters started looking for candidates with "stacked" credentials. Not just one skill, but proof that you can bridge the old world and the new. One certificate stopped being enough.

Here's why this isn't your fault:

Nobody told you. The industry shifted in about 12 months. Universities are still teaching curricula designed in 2019. Online courses are still pushing "learn OpenCV" without mentioning that OpenCV is now just one piece of a much bigger puzzle.

You were learning the right things. The target just moved.

But here's what I discovered after training over 50,000 developers: The gap between "CV specialist" and "full-stack AI engineer" is smaller than it looks. Much smaller.

The developers who made the jump didn't go back to school. They didn't spend two years getting a new degree. They found a structured path.

Tomorrow, I'll introduce you to a few of them. You'll see exactly how they went from "stuck" to "hired" faster than they expected.

Talk soon,
Your PyImageSearch Team