The AI Skills Gap: Why Entry-Level Jobs Are Disappearing with Ryan Lufkin

Well, why do I need to be Chaggy Petees the expert? Someone's got to check its work. It's great at doing research. It's great at being that assistant and accomplishing tasks that can be time consuming, but it's not infallible. We can't trust it to that level yet. Maybe someday, but we still need to be the experts. We can't offload that to the machines.

to college. You wear an instructor shirt, not as many people know. I always like to explain that connection. I did recognize that in our notes and that name, I was twitching a little bit. I'm not sure. Well, it's funny. You can tell how good their educators were at designing courses in Canvas. If they were like, oh, I love Canvas or oh, I hate Canvas. You're like, the teacher probably wasn't using it right. Yeah. Yes.

That's your point of view, I guess. It's probably how literate they were with technology. And a lot of times it's how much support they had in what does a good online course or a good hybrid course look like. I think too often, especially if they learned really rapidly at the beginning of COVID, our solution grew rapidly because people had to move online. And over the course of about two days, you could tell the educators that we're given a lot of support and a lot of resources and really trained what good looked like. And then the ones that were kind of thrown into it without that support, our goal really has improved over the last five years, that level of online learning and course design. There's some meta talk there, Ryan, the meta of the fact that the teachers weren't prepared to use the software appropriately.

maybe are missing school, things like that. We've got to get everybody on the same page. And Google announced a really great program, trying to provide free AI education to 6 million educators across the United States. We are getting ready to release some courses around AI literacy and even the detractors, those educators that are scared of AI or have doubled down and said, we're not using AI. Honestly, take an AI literacy course, at least understand how these tools work. then you understand what they're capable of. And then you can actually make the more informed decision about how deeply do you want to use these tools and put you in a better position to help your students understand how to use them ethically, how to use them effectively, things like that.

And it would say, there are two R's in strawberry. Of course, there's three R's in strawberry. And they could not figure out, because essentially large language models are a black box. You don't know what's going on inside there. They could not figure out why it hung up on that. And it wasn't until the next model, 3.3 came out, they fixed that. That's the reason that we all need to be experts. ChatGBT has a high propensity for what we would call hallucination. More often, it's confidently incorrect. What it's trying to do is give you what you've asked it for. Some cases, it makes things up. It'll make up links, sources. It'll make up whole sets of information because it's just trying to give you what you want.

And if it doesn't find it or doesn't spend the time to find it, it just kind of makes it up. We don't know exactly why. But when we are the experts, we can double check that work and say, oh, you know what? That's not right. Let's go back and fix it. Let's not perpetuate that strawberry conundrum. What's really scary is that next generation that takes that approach that you're talking about and says, well, why do I need to be Chagipete's the expert? Someone's got to check its work. It's great at doing research. It's great at being that assistant and accomplishing tasks that can be time consuming. But it's not infallible. We can't trust it to that level yet. Maybe someday, but we still need to be the experts.

We can't offload that to the machines. Even things as simple as math. is direct in black and white. When I think of what you just described, and I agree with it, but I tell people there still will be jobs because of what you said and discernment and humanity that have to be overlaid on the top of these things. There's not only just that, along with certain factual applications in the real world, But when doing 10 plus 10 or A squared plus B squared plus C equals C squared, even at advanced levels, that's fairly black and white. Are you saying that math is done wrong by JAT-GBT? I think it's the reasoning behind it. One of the things that's really important about math isn't just getting the answer.

It's actually having the logic and reasoning behind how do we get from here to that. There's a whole Bloom's taxonomy. If you're in education, you understand what Bloom's taxonomy is. It's this skill tree. There's a new Bloom's taxonomy that actually says, okay, these are the skills that are going to be easily replaced by AI. And these are the skills that aren't. These are the human skills. And they're problem solving. They're creative thinking. They're communication. They're consensus building. They're things like that. And that's why, to your point, we will always have jobs. We will always have the ability because we need to be able to connect with other humans while we let AI do the more mundane tasks. And in some cases, yeah, it might get math wrong.

It might get very convoluted. An accountant, the idea of an accountant giving up control of their books or understanding the formulas and letting them run without being able to double check that is scary. And not every job needs advanced math. If we're in marketing, I don't use advanced math on a daily basis, but there are occasions when it's important to have that reasoning, that logic. If math is still fairly critical learning and important to keep in the curriculum, What are the things that should be changing then? I don't want to pretend that what we were doing 30 years ago, but I do hear some of the subjects and some of the stuff. And I'm like, that's the same thing. Someone with a higher pay grade smarter than me knows if that's what they need to be learning.

We don't do that anymore. There's been a lot of news articles on that lately. Who's pushing that and why? How does that benefit us? There's a really great story. I was at California System meeting and we had a panel of educators. It was a professor of product design. And he said, okay, we used to spend the first 60% of a course designing a product, doing specs, doing market analysis, doing all this stuff. The last 40% kind of analyzing the work, presenting to each other, things like that. Now, AI is. We can do all of that within the first 10% of the course. Come up with an idea. Have AI help us do a product design. Have it do the research around that for us. Now, he makes his students actually reach out and contact experts in the market.

Set up a meeting and present to them this idea. And get their feedback. And I always say, if I call my daughter, she won't answer the phone. She'll text me right back. She's a junior in college. She does not answer the phone. She doesn't pick up the phone. He's pushing those students to lean back into those more human skills, reaching out, making a connection, setting up a presentation, presenting your thing, collecting feedback, those things that AI can't easily do for us. That's really the focus. It's kind of that evolution in teaching. We're not necessarily teaching entirely new things, but we're doing it in more innovative ways that lean into those human skills and not just assigning 20 page papers that kids are going to use AI to write.

That evolution, teaching online and with technology during COVID, we need to address this the same way. We need to provide educators the resources they need to involve how they're teaching with AI, with preparing those students because it's not going away. And I think those educators that I can opt out, we've had students say, I want to opt out. You're not going to be able to opt out of AI. There's a Waymo that just drove past people's houses. They don't get to say you don't get to drive past here. Nope. That automated car is driving down the street. You're going to be involved with AI at some level and understanding it, embracing it, understanding the ethical aspects of it are really important. Talking with Ryan Lufkin, the VP of Global Strategy and Instructure.

communication, like all those things that are incredibly important, those human skills that we're talking about, they embody all of those. A year or two ago, you saw a lot of businesses kind of pro that they were taking out a degree as a requirement for hiring. And what you saw is a lot of them slowly reintroduced that because it really is the best barometer of whether or not a person is prepared to enter the modern workforce. That said, because of this pace of change, we live in a world that we all need to be lifelong learners, every single one of us. That means go to school for 12 years, or 16 years, or 20 years, then we would go to a job, often the same job for 30 years, then we would retire with our pension, and that was our parents' generation.

That doesn't exist anymore. The average tenure at a job is about three years. They're saying, well, we're going to work until we die. There's no pensions anymore. It's incumbent on us to prepare ourselves to be upwardly mobile within the job market by constantly training new skills. And in most cases, employers aren't owning that. The college and university system still owns that upskilling and reskilling of adult learners. And they really have done an amazing job post-COVID, especially, of rolling out new credential programs because you can actually roll out a credential program, a certificate program without all of the regulatory requirements for an accreditation that a standard college program needs. In many cases, it's the same or similar content repackaged in more bite-sized chunks. So you can go and take a three or four course certificate.

But then that certificate, I can post to LinkedIn. I can post to an employer and she'll look. If you look at my LinkedIn, I've got certificate in data-driven marketing from eCornell. I did an AI regulation and compliance course from Oxford State Business School. I'm doing my master's right now with Arizona State University. Because to me, I'm going to do a lot of my master's right now with Arizona State To me, I enjoy learning. It's one of those things. But it's also that way that you qualify yourself for being openly mobile in a job. That's one of the things that we've shifted towards. And it's not necessarily breaking it down to the component skills. We haven't all agreed on like a skills taxonomy that makes sense to everyone.

And a lot of the old skills taxonomies are really outdated. They don't capture a lot of the more modern skills that we need. Not quite there yet, but getting those certificates to help demonstrate for employers that I'm a learner. I want to evolve and these skills. We're getting there pretty quickly. This episode is brought to you by HighLevel. Make sure to check out the link in the show notes to sign up for your 14-day free trial. If you run a business, you know leads rarely arrive when it's convenient. A call comes in while your team is helping another customer. If someone reaches out, but the follow-up gets delayed, an invoice sits unsent, or a promising lead gets stuck in the wrong stage of your pipeline.

So I had to essentially make A's on everything because to just to pass the class essentially because I was bored. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm partly ADD. I know I'm hired different, but it taught me absolutely nothing. Now, here's what I learned. You nailed it. The soft skills people coming to consensus. Absolutely. Probably was worth the money just for that. However, I might could have learned that and gotten further towards where I want to go doing something different if different had existed. What's cool though, yeah, to your point, there are more educational opportunities, more paths to find yourself into a well-paying job than there ever have been in the history of the world. And the biggest challenge is finding out what do you want to do and then finding through all the noise what's the best path to get together.

And it's not always a two or four year degree. But I was the same way. I'll be honest. I diagnosed ADHD, missed class a lot on academic probation at one point. What you learn is all of a sudden you're like, it clicks and you're like, oh, if I go to class, if the teacher knows my name, if I do the basic studying, I will graduate. And those are the things. It's those social skills. College is almost about as much as learning what you need to do to be successful. There's a lot of kind of noise around employees not being prepared for the job. They don't want to come to the office. They don't want to show up on time. They don't want to spend the time there.

What college does is train you that you need to be. You need to be here from this time to this time. You need to make connections with the people that your bosses, your educator, and your peers. And those are what make you successful. That model applies in the workspace in ways that we're really kind of just starting to really appreciate. As we do the debate between remote work and in-person work, how do we make sure we judge that? One of the challenges I faced, too, is I had a job working for an ad agency when I was a senior in college. And I was like, well, why do I need to – I've already accomplished my goal, which is getting hired. Why do I need to finish?

And that was at odds for me. But my first job was working for Coke's ad agency in the Western United States, writing 20-second customized – radio bumpers for Leadville, Colorado and Boise, Idaho and St. George, Utah, things like that. There were four interns and that's what we did. All of those can be done by AI by one person now. Entry-level job that really got my foot in the door and got me hired by the agency full-time and was the start of my career is now gone. What are schools doing to provide more experiential learning to better prepare students to make that leap? And then what are businesses doing to maintain those entry-level positions? That's one of the biggest challenges right now that people Yeah, great point.

the unique requirements of education. Accessibility, privacy, security, those are non-starters for education. We are governed by very strict laws around student data privacy and accessibility. And so how do we make sure that these tools support that? We support K-12, higher ed, and more increasingly, the government and corporate space as well. People graduate and say, I really like using Canvas. Why don't I have something like that here in my job? We've moved to support that as well. That lifelong learning approach is incredibly important, and we want to make sure we're there to support institutions as they deliver that. I try to be reflective outside of my own curiosity and skill set or whatever I'm interested into. And then sometimes I step back, call it empathy, call it just understanding other sides of it.

And it went out and it tried to access the website. Website wasn't working. So it gave itself a voice and it called the restaurant and made the reservation. And that freaked everyone out aggressively. Because... It accomplished the task that it was given, and it did so by going outside the bounds of what the person asking it to do the task thought it was possible. We all want Jeeves. We all want the virtual assistant that we've been promised forever, that you click a button and you can say, oh, make me a reservation. Go do that. Book me a flight to Cancun. Try to go to a hotel and a restaurant. Settle that up. And then let's go. We all want that level of ease. But with that comes risk.

And that's where we're in this kind of phase right now of how much do we trust these tools to be autonomous and how much do we really need to continue the oversight. But it's a lot. It can feel very, very overwhelming. And you almost have to shrink your bubble into the world that you control and that you have aspect and kind of ignore a lot of the other noise.

He reached out to me and we had a conversation. I sent him some courses that he could take and he upskilled quickly and then got a job pretty rapidly from that. But we're in this position where a lot of college universities aren't necessarily taking ownership of teaching AI literacy and employers aren't necessarily taking ownership. ownership. They want these graduates to come out with these skills to help them. We need both sides to take ownership of training students on AI literacy and how to use these tools effectively and ethically across the board. That other aspect is there's this adage that I've heard from a lot of employers that are like, well, what if we train our employees and they leave? The counterpoint is, what if you don't train them and they stay?

We're being forced to really adapt to the modern world in a way. If you want to keep a good employee, you're going to have flexible hours. You're going to have good technology support. There's these new requirements for students that are just very different than when we came out of college or entered the workforce. These tools have an empowerment component. How much they unlock. I came up in the ad agency business too, Ryan. I worked 20 years plus, 15 work for other agencies. There's no better silo world than the ad agency business. I imagine it's gotten better, but I'm 10 years removed from it. Ryan, you're going to get this. Much like I was out of fish, out of water in college, I was a creative strategic account guy at ad agency.

That is an incredible example. I'm gonna steal that for later because I love that example of that side of the organization. I remember having an idea because I was on the account management side, a creative idea. I'm like, what if we do this? And I was told, stop, shut up, not your department, go talk to the customer. I had been a commercial designer. I had the right to be creative and it was so funny that like that got shut down. Even the stages within the creative field, somebody would come up with a headline. The writers came up with headlines. The designers came up with maybe storyboards to pitch the idea. And now you can have the idea, you can actually work with AI to do the writing and improve the writing.

You can actually have AI create the storyboards for you to your point exactly. Now imagine educators, educators who are not necessarily really trained on how to be an educator. They're really subject matter experts in their field. I'm a history professor. I know history like the back of my hand. But suddenly I have the ability to use these tools to create short videos, to create imagery, to make my writing less dry, things like. that if we lean into that if we support that holy cow the potentials are just unlocked for employees to be so much more productive in ways that we you know but we've got to break down that frame of that box those boxes that we put people in love that analogy that was a good one that's a big opportunity ryan as we close out here i got a little rapid fire for you if you don't mind three things most overrated skill coding unfortunately most underrated skill good clear communication is incredible

Again, modeling what good looks like, show people what's possible, and encourage everybody else to kind of follow that freeing of their minds. AI creates these laboratories of opportunity. And if you enable that and you empower that, you're getting, it's kind of like in science and technology, how many more tests can they do to improve the model? That could change the world or at least change the organization. We're just at the point where we're building the trust and we're starting to use these tools in really creative ways. But they're brand new and we don't even know exactly what they're all capable of. If we suspend our fear a little bit and if we lean into using them and learning them, I think there's a lot of opportunity that they uncover.