AINow!

Every Community College student in America should be AI-job ready

While the impact of AI on jobs is still a little hidden (adoption is still relatively low) it will be huge ; one consulting firm assesses that about 25% of the time spent on all jobs across Colorado could be saved today by widespread adoption of current AI models. More than half of all the skills that currently comprise the top 100 knowledge work jobs are either outmoded or need to be dramatically improved due to AI — already!

Meanwhile, AI’s capabilities are accelerating. It’s Moore’s law on crack; the computational capability of AI is doubling every six months. OpenAI is pretty clear about the path — and pace — ahead:

OpenAI imagines the AI future unfolding in five steps. We’re almost at the second step, the startup told staff members. The AI tiers range from the kind of chatbots available today (Level 1) to AI that can do the work of entire organizations (Level 5). The company has long said it hopes to develop artificial general intelligence, or AGI — essentially, computers that can outperform humans.

AI with its current capabilities is already blurring everything — in particular the line between education and careers:

As AI makes skills more accessible, employers will place a higher premium on knowing what to do with skills… Do candidates have enough experience to know what to do with their skills — how to apply them in a specific job function and industry? For most employers, the only way to assess this is demonstrated experience”… This dilemma all points in one direction: the need to radically redesign the interface between education and work to ensure that a much wider cross-section of young people can access early career experience.

The impact is particularly immediate for jobs that are repetitive (call centers, retail) but also for entry-level knowledge work;

The rise of AI may spell the end of entry-level work as we know it, along with the related opportunities for candid feedback and mentorship

I’ve written before about ai.edu, and about the critical role the community college system has as AI accelerates the move away from traditional credentials to lifelong skills-based learning. The community college systems have all the scale, and it’s good to see some systems move to support lifelong learners :

“Massachusetts’ nascent free community college program for nontraditional students has nearly doubled enrollment among those eligible.” MassReconnect, launched last August, “covers the cost of community college for state residents 25 and older who don’t have a degree. In the 2023-24 academic year, Massachusetts’s 15 community colleges enrolled 8,411 students in this age group, up 45% from the year before.

And I love Singapore’s SkillsFutures Credit program, providing S$4,000 to all workers over 40 to upskill.

In the trickle-down world of institutional tech innovation, community colleges get new stuff last. Employers, starting with the largest (JPMC now trains every new employee on AI) and aided by the big consulting firms, are first adopters. State and local governments and post secondary institutions struggle to prioritize AI . Community colleges are almost always the last to benefit…

We’re making change too complicated. How can we quickly provide pathways so that every community college student in America is AI job-ready?

I sat down w/ ChatGPT and over multiple iterations generated a six course, 20 credit sequence which would qualify anyone who completes it for an entry AI job, paying between $40,000 and $85,000 per year. There are thousands of these jobs open now, and that number will triple quickly. The courses can largely be taught by folks from industry and/or with Masters-degree level training. Two of the six can be fully remote. Even better? Most of these courses are already offered in community colleges. They’re just not sequenced into employer-supported (‘Complete this and you’ll have an internship, apprenticeship, and first job with Employer x’ — here’s looking at you, NY CEO Jobs Council and Colorado Thrives) pathways.

And this is just a start. 20 credits is equivalent to a full minor. This is just one possible sequence — hiring managers can work with educators to rapidly iterate to determine which subset of this sequence — or others — would suffice to get folks into AI-informed (vs. AI-focused) roles. We could call that version the Governor’s AINow! Certificate…

Community colleges could offer these certificates and the full sequence to non-traditional learners who could be funded to upskill by their employers or through programs like Singapore’s. Berkeley’s 10 month course on digital transformation and AI for execs costs $26,000 …

Big AI tech can fund the roll-out — Microsoft is already committed to train 250,000 Swedes on AI… Regional and national foundations like Gates and Axim can be catalytic.

And —- here it is! Take a look and let me know what you think. Here was the initial prompt:

Please develop a sequence of courses on artificial intelligence for community college students who do not have a strong STEM background which will qualify them to get jobs working with AI systems.

The speed with which I was able to iteratively develop this possible pathway (including specifying which Colorado employers would hire how many folks who had completed this sequence) shows how subject matter experts can leverage AI now to save considerable R&D time and resources.

If you’re a Governor, give a call if you want to be the first in the nation to guarantee that every one of your community college students has a pathway possible to an AI Job Now! This would be a great deliverable for the National Governor’s Association, as its new Chair, Colorado’s Governor Polis announced a new ‘Let’s Get Ready! campaign this week, :

A year from today, based on the learnings from this initiative, we will release a roadmap to support Governors and states to drive innovation, bolster our capacity to measure what works and what doesn’t, and most importantly, prepare our students for successful futures and our economy for greater success.