AI’s Impact on Early Talent: Building Today’s Education-to-Employment Systems for Tomorrow’s Workforce — from bhef.com by Kristen Fox and Madison Myers
To rise above the threshold, consider the skills that our board member and Northeastern University President Joseph Aoun outlines as essential literacies in Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. In addition to technical and data literacies, he shares two key components of human literacy.
First, a set of “catalytic capacities” that include:
- Initiative and self-reliance
- Comfort with risk
- Flexibility and adaptability
Second, a set of “creative capacities” that include:
- Opportunity recognition, or the ability to see and experience problems as opportunities to create solutions
- Creative innovation, or the ability to create solutions without clearly defined structures
- Future innovation, or the disposition to orient toward future developments in society
The most effective approach to achieve these outcomes? Interdisciplinary models that embed skills flexibly across curriculum, that engage learners as part of networks, teams, and exploration, and that embed applied experiences in real-world contexts. Scott Carlson and Ned Laff have laid out some great examples of what this looks like in action in Hacking College.
The bottom line: the expectations of entry-level talent are rising while the systems to achieve that level of context and understanding are not necessarily keeping pace.