career development

Your Next Job Interview Could Be With a Bot. Here’s How to Prepare. [Rumage]

On 09/23/2026, in Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, business, career development, change, communications, corporate / business world, productivity / tips and tricks, student-related, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Your Next Job Interview Could Be With a Bot. Here’s How to Prepare. — from builtin.com by Jeff Rumage
More employers are using AI to screen candidates before they ever speak with a recruiter. Here’s what to expect from an AI interview and how to put your best foot forward.

Summary: AI-led interviews are becoming a common early-stage hiring screen as employers use conversational AI to evaluate applicants at scale. Candidates can prepare by practicing aloud, keeping answers concise, using mock AI interview platforms and avoiding scripted responses.

New study: 15 community college presidents on what it will take to lead higher ed’s next chapter [eddesignlab.org]

On 09/19/2026, in career development, change, changing business models, community colleges, competency-based learning/education, experimentation, faculty/staff, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, generational differences, higher education, skills, student-related, teaching & learning, United States, workplace, by Daniel Christian

New study: 15 community college presidents on what it will take to lead higher ed’s next chapter — from eddesignlab.org

Community colleges are at a pivotal moment.

As learners, employers, and regional economies change, these institutions have an opportunity to lead the next evolution of higher education — if they can move beyond structures built for a different era.

In the Lab’s new study, Insights from 15 Community College Presidents on the Future of Learning in a New Economy, leaders share their perspectives on the opportunities and barriers facing the sector, as well as the institutional changes needed to help more learners access economic mobility.

Their insights validate Education Design Lab’s Future of Learning framework, which asks five essential design questions:

How might we make skills and competencies visible?
How might we create stackable pathways that credential skills along the way?
How might we make learning universally flexible through multiple modalities?
How might we guarantee applied learning opportunities for every learner?
How might we ensure every learner has access to adequate support services?

Several items re: the changes needed within higher education

On 09/14/2026, in 21st century, adjunct faculty, business side of he, career development, change, changing business models, collaboration, colleges, communities of practice, community colleges, corporate / business world, cost of getting a degree, culture, dangers of the status quo, entrepreneurship, expectations, experimentation, faculty/staff, future of higher education, game-changing environment, generational differences, higher education, ideas, innovation, instructional design, leadership, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, liberal arts, lifelong learning, new business models, reinvent, skills, society, staying relevant, strategy, student-related, surviving, teaching & learning, traditional / tradition, United States, universities, youth, by Daniel Christian

Below are several items that were either mentioned by Matt Tower or I came across them via offshoots of items that he linked to:

Future Universities Alliance Names Inaugural Innovation Sandbox Cohort — from provost.duke.edu
Program incubated by Duke brings together higher education innovators from 23 countries for year-long peer exchange

The Future Universities Alliance has selected 49 institutions from 23 countries for the inaugural cohort of its Innovation Sandbox, a 12-month peer learning program for higher education leaders advancing ambitious, institution-level innovation.The cohort brings together founders of new universities, administrators and faculty leading high-stakes changes within established institutions, and leaders of proven models exploring how their innovations can travel to new contexts. Participants were chosen through a competitive process that drew applicants from around the world in its inaugural year.

A makeover for college: No gym, no meal plan and two years of work — from npr.org by Jon Marcus

An entirely new college is being planned here to change not only how higher education is delivered, but at what price. It also proposes to highlight ways the current business model no longer works, as evidenced by the 152 colleges and universities that have closed or merged since 2016, and the 442 others that a new projection says are at risk.

So deeply entrenched are the problems confronting higher education that a growing chorus of innovators says the easiest way to fix them is to begin again from scratch.

All undergraduates should get work-based learning, v-cs say — from timeshighereducation.com by Jack Grove. NOTE: this item is behind a paywall.
Bold plan to support graduate employment would require placements for 1.4 million students annually

When Learning Feels Like a Vulnerability [Hall]

On 09/14/2026, in adult learning, business, career development, change, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, Emotion, ideas, instructional design, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, training / L&D, vendors, by Daniel Christian

When Learning Feels Like a Vulnerability — from learningguild.com by George Hall

Why do some adult learners interpret training as a judgment about their competence, status, or identity?

Learning and development professionals often focus on content, platforms, courses, tools, and performance support. Those matter. But they are not enough. Learning is never just cognitive. It is also emotional and social.

A new skill can feel like evidence that old competence is no longer enough. Feedback can feel like judgment. A new model can feel like criticism of past practice. A request to change can feel like a loss of face.

It means learning can feel personally exposing. Adult learners do not only receive training. They interpret what needing training seems to say about their competence, status, identity, and future value. That interpretation can either open learning or shut it down.

“The Disappearing Bottom Rung in L&D” + “The AI Workflow Redesign Method: How the Top 6% of Users Get Real Returns from AI” [Hardman]

On 09/10/2026, in Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, business, career development, change, changing business models, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, ideas, instructional design, intelligent systems, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, training / L&D, trends, UK, United States, youth, by Daniel Christian

The Disappearing Bottom Rung in L&D — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr Philippa Hardman
Junior roles are rapidly disappearing from L&D. Here’s the data + my hypothesis about why it’s happening

TL;DR: the bottom rung of L&D isn’t just narrowing — it’s being automated. The humans who remain move up the ladder, and the profession re-forms around a new set of AI and domain specialisms.
…
Is AI responsible for reshaping knowledge work, including L&D? My hypothesis is a resounding YES, primarily because of what I see in L&D job ads in 2026…

…..

The AI Workflow Redesign Method: How the Top 6% of Users Get Real Returns from AI— from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr Philippa Hardman
A practical three-step method to redesign your workflow & get ~2X value from AI

One pattern I see emerging from that research is this: the people getting the most value from AI aren’t the ones using it most, or the ones with the most advanced technical skills: they’re the ones who redesigned their day to day workflows around AI’s capabilities.
…

How to Redesign a Workflow in Three Steps
In my bootcamp we use a task-mapping process that distils workflow redesign down to three steps: map the work, tag each task by the impact you want AI to have, then validate whether what you want is possible.

Three steps get you to a plan: two or three tasks worth building, each with a written standard. Turning that plan into a redesign takes two more moves, which I’ll cover after the steps. I’m flagging that now because the moves are the bit most people skip, and they’re where the redesign actually happens.

Here’s a how to for each step:

College Is an Expensive Career Exploration Tool. Here’s an Alternative. [O’Donnell & Dulin Salisbury]

On 09/01/2026, in career development, colleges, community colleges, Daniel S. Christian, education, education reform, higher education, ideas, K-12 related, Learning Experience Design, morals/values, more voice more choice more control, passions, student-related, United States, universities, youth, by Daniel Christian

College Is an Expensive Career Exploration Tool. Here’s an Alternative. — from humanistxyz.substack.com by Patrick O’Donnell and Allison Dulin Salisbury
“Young people know that sitting in a classroom for twelve years isn’t going to show them how to find a job, let alone a career they love.”

This interview is part of a series on AI, high school, and the Experience Gap. Our report, Closing the Experience Gap, makes the case for a high-school model in which at least 50 percent of formal learning is experience-based.

College is an expensive career exploration tool. It is also poorly designed for the job.

Patrick O’Donnell tells the story of a student who entered a four-year nursing program certain she wanted to become a nurse. Once enrolled, she discovered that the work was a poor fit. Earlier immersion in healthcare, she told him, would have moved that discovery forward by several years. Now she needed to transfer to a community college and remap her plans.

Her predicament is familiar. We ask teenagers to choose a college and course of study with little direct knowledge of the work on the other side. Many spend their first years of college trying to answer a question high school gave them few opportunities to explore: What kind of work fits me?

From DSC:
College is an expensive career exploration tool. It is also poorly designed for the job.

This assertion resonated with me instantly — and I agree with it 100%. As a bit of background as to why I say this…I thought that I was going to be a doctor all through K-12 and even in my first year at college. But then I got to about halfway through my fall semester in my sophomore year, and I dropped out of pre-med. It was the best decision of my life.

But then what?

I had very little idea of what I wanted to do in the future or what my skills, interests, passions, and abilities were. K-12 and college offered next to nothing in terms of career preparation back in that period of time. It wasn’t until my late 20’s that I even began to get a clue on what’s all out there. What were my choices and what was a good fit for me? What did I enjoy doing and what did I not enjoy doing?

So I agree completely…college is an expensive career exploration tool/setting. But I’m glad to see more and better options these days within K-12. Colleges could do much better.

Escaping The Backrooms Of Workforce Development — by Ryan Craig

Which makes sense. Because far too many find themselves in a liminal space, neither in school nor a career. Needing to make a living in an era of digital transformation and AI, they’re having a horrific time finding their way into and around work. So it’s not just education and training wonks who think workforce is the defining issue of our time. The success of Backrooms demonstrates Gen Z thinks so, too.

It’s happening everywhere. Young people around the world are angry at how hard it’s become to launch careers. This summer an entire protest movement arose in India – the world’s largest Gen Z population – around entrance exams for medical school, one of the few remaining sure bets. In the UK, youth unemployment is over 16%; it’s 15% across the EU and over 25% in Sweden. Back home, nearly 400,000 young Americans stopped looking for work in June alone. So it’s urgent that we identify what actually works to help young people get good first jobs.

The answer lies between apprenticeship perfection and train-and-pray scale. We desperately need a scalable training-first model that’s as proximate as possible to employment opportunities, employers, and actual employment. That can only mean work-based learning: real work experience completed during or connected with a training, certificate, or degree program. Work-based learning can take many forms: rotations, clinics, co-ops, internships, short projects. It can be integrated into coursework or independent. But what all forms require are bona fide employers, which regulate scale. Such programs can enroll only as many as can fit within the constraint of available work-based learning opportunities.

Also see:

Is Your College A Zombie? — from forbes.com by Ann Kirschner; via Ryan Craig

I want to be careful here, because this is not an argument that universities are doing nothing. They are doing an enormous amount. New programs, AI task forces, employability frameworks, microcredentials, and shifts in how they enable lifelong learning.

Activity is not the problem; what has not changed is the machinery that decides what counts. Too many institutions move in herds rather than forging an independent path. When one college launches a new program, say, data science and AI, fifty will follow without asking whether their version serves their students or simply checks a competitive box.

Meanwhile, 88% of American professionals believe colleges and universities should be the ones providing AI training, and nearly half say their employers have offered no AI resources whatsoever.¹

“It’s critical to find ways to make an institution’s own continuing & professional education programming accessible to its students.” [Ahluwalia]

On 08/31/2026, in adult learning, Alternatives, Canada, career development, learning ecosystem, lifelong learning, universities, by Daniel Christian

AI Adoption in the Workplace Accelerates, but Trust Gap Remains [Parker]

On 08/25/2026, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, business, career development, change, emerging technologies, leadership, pace of change, policy, strategy, workplace, by Daniel Christian

AI Adoption in the Workplace Accelerates, but Trust Gap Remains — from campustechnology.com by Sean Parker

Key Takeaways

AI adoption is accelerating across the workplace, with 62% of U.S. workers now using generative AI for professional purposes.
Employee concerns about AI’s impact on jobs remain high, even among workers actively using technology.
Companies are adopting AI faster than they are creating clear guidelines, raising questions around trust, leadership and workplace readiness.

A new Pulse of the Workforce Special Topic Report published by Idealis and CivicScience found that while AI adoption is accelerating across the U.S. workforce, confidence is not growing at the same pace. The report points to a central tension: AI is becoming common at work before many organizations have built the policies, training, and leadership practices employees need to use it with confidence.

We Keep Designing the Future from the Past — from LinkedIn.com by Monty Alger

“Using AI to create the practice opportunities online students need” [Miller Perkins] + other items re: AI in our learning ecosystems

On 08/19/2026, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, adjunct faculty, adult learning, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, assessment, business, career development, colleges, communications, communities of practice, community colleges, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, digital learning, education, education technology, emerging technologies, Emotion, engineering, experimentation, faculty/staff, game-changing environment, higher education, homeschooling/homeschoolers, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, IT in HE, K-12 related, leadership, learning, learning agents, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, learning spaces, liberal arts, mathematics, online learning, personalized/customized learning, productivity / tips and tricks, professional development, student-related, teachers, teaching & learning, technologies for your home, tools, training / L&D, UK, United States, universities, vendors, workplace, youth, by Daniel Christian

Using AI to create the practice opportunities online students need— from timeshighereducation.com by Kathy Miller Perkins
For disciplines that depend on interpersonal skills such as communication, leadership, negotiation and mediation, AI can provide elusive experiential learning, particularly in asynchronous environments

What if AI’s greatest educational value lies not in generating answers but in generating experiences?

The result surprised me. Students did not simply interact with the AI, they meaningfully engaged with it. Many reported that the experience felt valuable precisely because the simulated conversation partner pushed back. Unlike classmates who sometimes hesitate to challenge one another, the AI consistently maintained its position. Students had to work harder, listen more carefully and apply the communication strategies they had spent weeks learning. And, importantly, they practised.

Here’s how to show students what responsible AI use looks like — from timeshighereducation.com by Andrew Firr and Alex Fenton
Well-designed assessments can highlight generative AI’s limitations, where it can provide support and what responsible practice looks like. Andrew Firr and Alex Fenton offer strategies

We have been exploring ways to offer this in our Level 7 module for MSc engineering management students, many of whom come from the Global South. Assessment is built around a practical design problem: students examine how a real campus process operates, where delays occur, evidence they observe and how a feasible redesign might improve the system – in a 3,000-word essay.

They can use AI for planning and providing clarity, but not for generating the evidence on which the analysis rests. Invented observations, measurements, screenshots or unverifiable citations are prohibited. The assessment design reinforces this through a case study, diagram, fact-checking exercise and a short AI use statement.

Requiring an AI use statement encourages students to reflect on their processes. We ask which tool they used, how they used it, how they checked the output and which parts of the work depended on their own evidence and judgement. It reminds them that evidence must be theirs and that citations must be manually verified.

Slow math: Kids may learn more when AI makes them review mistakes — from hechingerreport.org by Jill Barshay and Kristin Fasiang
A randomized experiment involved more than 6,000 Tennessee middle school students learning fractions

In an experiment involving more than 6,000 middle schoolers in Tennessee, students learned slightly more math when an AI tutor walked them through their mistakes and then required them to demonstrate the same skill correctly three times in a row before moving on.
…
The winning combination wasn’t the addition of AI tutoring alone, but AI tutoring plus repetition, with the idea that students needed to stick with the skill to demonstrate some level of mastery. The students who practiced math with this AI-enhanced “mastery learning” approach scored about 3 percentage points higher than students receiving conventional computerized instruction. The advantage was small.

I Built a Team of AI Bots That Write Feedback Better than Me. Here’s How. — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr Philippa Hardman
Aka, how to make learners love AI-assisted feedback, rather than loathe it.

This wasn’t hidden from the cohort. For reasons I’ll come to below, I always tell my cohorts at the very start that an AI assistant will be helping me draft their feedback. The aim wasn’t to remove me from the process, but to find out whether AI could help me to deliver feedback at a volume and quality that I simply couldn’t maintain without AI.

Spoiler: the experiment worked — but not for the reason I expected. In this post, I’ll share exactly what I built, tell you how to build a version for your course and reveal the three conditions that decide whether learners trust AI-assisted feedback or quietly stop reading it.

TL;DR: the spec for my feedback assistant is long not because the model needs persuading, but because it’s where my judgement lives. Every rule in it is a decision AI would otherwise make by itself, with limited expertise. A spec doesn’t make the model smarter — it makes expertise and judgement legible enough for the model to follow.

Of the five stages of AI grief, some managers are stuck in denial— from timeshighereducation.com by Shadi Mohamed
Acceptance is not surrender. It is about getting beyond a policing obsession and rethinking what assessment aims to measure, says Shadi Mohamed

In that moment of institutional blindness, it struck me: universities are not merely struggling with a technological adoption curve. They are grieving the demise of the modern university’s economic and institutional logic.

To understand the scale of this threat posed by AI, consider what the internet did to journalism. Newspapers thrived by bundling together classified advertising with quick news hits, sports scores and opinion columns, using that reliable revenue to fund the expensive social necessity of investigative reporting. The rise of internet advertising did not kill journalism outright but it shattered the bundle, leaving the expensive core product without its historical financial engine.

Universities operate on a similar logic, bundling content delivery, assessment, credentialling, research and professional formation. But generative AI is now commodifying the most visible parts of that package. When AI can deliver personalised explanations instantly and generate the essays and reports we use to measure student capability, the traditional degree loses its role in the labour market as a proxy for understanding. If the bundle breaks, the economic model that funds our deeper purposes is in peril.

As fewer young people choose college, this district wants to ensure they have career options — from hechingerreport.org by Ariel Gilreath
In Niagara Falls, New York, a town with shrinking job options, students are encouraged to consider their careers in ninth grade

At Niagara Falls High School, students are encouraged to consider their careers upon arrival in ninth grade. By 11th grade, every student at the school must pick from one of five pathways, ranging from business and finance to design and engineering. The shift toward career education comes as about one-third of seniors at Niagara Falls High are rejecting college and instead choosing to enter the workforce after graduation, compared with roughly a quarter a decade ago, said Superintendent Mark Laurrie, who retired in June. In a town that’s struggled with population declines, where now-shuttered manufacturing plants once dominated the local labor market, there’s an urgency to prepare high school students for careers.

“It’s important to give them hope for the future with a career pathway — a career, not a job — to have something to aspire to and, hopefully, keep them in the city and in the state,” Laurrie said.

New grads have to compete with AI for entry-level roles, hiring managers say [Ewen]

On 08/10/2026, in Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, career development, change, changing business models, credentialing, skills, society, workplace, youth, by Daniel Christian

New grads have to compete with AI for entry-level roles, hiring managers say — from hrdive.com by Lara Ewen
Nearly half of organizations now ask a senior worker plus AI to do the work of several entry-level grads, per a new report.

Dive Brief:

Hiring managers in the U.S. are betting on artificial intelligence over new graduates, with 48% saying they would rather invest in AI tools than hire and train a recent college graduate, according to a Friday report from ResumeTemplates.com.
The job market does still have space for 2026 graduates, and 65% of hiring managers said they planned to hire the same number or more this year compared to last year, per the report. However, 23% said they expected to hire fewer 2026 grads this year or none at all, and 12% didn’t know how many they would hire.
Most hiring concerns centered around workplace skills rather than credentials. Nearly 70% of hiring managers said they had “at least one character concern about recent grads,” including 33% who cited “a lack of work ethic.” Another 76% said recent grads required assistance understanding basic documents such as memos, contracts and budgets.

Will this new company be the largest company on the Internet by 2030? [Christian]

On 08/01/2026, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, adult learning, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, Bias | Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DE&I), career development, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, communities of practice, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, cost of getting a degree, credentialing, curriculum, Daniel S. Christian, digital learning, disruption, education, education technology, elearning, emerging technologies, engagement / engaging students, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, generational differences, global, higher education, homeschooling/homeschoolers, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, informal learning, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, internet, K-12 related, learning, learning agents, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning preferences, learning spaces, lifelong learning, love of learning, more voice more choice more control, motivation, online learning, online media, online tutoring, pathways, personalized/customized learning, platforms, productivity / tips and tricks, professional development, reinvent, society, staying relevant, student-related, teachers, teaching & learning, training / L&D, United States, vision/possibilities, web-based collaboration, youth, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
The vision that I’ve been tracking for well over a decade begins with this graphic:
.

Could LearnVector be this next-generation company/platform? Perhaps. Time will tell.

Per Matt Tower via The EdSheet Vol. 38 dated 7/31/26:

Coursera bets $100M on its own co-founder: Andrew Ng’s new venture LearnVector lands one of the largest single checks in edtech this year — from Coursera, the company he founded 14 years ago.
.

LearnVector.ai

Learning Ecosystems

When Learning Feels Like a Vulnerability [Hall]

“It’s critical to find ways to make an institution’s own continuing & professional education programming accessible to its students.” [Ahluwalia]

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