a16z Podcast - Jobs of the Future

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

(00:00) - The Future of Jobs(03:15) - Job growth over the last 80 years(05:06) - The shelf-life of jobs(09:11) - Education trends(12:25) - The importance of learning the foundations(17:18) - Regional access to education(20:19) - How companies are hiring and looking at strategic priorities(22:58) - The economic mobility and economic stability of degrees (25:59) - Job and training trends at Grow with Google(28:11) - Do companies train or hire for skills?(29:23) - The future of the traditional degree(31:10) - The employer and educator ecosystem (35:36) - How to approach upskilling  In a world where technology is moving at an unprecedented pace, what will the jobs of the future look like?Kai Roemmelt, CEO of the online learning platform Udacity, and Lisa Gevelber, a key figure at Google responsible for building the Grow with Google program, unpack the seismic changes reshaping the tech and education realms.From disrupting hiring norms to redefining how we acquire degrees and engage globally, this episode poses the question: How can you skillfully navigate the challenges and seize the opportunities awaiting in this evolving landscape?Resources: Find Kai on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kai-roemmeltFind Lisa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisagevelberLearn more about Udacity: https://www.udacity.comLearn more about Grow with Google: https://grow.googleStay Updated: Find a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

A skill is not a static concept. IBM reported that technical skills have a shelf life over about two and a half years. Four out of five CEOs say that the number one inhibitor or one of the top few inhibitors to their growth is finding people with the skills they need. Jobs are going to become richer. About 80% of jobs in the U.S. and similar in other countries

that pay well, say they require a college degree. But in our country, actually only about a third of Americans earn a college degree. I think this technology will impact almost every single job out there in some way. Having a college degree is life-changing, but it cannot be the only way to change your life. Technology understanding is becoming relevant for everyone in the company. This trend is only going to continue. The number of searches for how to become a data analyst was the number one search of any how to become in the world last year.

Consider this. A staggering 60% of jobs that exist today were non-existent in 1940. And with the relentless progress of software eating the world, jobs have undergone a profound metamorphosis. Plus, with AI taking center stage in 2022, people are hard-pressed to identify industries that will not be impacted. But this is also not very new. Jobs have been evolving since the dawn of time. If you look at farming, around 1800, you had 90% of the time. of the population working and farming, around 1950 at the time that you just cited, I think it was down to about 20% and today we're seeing about 1, 1.5%.

So as we enter 2024, what lies ahead in the future of work? What skills will fall to the wayside alongside their long line of ancestors and what skills will prove indispensable for success? Today, we're joined by Kai Rommelt and Lisa Gubelber to talk through these fundamental shifts, and how they might impact everything from hiring to degree acquisition to global participation. Kai is a CEO of Udacity, which provides online programs that cover everything from deep learning to autonomous systems to cloud computing, but also topics that you may not have heard of, things like sensor fusion, self-healing architectures, or data governance.

Lisa, on the other hand, hails from Google, where she built their program, Grow with Google, that deploys career certificates. Grow with Google has graduated over half a million people from their courses that include programs around cybersecurity, data analytics, U.S. design, and more. So, in a world where technology is moving at an unprecedented pace, what will the jobs of the future look like? And how might we prepare for them? Let's find out.

As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16C.com slash disclosures. Why don't we start with a statistic? I'd love to just get your raw reaction to this. but a recent report from economist David O'Tore

shows that actually 60% of workers in 2018 have jobs that actually did not exist in 1940. So over the last 80 years, most of the jobs that we have today and even more so the job growth in that period came from completely new jobs. What's your take on that? I think it's absolutely amazing. Personally, I think it's amazing

and I'm really grateful to live in such exciting times. it's also not surprising because if you look at the history in the longer run, we've always seen those kind of changes and those kind of changes fueling than the societal changes. If you look at farming, around 1800, you had 90% of the population working in farming, around 1950 at the time that you just cited, I think it was down to about 20%, and today we're seeing about 1, 1.5%. So this change is really what allowed us to take the human capacity and then apply it to new problems. And a lot of the things that we see around us today, even kind of our jobs that we're doing here, recording podcasts, things like that, those wouldn't have been possible if everyone would still work in farming, right? I think AI as such will absolutely accelerate this once more and we will see the same effect.

we'll probably see it at an even higher pace than what we've seen historically. As I said, I'm excited about it. I do hope that that excess capacity, that capacity that's being created will be used and applied to address some of the big challenges that we have in our society today, like climate change, like a mental health epidemic. But I think that if we didn't have changes in the job market, we wouldn't be able to address new challenges and new problems. Yeah, I think you mentioned the term pace. Things are moving so quickly, and we have seen this phenomena where jobs, occupations, the world has changed over time, but maybe the dilemma or the juncture that we're at that people are calling out

is the idea that maybe things are moving so quickly that certain jobs are being wiped out more quickly than new jobs are being created. What's your take there and specifically how quickly certain skill sets are going in vogue and then out of vogue, or are there skill sets that still exists today that can hold with time? Recently, IBM reported that technical skills have a shelf life of about two and a half years. But I think that the way we need to look at these things are that a skill is not a static concept. If you acquire a technological skill today or whether you've acquired that skill five years ago

is going to be fundamentally different because the tools have changed, the capabilities in the market have changed, the whole environment has changed. or think about digital marketing, strategies that worked five years ago might not even be applicable anymore, not doable anymore today. I can confirm that. And I think that the way we have to look at it is we have to look at acquiring skills and about staying current in those skills. So I think it's becoming more flexible.

We need to be more flexible because, as I said, it's not static. How do you think about what kind of education is then required or how to design an educational platform, given that pace of change, given the fact that maybe we are in a new environment that is very different to, let's say, 40 years ago where someone could acquire a skill set and remain in that occupation for decades on end. I think what it means for us is that we have to provide the content

that we have in a more flexible way. And, you know, the traditional model of universities is learning all the education happens at the beginning of the career and then it has to last over the span of a whole career. With the NANA degree that was invented at Udacity, you have a shorter form that focuses on a set of skills that make you employable. What we are going from there now is that we're making shorter form content that can be combined in different ways that allow people to train themselves up and prepare themselves

for maybe something like a Nano degree. but also afterwards to say, okay, how do I stay current in the skills? I mean, on that note, how do you think about what is worth creating that will stand the test of time, or are you just on a completely new iteration cycle where every six months you're having to come up with new material? Because if you think about the alternative, let's say university, they'll spend years developing a curriculum to the point

where in certain fields, it may no longer be relevant or it at least won't be at the cusp of innovation there. I think you're making exactly the right point. So it's really about having a high content velocity. So first of all, one of the things that we've done is rather than thinking about something like a nanodeegree as like one static concept that lives from beginning to end, we're building it in a different way now that we've disaggregated and we take it down to a lesson level and then these lessons combine make up the degree.

The difference is that traditionally what you would do is you would have that. lesson one and then you would have lesson two that builds on lesson one and lesson three that builds on lesson two and lesson four that builds on lesson three. The way we build the content now is that every lesson stands for itself, which means we can recombine these lessons in any way necessary. But what we can also do if we realize that there is a lesson that's not relevant anymore, we can just pull it and we can replace it with a different lesson. So it's really about flexibility in how you can reconfigure your content all the time

and a high content velocity that you create the amount of content when it's needed and move it in and out as it's relevant. As new trends show up and speaking of trends, I mean I think certain courses, if someone were to go to Udacity's homepage, they'd see a lot

of things that they would expect. Especially with the AI wave, you've got things like deep reinforcement learning, AWS machine learning. Those were no surprise to me, but you also had courses that I was a little surprised to see. You've got sensor fusion, data governance, identity access management, self-healing architectures, and maybe I'm just out of the loop, but tell me a little bit more about how you identify whether a skill set is worth adding to the platform, what data

sets are you looking at? And also, are you seeing any discrepancy in supply and demand? Because there are these trendy titles that a lot of people are jumping towards, but it does feel like there are maybe some of these more underground trends that aren't on people's radars. Yeah. We have about 140 Fortune 2,000 companies that we work with. Plus we have a large amount of individuals and we take a lot of cues from our customers, from our partners. We also see based on jaw boards and analysis that we do. We see kind of what are the skills that are trending that are needed and then we build courses to address those. In terms of mismatch, what we see a lot in the market, for example, let's take the topic of generative AI. We're seeing a lot of content being out there that's descriptive, but what companies are really looking for is the practical application of it. So I think that it's really about answering those questions on how can I and my company practice it, how can I have the practical element of it? What you're pointing at to a degree is it sounds like it's not just training new folks

on being the machine learning engineers that develop the models, but also since this is such a broadly sweeping technology that basically anyone in an organization can benefit from understanding how to incorporate AI into their jobs. Am I understanding that correctly? It's interesting because you're absolutely right. Historically, in technology, you see people looking for very deep skills. Today, what we see is that we have very high demand from a broader base of the company. So it's really about, I would. would say technology skills and technology understanding is becoming relevant for everyone in the company. We now have two different types of content. We have the deep learning content and we also

have content that allows managers and people in the company to become fluent with the technology without having to go super deep into the technical skills because maybe they have technical teams or what we also see is that we have today a lot of tools where technical requirements are just not needed anymore for the users because you have low-code environments, no-code environments. So, yeah, we're seeing that the barrier for more advanced technical skills that are coming down. Just as an example, today you don't need necessarily explicit design experience anymore to work with tools like Dali or Mid-Journey because these tools can do a lot of that hard work for you. But what's really important is that you are able to use them and have enough knowledge to know how you can apply these tools.

in your context. Yeah. There's something counterintuitive there, which is, I think as these technologies advance, the natural reaction is for people to say, oh, all the foundational stuff we no longer need because it's being abstracted. But to an extent, what you're getting at is actually it's really useful to understand basic code. It's really useful to understand basic design principles. And it's really useful on mass, right? It's useful for all of us as we will get more exposure to technology via AI to have that foundational layer. And when we talked originally, it sounded like you're actually seeing that in your data, right? We're actually, surprisingly enough, the foundational stuff is what is trending or a lot of people are reaching for.

You're absolutely right. We've seen in the last year, about a 33% increase in AI-related courses. And we had exactly the same increase in foundational courses related to AI. So something like Python programming. So we can see that from the learners that we work with, they want to do the AI application courses, but they also want to make sure they understand the basics and the foundations. Are there any other jobs that you're seeing sprout up with time that you just think are really fascinating and could be the equivalent of like the social media manager, the UX designer, the product manager that were kind of like the last generation. They're still extremely relevant. But if you think about it, in the early 2000s, those jobs didn't exist, right? As we talked

about at the outset, and also, they're the kind of jobs that we probably just truly could not have predicted. They've manifested in ways that seem so obvious today. But back then, someone would be like, wait, there's someone who studies how people engage on a screen. Yes, I think there's a lot of the obvious jobs that are going to come. I'm sure we'll see chief AI officers. We'll see lots of AI product managers that will manage tools, but I do think that this is what makes this technology different from a lot of other technologies that we've seen before, is that I think this technology will impact almost every single job out there in some way. And I think very often the effect that we're going to see is that for certain roles, we will need less people to do the same

job. That's from engineers where you have GitHub co-pilot, where to design as a copy, that are going to use some of the tools, but it means that the jobs themselves are going to change. So I think people will much more focus on quality checking and doing more meaningful tasks. So the jobs will be augmented by AI, and then people will function as data stewards. They'll look at the efficacy of AI, and they will make sure that the quality level of the results is where it needs to be. So it's a little bit, if you want to compare it to an individual, building a car to a manufacturing line where now one person just oversees a much bigger process rather than doing every step of the way themselves. It's going to become a very key tool.

Yeah, absolutely. Our founders, Mark and Ben, recorded an episode about Hollywood, and they have this section where they're talking about within the entertainment industry. You have producers, you have actors, you have screenwriters. You have all of these people who participate in the production of something, and they were talking about how actually, yeah, you could have any one of those jobs then work with their team of AIs to basically have their own production agency, right?

Where basically they're able to do all of those roles through the help or augmentation of AI. So it's exciting to imagine that, to your point, every job is going to be impacted by this or most jobs, but that actually in many ways makes each job more dynamic, right? Instead of it being in a silo, a designer, a developer, and a product manager can all, in some way, fuse into one indie hacker, right? And that indie hacker can do so much more on their own.

And if you think about it, we just talked about like a car manufacturing process. It is a lot more interesting as a job if I can oversee a machine that makes a whole car rather than just having to be somewhere where I just have to do one screw, the same screw, every day. So jobs are going to become richer. they're going to become faster paced. So I think intensity, as it's always been, is going to increase, pace is going to increase. But the jobs are going to be more meaningful and richer than what we have today. And the exciting part, if we use the car analogy and extend it, is when someone can not only

oversee a whole process of creating a car, but all of a sudden we have a self-driving car or a flying car. And I know that sounds facetious to an extent, but it's like how can we use AI not just to build what we currently can in a different way, but also, to build fundamentally new things, which I think will come, right, the same way that the reason that U.S. designers or app developers exist is because now we have apps. Those did not exist in the past. Let's talk about other trends like regional access. I think that's something also that is intersecting this AI wave, where you have not just people in North America participating in these new

technologies. You have people truly all over the globe. And I think this is something that you've seen also with audacity. So maybe you could speak to that level of access and the integration of people from all over the world participating. First of all, I mean, technology is pretty amazing, right, where historically you had to be in a specific location to do a job. And now there's a lot of jobs that you're able to do from anywhere in the world. And one of the programs that we're particularly proud of is we're working with the Egyptian government. Egypt has a foreign currency crisis. So they came to us and were looking for us for ways of how they can solve this. And we designed a program with them where we are training people in Egypt in technical skills with the

goal for them to become freelancers in the end, or some of them, a portion of that. So they generally want to create a more tax-avvy population. Just to give you an order of magnitudes with this program has been running for two years, we've trained up about 150,000 people in Egypt now. And then a portion of those people went into freelancing, so we also trained them into how to access the freelancing market. From there, a portion is working for global companies. That's now bringing annualized about $200 million of foreign currency back into Egypt. Just through that program. Just through that program. So number one, it's interesting because, again, jobs become globalized in a whole different way, where it's not about, you don't have to take a whole factory and move it

from one country to another one, but like job markets now open up in a way where people from the whole world have access to it. If you think about it, now you have a single mother in rural Egypt that has access to tech gigs that she can work in. So if you think about what that means, not only for her, but what that means for her children, what that means for the community around her because obviously there's money coming in that she can now take and spend in the local community where she lives, the fabric of society that we've got, where you have people that historically have been strong and could dominate, that's because they have access to jobs.

Now that's different. So the level of confidence that you give people and the liberties that come with that, that's amazing. And as I said, we're very proud to do that. Egypt is one example. We do similar things in a number of other. countries. We're very proud to have trained the first female self-driving car engineer in Saudi Arabia. Amazing. And it levels the playing field in an incredible way. And that's from a geographical

perspective, from a gender perspective, but also people that physically might not be able to drive to a job, but now can do it remote. From truly anywhere. From truly anywhere. How should companies be thinking about this? Because something that comes to mind as you're describing all of these people becoming educated and skilled in ways that they hadn't been before, the systems to which people are hired seem a little outdated. If I'm just thinking through, A, like how we look at resumes, what signals we look for, whether it's a specific kind of degree or if they went to a specific kind of school, but also I'm thinking through an interview process if someone's been trained in that way, right, to be able to command that confidence that you just described. So,

Tell me a little bit more about what you're hearing from companies. Are companies rethinking how they're hiring people or what signals they're looking for as they now have an increasingly global talent pool? I think this is something where we're only standing at the beginning of it. And if you look at the numbers of freelancing gigs, et cetera, that's vastly increasing. So companies are really now in the process of learning of how to deal with it and how to use it and how to leverage it. But at the end of the day, it all comes down to practice.

practical application. And what's important is that a company is able to understand what is the set of skills and capabilities that they've got and what is the set of skills and capabilities that they need in order to get their strategic priorities done. The best companies have understood that learning is not a benefit for your employees. And learning is not a kind of nice to have, but it's really about upskilling programs that have a tangible impact on the business. So how do I connect, A, my strategic agenda to the skills that I need? And B, how do I make it relevant for employees? How do I measure the skills and capabilities that people have? And how do I turn that into a currency inside the company? The big question around upskilling is it's all about

the why. Because if you have an online learning platform, the learners are ultimately sitting there and they're saying, like, am I going to log into this platform now, or am I going to log into Netflix? Or am I going to play soccer with my kids? Or I'm going to do YouTube. The question that you really have to answer is, why should learners be on the platform, spend their time and learn the skills? And that's where companies can come in by really turning skills and capabilities into a currency where you will see in job descriptions where they exactly highlight what skills capabilities qualify you for a job, how you can show that you have gained them and can do them, and then you get that connective tissue.

All right, we'll return back to Kai, but here's Lisa adding her perspective on what she's seeing in the marketplace for jobs, including how AI is impacting that landscape. But first, her take on the difference in people with traditional degrees and the jobs that require them. About 80% of jobs in the U.S. and similar in other countries that pay well, say they require a college degree, but in our country, actually only about a third of Americans earn a college degree. So that leaves two-thirds of our country, basically locked out of every good-paying job. And so we said, well, this is a big, important problem that needs to be solved. And for sure, having a college degree is life-changing, but it cannot be the only way to change your life.

And so we set out to solve this problem of how could you help more people get access to great jobs by training and certifying their abilities to do those jobs? To your point, it does feel like there are a couple things that if you put them on a resume, they just greatly enhance your ability to get to the first interview. And so are you seeing that reception where things are changing both on the talent side in terms of taking this chance and in pursuing this instead of a full-time degree or also on the company side being receptive to hiring these folks? Our goal is economic mobility and economic stability for people. And the only way you can achieve that isn't by training people. It's by helping them get a better job and a better career.

And the only way to do that is to get employer buy-in. So even from the very beginning, we were very deliberate about involving employers. So we looked at what are really in-demand career fields that are projected to keep growing, where Google has unique expertise, and where we knew we could teach people in a relatively short period of time, how to become proficient for entry-level jobs, and where we could do that completely online. Because we really wanted to meet people where they are, which is working Americans don't control their schedules. about a quarter of Americans don't even know their schedule for the following week. Right.

And so they need it to be online on demand. So we vet the curriculum with top employers. And actually, what we found, which was really fun and exciting for us, is that they were willing to contribute content. Okay. So a great example is we have a data analytics certificate. And Deloitte, who hires tons of data analysts, gave us the assessments that they used to test for mastery of SQL and R.

And they let us build it right into the certificate. it. And then we became a preferred hiring credential at Deloitte because they knew what we were teaching. It was exactly what they were hiring for and that we were testing for mastery in the same way that they would. Exactly. And I mean, I feel like these companies, it makes total sense because they would end up doing that training anyway. And so the incentive is there for them to say, hey, yeah, actually help us train these folks. And we trust that if you're using our material, then we're going to get the folks that we need. Let's talk about some of those trends. I like that you really narrowed down. It has to be online. It has to be done. It has to be done

in a specific period of time. And actually just real quick, how quick are we talking? It's all self-paced, usually have from 100 to 150 hours of content. So most people finish in somewhere between three and six months. Great. And so what jobs have you incorporated into the program that kind of fit that bucket that you said is important today, but also is going to be just as, if not more important, looking ahead? Yeah. Well, research shows that demand for data analytics skills is growing 15 times faster than the average demand for other skills. And we see it on the other side from people looking for new careers. The number of searches for how to become a data analyst was the number one search of any

how to become in the world. Really? Last year. Yeah. Love that. So of all things, apparently a lot of people want to become data analysts. And we can see the demand from the employer's side as well. So data analytics is one example.

And another good example, just a few months ago, we launched our cybersecurity certificate. And we all know, unfortunately, that cyber attacks keep happening. As a matter of fact, they grew 38% last year. So there's this giant gap between the number of cybersecurity jobs and the number of people who are already trained to do them. In the U.S., I think the number is 650,000 open jobs in cybersecurity. That does not surprise me one bit. I saw this research. It was like a year ago, and there's so many aspects of cybersecurity.

and one of them is insurance. And all of these insurance companies are losing money, quite frankly, because, well, one, it's a relatively new field, so they're trying to, I guess, still do the calculus around underwriting. But at the same time, it seems like, yeah, there aren't enough professionals,

also embedded within companies to figure out their cybersecurity posture. And so, yeah, it seems like just super open field for people to come in and learn this new skill. Yeah, and I mean, it's also, in addition to being a high-growth job field, it pays really well. I think the number in the world they're expecting to have a gap of about three and a half million open jobs. So plenty of opportunity for everyone. Yeah, it feels like

pretty much any business that is somewhat digital, which is basically becoming every business, has that kind of surface area for risk in the space. And so it doesn't surprise me that there's going to be millions of jobs missing here. Maybe one thing related to that is this question that I feel like a lot of operators within companies face, which is just as we see these gaps, should we skill people within our company? Should we take people who are missing those skills, but we know are all-stars and transition them? Or should we net new, hire people in? How do you think maybe people should be thinking about that within their companies, whether they should be upskilling or borrowing or, I guess, newly buying talent? I mean, in field like cybersecurity, there's so much

demand. There's just great opportunity for employers to do both, and we see people doing both with our career certificates. Even in the past two years, we've graduated over half million people into these fields. And it's a range. Even at Google, there's thousands of people upskilling themselves using the Google career certificates who just want to get into a different field. Maybe they want to become a U.X designer or they want to become a program manager. I think we're going to see a lot more of that. I'm curious to get your pulse on the college degree concept as a whole, and whether that is outdated, this idea of spending four years becoming proficient at one thing when we are talking about this idea that technology is moving so quickly. And I can say in my job, which,

you know, schedule an episode will record something. And then in some cases, if we wait too long, if we sit in our feet two months later, I'm like, can I publish this because things are moving so quickly. So then I position that with four years and I'm like, I don't know. What do you think about that? I think the days of learning everything you need to know for your career in a four year period are so far behind us. It's true for all of us, right? And that doesn't make the college degree any less valuable. But I also think that colleges and universities are realizing that they're needing to do more even within those four years to prepare people for the workforce. A good example is the University of Texas system.

There's a few hundred thousand students in the University of Texas system. It's outstanding. And they really realized that they wanted to use the Google Career Certificates and offer it to all of their students to help make them more employable at higher wages. And if you look at at like-cast data,

which is one of the best sources of workforce and labor market data, it actually says that if you complement a bachelor's degree, especially in liberal arts or humanities, with a high-quality industry-recognized credential, you will, in fact, become dramatically more employable at higher wages. And so it's really exciting to see what the UT system is doing, and even within a very short period of time,

I think there's 2,500 students at the UT system doing the Google Career Certificate Program on top of their degrees. That's amazing. It feels like maybe the natural question is also, is there ways that some of these larger organizations, whether it be the educators, or it could also be regulators,

like should there be something there in terms of how local officials or folks can work with companies to better understand this new dynamic that we're in? Yeah, I think one of the things that we're trying to do is work with all parts of the ecosystem. You and I started by talking about employers and I think the PWC survey,

four out of five CEOs, say that the number one inhibitor or one of the top few inhibitors to their growth is finding people with the skills they need. So there's the whole employer side. And then there's educators. We were just talking about colleges and universities. But in fact, if two-thirds of Americans are never going to get a college degree, we actually need to reach people when they're younger. And so we've started working with public school systems. One great example is in Anaheim, California. They, I think, have about 800 high school students doing the Google Career Certificate program as part of their high school curriculum. And we're seeing that as a bigger and bigger trend. And I think in different states, they're really trying to figure out how do we, improve the livelihoods of our population, but also how do we make sure that the employers who either are already in our state or the ones we want to attract know that we have the talent here in our state that will meet their needs? So it really is an ecosystem problem. One other thing

that you mentioned is that these are inherently asynchronous, right? They live online. These are courses. I'd love to get your take on that facet of education because historically, education has been quite synchronous. And now there's many different, as you said, experiments happening of different companies that are trying to put this education online. I mean, I was actually talking to someone yesterday and he was talking about how fascinating it is that several years ago, many of the universities like MIT put their courses online and everyone was like, wow, this is going to completely change the game because anyone with an internet connection can now go get a degree from MIT. They don't have the same student experience, but the information is there. And yet

In some way, it feels like maybe that hasn't met its expectation. But maybe there's a false understanding of what we're trying to achieve there. I mean, I think COVID really accelerated the acceptability of learning online. Yes. And it's for sure not perfect, but it actually has some advantages over other ways of learning. So in our program, we build behavioral science techniques right into the teaching. So I mentioned before, in order to earn the certificate, you actually have to prove mastery. So you have to get an 80% or higher on all the required assessments.

Yes. But most people actually don't pass a lot of the assessments the first time they try. And because we're doing it online, we have all these behavioral science techniques. Like we'll first reassure you, hey, Lisa, you didn't pass this time. But that's okay because most people don't pass this assessment on their first try. And then we can direct you directly back to the content that's related to the things that you missed. Right. So kind of like a personal tutor, if you will.

And AI is just going to improve all of those things more and more. I think it's never been more exciting, actually. There's more options than ever to teach yourself something you didn't know how to do and more options than ever to get a credible proof that you are capable of these skills. So for job seekers, I think the world is more open and there's more opportunity than ever. And for companies, too, actually, these skills gaps are not going away. There are definitely more jobs open than there are people's skilled to do them today. And I think that's going to force some openness on employers around who

they hire in a way that's actually really good. And I think education is adapting too. I think educators are looking for ways to improve the value to their students. And they're becoming more open to additional options like ours. I guess that is a surprise. Like if you would ask me a few years ago, would I think higher ed would embrace career credentials, even from an amazing place like Google, I would have said, I'm not so sure. It's not the way academia has worked in the past. But our experience is that people are more open than ever, and they're just trying to do the right things for their students. And if that includes partnering with other organizations or embracing additional credentials, a lot of them are really leaning into it. And I think that's really

exciting. I think it's good for everyone. And finally, we return to Kai. To discuss what people might think about reestablishing their skill set in the increasing sea of options out there, something that even Kai himself is exploring. As a learner also now thinking about what am I going to do next, I think it's important, ask yourself the question, why? Why am I learning this? What do I want to achieve? And then that will help inform for you what the skills are you need to acquire to get so. Yeah. And to your point, I really wouldn't underrate, even if folks have just like a side project they've always wanted to build, it doesn't need to be an occupation.

Whatever is closest to you actually taking action on that thing, even if you think, oh, it's not as revolutionary, it's not as new as some of the technologies out there, but you really just want to learn how to code a website using HTML, CSS JavaScript. Even though that doesn't sound, quote, innovative, if it's close to getting you on a path, you'll be surprised by how many different left turns, right turns,

you'll find along that path, versus trying the most innovative thing, which may seem not only daunting, but also just like not relevant to your life or your interests. Exactly right. And if you look at most of the jobs are not necessarily in the bleeding edge topics. Yes. But most of the jobs are driven at this point, even data analytics, cloud engineering. So those are still kind of some of the areas where there's the most interest. Anything you learn, it does build a foundational understanding and a sabbiness that we, will help you in the future. People tend to think about like what's going to get me the next job

and that's okay. But I would also see the benefit, the value in acquiring skills just because you find them interesting. I learned to code several years ago and I never planned and still do not plan to be a developer. But the random instances where it's come into play or just allowed me to take interest in other things has been so underrated. It allows you to understand things better. And often things that you wouldn't even been able to. I mean, we see this, we've developed this, what we call discovery and fluency content, which is really kind of this entry-level content that's supposed to give you fluency, because, again, everything is becoming more interconnected.

I was asked recently by someone in terms of our product focus, whether we're going to branch out in different areas. And I said, like, what area are we supposed to branch out? Technology is going to be everywhere. Like, tell me something that we should branch out. to that's not fueled ultimately by technology. And this trend is only going to continue. Yeah, I love that you use the term fluency as well.

The same way that written, spoken literacy was extremely important for humans to interact and participate effectively, I do think there's an element, a parallel element of tech literacy, of understanding that space and being able to communicate with it, even if you don't have a headline title on your LinkedIn that says, I'm a machine learning engineer, that baseline understanding is only going to become more important. What's really interesting is we see that, when I mentioned our government clients earlier, we have a lot of large government clients where there's an understanding that for a country, it's essential to have a tax-savvy population and to have a population that speaks tech

and that understands tech. And that's something for me that I'm sometimes a bit worried about is in Europe, do we have that mindset that we're really pushing this enough that our populations speak enough tech to just have access to where the world is moving to? Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And I think it'll be interesting to see that even as a data point, right? Like, I'm not sure exactly how you codify that,

but the same way that countries were tracking literacy rates, how do you track tech literacy? I think that's a great place to end off. And thank you for helping not just people, in the United States or Europe, but worldwide to get access to that, because I think that's one of the most essential ingredients to better someone's life. Thank you very much. All right, that is all for today's episode. Look, I know this episode did take some twists and turns, but I hope it shows just how much opportunity there is to rethink every layer of the stack,

whether it's upleveling your own skills or rethinking your education or vetting systems, or how not just companies, but entire countries, need to rethink competition. By the way, if you know anyone already working in some of these new roles, think the next decade's equivalent of the UX designers or social media managers of the last decade, let us know. So if you know a prompt engineer or a digital fashion designer or any job that most people have not heard of, email us at potpitches at a16.com and let's kick some butt in 2024. Thank you.