"I cannot think of very many job roles where AI will not be needed at all over the coming decade"

Kathleen deLaski, an expert in the future of education, is the founder of Education Design Lab and one of the leaders of the Project on Workforce at Harvard University, which works to align educational pathways with the labor market of the future. DeLaski took part in the 1st International Forum on Skills Intelligence (IFSI) in postsecondary and higher education, organized by the UOC. According to DeLaski, digital skills in artificial intelligence and the ability to analyze data are becoming essential to securing employment in today’s world.

What prompted you to switch careers from TV political reporter to working in the field of academic education?

As the field of journalism changed in the 1990s towards a more partisan approach and a 24-hour news cycle, I found it harder to practice objective, well-researched journalism. I actually took a few side steps as a political appointee in government and as a consumer tech product developer at an early internet company (AOL) before being asked to work as an executive at a student lending company, which is where I first encountered the fascinating issues of college/university access.

Have your journalist and Pentagon spokesperson roles influenced your subsequent career in education?

Absolutely, in my journalism career, I spent a lot of time meeting families for whom government policies were not working, in health care, the justice system, disaster relief, race relations... With so many opportunities to research the unmet needs of society, you gain an understanding of broken systems that are not optimized for "end users". Post-secondary education, in the US at least, suffers from being optimized for institutions, not students, and the traditions of a 375-year-old model – that's just the US; it's a thousand-year-old model if we go back to Bologna. At the Pentagon I learned a lot about how to navigate through bureaucracies during crises and periods of policy innovation (I was there just as the Cold War was ending).

What were your objectives when you founded the Education Design Lab and how has it evolved?

The objective was to start a national non-profit that could help universities and colleges design new and shorter-term learning models to meet the needs of learners and employers. Over time, much of the interest was coming from two-year colleges, known as community colleges in the US. They had lost one third of their enrolment over the past decade. They had a lot of trust from their communities, they were very affordable, but they were mainly offering degree models and transfer pathways, which fewer students, over time, were signing up for or completing. Today, community colleges in the US are responsible for much of the comeback of college enrolment, because of workers, learners and secondary students. A hundred community colleges are working with the Education Design Lab to design "micro-pathways" with their regional employers.

What are we talking about when we talk about skills intelligence and why is it an emerging concept in the field of education?

I equate skills intelligence with skills "visibility" for the learner and the employer. Others see it from a data and policy approach to help us discern gaps in the labour market that can be addressed by new pathway design and incentives to attract workers to jobs where shortages exist. Either way, skills is a much better way to measure needs of markets than the old way, which was less granular: looking at degrees, and at trade jobs vs. university jobs. This system also recognizes the blurring of the lines that technology has caused.

Are degrees a thing of the past or on the way to becoming obsolete? If so, why?

No, I don’t believe degrees are going away. I say in my new book, Who Needs College Anymore?, that about 30% of the market will continue to seek degrees, largely because licensing for certain job roles requires it. In the US, examples would be medical doctor, registered nurse, lawyer, therapist. But for many other roles, we see employers removing degree requirements, although for now, they still are tending to hire folks with degrees. My projection is US-focused, where students are turning away from degrees because of cost, foremost, but also concerns about relevance.

What skills are the most needed in today’s working environments?

ChatGPT answers this question the same way I would, citing digital literacy and AI fluency, and data analysis and data literacy. I would add that to get hired in this era, job applicants need to be able to demonstrate how they can use these tools in the context of workplace tasks in their discipline or sector.

Are there any common skills that are useful across sectors/disciplines?

The skill of "project management" is getting a lot of attention right now as we think about the growing importance of workers being about to manage information and input from many sources, including in the near future, the work of programmed bots. Critical thinking is also much discussed, as we all increasingly have to work harder to separate fact from fiction. The other "soft" or "durable" skills, such as creative problem-solving and empathy gain more importance in a world where human tasks move to a higher order, requiring synthesis, decision-making, and advocacy, communication.

How are AI and digital technologies in general changing the way we learn and educate?

I believe educators have moved past the "denial" phase of trying to keep AI out of their classrooms, and are now grappling with how to "flip the script", helping students figure out what to do with the knowledge and task completion tools at their fingertips. This includes guiding students through discovery and insights and implementation phases to interact with the ideas, outcomes, solutions. I'm a big fan of using "design thinking", which I teach at George Mason University, for this.

Do we need to train all our students in AI so they can succeed in tomorrow's work market?

Yes. I cannot think of very many job roles where AI will not be needed at all over the coming decade. My daughter is a professional ballerina, who apprenticed rather than going to university. Maybe she doesn't need it for her job, but she will likely be using it soon throughout her personal life. AI is becoming a consumer tool at the same rate it is becoming a workplace tool.

What are the goals of the Project on Workforce at Harvard University and how can it help to tackle the college-to-career gap?

What's cool about the Project on Workforce is that it is an interdisciplinary, collaborative project between the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, the Harvard Business School, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. As a graduate of the School of Government, I don't know of many initiatives at universities that traverse that breadth of disciplines and it really benefits the graduate students from all three schools, who get to work together. The Project produces basic and applied research at the intersection of the education and labour markets for leaders in business, education, and policy. Our mission is to chart the course for a post-secondary system of the future that creates better pathways to economic mobility.

What is your approach to the International Forum on Skills Intelligence (IFSI) in Post-Secondary & Higher Education and why do you think is it important?

Real time data capability is one of the top three capacities that workforce and education institutions or ecosystems require in order to create the skills visibility system we need to keep pace with the rate of change in today's and tomorrow's labour markets.