Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Career education is a vital pipeline to high demand jobs in the workforce. Students from all walks of life benefit from the opportunity to pursue their career education goals and find new employment opportunities. Join Dr. Jason Altmire, President and CEO of Career Education Colleges and Universities (CECU), as he discusses the issues and innovations affecting postsecondary career education. Twice monthly, he and his guests discuss politics, business, and current events impacting education and public policy.
Jason Altmire [00:00:00]:
Hello and welcome to another edition of Career Education Report. I'm Jason Altmire. We're in our fourth year now doing this podcast and have developed a loyal audience and we often get questions and requests for topics to be discussed and the two most requested topics always. People want to know more about artificial intelligence, of course. And people want to know about workforce development, filling the skills gap. And we have a guest today that is an expert in both and is leading the way for a very large company. She is Lydia Logan. She is IBM's global vice president for Education and workforce development, working in their corporate social responsibility department.
Jason Altmire [00:00:50]:
And she's the global lead for IBM's education and workforce development initiatives. And as part of this, we're going to talk about their work with artificial intelligence. But I think just to talk a little bit more about her background, she's an education expert. She has over 25 years of experience across education. She's worked for nonprofit organizations, large foundations, the Chamber of Commerce. She worked for Verizon Innovation Learning Schools initiative, which provided hundreds of under resourced public schools with technology and just has an incredible background, the perfect background to talk about this. So, Lydia, thank you so much for being with us.
Lydia Logan [00:01:33]:
Well, Jason, thank you so much for having me. This is a really important conversation. Hot topics today.
Jason Altmire [00:01:39]:
Absolutely. Yeah. Maybe to get started. You of course have been working on Skills Build, which is an IBM initiative. And I've seen it referred to many times. I've seen you speak about it, maybe talk to the audience, just give an overview of what is IBM Skills Build initiative.
Lydia Logan [00:01:59]:
IBM Skills Build is IBM signature education and workforce development program. We offer it around the world in multiple languages, up to 20 languages in fact. And we have up to 1,000 different learning experiences, everything from short form learning all the way up to full courses and certificates. We made a commitment to skill 30 million people by 2030 and 2 million people in AI by the end of 2026. And the primary way we're reaching out to people around the world who need these new skills, AI and workforce development, preparing for the workforce is through our program. So we do that in a variety of ways. We have some partners who are helping to deliver the program and then we have other partners who send their learners to some of our training programs that we work on with partners. So there are multiple ways people can access it.
Lydia Logan [00:02:55]:
You can also, as an individual, just sign up, create an account and start learning for free. So we wanted to make it as accessible as possible for anyone who's interested in gaining some new skills.
Jason Altmire [00:03:08]:
And it is important to Reinforce that you are global in scope, worldwide in the activities that you do. You know, when I read your website and I read the materials and have heard you talk about it, there's a constant reference to the skills first approach, which is the way you go about it. But what exactly does that mean? What's the importance of a skills first approach?
Lydia Logan [00:03:31]:
Well, traditionally, most employers and most jobs have preferenced people who have a degree. And really that's not the way that work ought to happen. That's not the way that applicants should have to put themselves forward in order to show they're qualified for a job. Degrees are important, by all means. So let's not walk away thinking that, you know, we're not interested in degrees, but there are a lot of people who have some college and no degree, who have a lot of work experience and no degree, who have completed additional career training programs. Those may be certificate programs and not degrees, and they're highly qualified to do a lot of different kinds of work. With skills and technology changing all the time, lifelong learning is really where it is. And it's more about acquiring skills and demonstrating what you know and are able to do than it is about having a degree which shows that you know how to learn but may become obsolete a few years after you earn it.
Lydia Logan [00:04:35]:
So lifelong learning, making sure that you're continuing to learn, that you're focusing on acquiring new skills and earning digital credentials and certificates and things that can show your employer or potential employers what you know and are able to do, that's really the skills first approach. And more and more employers are saying degrees are great, but we need ways to assess people on their ability, what they know. And so certificates and digital credentials and skills first rather than degree first is really what that's all about.
Jason Altmire [00:05:09]:
For many people, when they think about artificial intelligence AI, they think of it really in the same way they think about Google. I would venture to say most people, right, you go to ChatGPT or any of the other sites and you ask your question, or maybe say, I'm giving a speech and can you give me some ideas, whatever it might be, or I'm doing a project, but it's so much more than that. And, and, and you talk about filling the AI skills gap again worldwide. You mentioned that IBM has a commitment to train 2 million learners in AI by 2026. And of course, we're in 2025 right now. How, how are you going about doing that? That sounds very ambitious.
Lydia Logan [00:05:50]:
Well, we do it with partners. Some of them are other companies or partners. We've got Salesforce and work that we've done with Cisco. Some of it's through coalitions. A lot of it is through making sure that skills build is available. But when we think about AI and the skills you need, we talk a lot about AI specifically, but there are a lot of related skills and a lot of related relevance that people need to make sure they're connecting. Some of that is thinking about cybersecurity. So do you understand how important it is to keep your personal information safe? How hackers and some bad actors who are out there might be using loopholes in technology or using your information in ways that are not to your benefit? So you need to understand cybersecurity and your role in keeping yourself and the organization you work for, whether that's a school or an employer safe.
Lydia Logan [00:06:44]:
You need to understand some about data and data management and data analytics and security, how people are using data and AI. So those things we think about sort of as a suite of skills and information, people need to at least have foundational knowledge. When you talk about AI like Google, a lot of people, like you said, think about it as an enhanced search, but it can do so much more. And we say AI won't take your job, but people who know how to use it might. And that's why we get back to the skills conversation and why it's so important for people to acquire the new skills. What understanding what AI is and how to apply it in their everyday lives and workplace.
Jason Altmire [00:07:24]:
And then I think over the past two years since AI has become so much more visible to people, I've seen a difference in understanding of that. There was a lot of concern about the jobs that would be lost as a result of AI, and there will be workforce restructuring as a result for certain type of jobs. But I think now people are understanding that if you know how to use AI, if you can use it efficiently and effectively, it's actually going to be a job creator, A net job creator. Can. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Lydia Logan [00:07:57]:
I think that's absolutely right. You know, we've done surveys with CEOs through our Institute for Business Value. 80% or more of them say that, you know, jobs are shifting as a result of the new technology. As a. As a result of AI, people will need reskilling. Some jobs may shrink, but other parts of jobs will grow and whole new jobs that some we've never even thought about will be created. So this is a big technological shift. I think people really need to lean in, understand prompting and successive prompting and how you get the answer that you want.
Lydia Logan [00:08:31]:
How you really leverage this technology to create some efficiencies. You know, generative AI, depending on the tool you're using, can help record calls, take notes, create action lists, and give them back to you so that you can edit them, review them, which is a really important step. Right. You don't necessarily want to take it as is the first cut. You want to have that human layer on top where you're reviewing it before you're just executing with it. So figuring out how to use generative AI as a way to become more efficient, taking notes, doing some basic research, assisting with, you know, creating outlines or drafts of things. There's lots of generative AI now that can create images for you. If you weren't great at creating slide presentations, there are generative AI tools that will do that for you and create a first cut.
Lydia Logan [00:09:21]:
So all of the things that take up sort of administrative time for us are becoming automated in ways that really will allow us to spend time with other humans and use that creativity time, the team time, using design thinking. How are we using our creative skills and putting our time there rather than into the administrative pieces that can be automated?
Jason Altmire [00:09:46]:
There are so many examples of that, individual examples, real people who've been impacted by that. And I was struck by one. I hope you know the example I'm referring to. It was an adult learner, a student who turned AI digital credentials into a job at a Fortune 500 company. And I found that one to be compelling.
Lydia Logan [00:10:06]:
Absolutely. Jamauri Bynum-Bridgewater was a recent graduate of Grambling State, which is a historically black college and university. He was interested in getting a job. It's a competitive job market out there. And he discovered Skills Build through one of the programs that we were doing collaboratively with his institution. He took and completed seven courses, earned seven credits, credentials, beefed up his resume. When he got out there, employers where he was seeking positions were so impressed that he was really being proactive about staying on top of the latest trends and skills that he was able to land a job with a Fortune 500 company. He's just one example.
Lydia Logan [00:10:50]:
I actually met a student who had no idea that I was the person whose team ran Skills Build. And he was telling me about the job he had found after stumbling on Skills Build, earning some credentials, and then landing a job. So while we do have these great stories that we know about, there's so many more that we don't know. But I think what people need to be aware of is a lot of employers want people who are proactive about staying on top of trends, who will show that they will put in the time and the effort and that they are interested in learning and staying competitive. Earning these digital credentials is one way to signal that to an employer. And the fact that we can offer them from IBM for free is really a tremendous value to people because often some programs are really expensive. You may not have the $15,000, even $1,500 to take some of these courses. Start with us.
Lydia Logan [00:11:46]:
There are plenty of things that you know you can do at higher and higher levels that may require you to pay. But I always say don't pay for something you can get at high quality for free.
Jason Altmire [00:11:56]:
That's good advice in life generally, I think, after they've taken the course, the free aspect of it. Is there some sort of connection that exists to employers or some assistance in job search and how to do something with the credential that you've earned?
Lydia Logan [00:12:13]:
Sure. We do have different partnerships that help people get fed into different kinds of applicant pools. They're not in every single country and every single sector that where we offer training. But we do our best to make sure that people are able to share their credentials. We have a partnership with Credly, and so it's easy to share their credentials, post them on LinkedIn, forward them, and point them out to potential employers. So we do some assistance and then we make it as easy as possible for people to do that on their end as well.
Jason Altmire [00:12:46]:
You talked about partnerships, external partnerships, and there's so many, but one that I was interested in. And I think our listeners, given that we're career colleges, generally our listeners, there are new opportunities for community college students to earn credentials and data analytics in cybersecurity. How does that program work?
Lydia Logan [00:13:08]:
So we worked with a leading nonprofit that looks at education and workforce development called Jobs for the Future, and did a landscape analysis to see where were there some gaps where IBM could really play a role in using our expertise, our talent, and our technology to help close those gaps. And what we found, in addition to what the policymakers were telling us, that we had a national job shortage at the time of around 700,000 open cybersecurity jobs. People didn't know where to start. And often the job training programs are starting at a level that was too high for job switchers. So we worked with four community college systems to create, with their advice and input, a data analytics certificate and a cybersecurity certificate. So that's the Alabama Community College System in California, the Bay Area Community College Consortium, the Colorado Community College System and the Louisiana Community and Technical College System. And what they found was these two certificates were a great foundation for people who wanted to make the transition into these two fields and needed a place to get started. We had them reviewed by the American Council on Education, and our cybersecurity certificate comes with eight recommended college credits, and the other one is 12 recommended college credits.
Lydia Logan [00:14:39]:
So when you're looking at somebody who's also on a path to earning an associate's degree, that's a great opportunity for them if that's where they want to start. But we felt like it was really important for us to help people get started on paths to real jobs that are part of our national security effort and also make sure that that we were helping people get into places where the jobs were available and in demand with the right skills, using the right partners.
Jason Altmire [00:15:11]:
When you look at your website, you see a lot of examples of student success and programs. But I saw a lot of reference to individual contributors, the concept of individual contributors, and a lot of reference to quantum skills, which are topics and ideas that maybe are new to people. What are individual contributors and what are quantum skills?
Lydia Logan [00:15:38]:
So let's take those two separately. I think individual contributors are people who are not necessarily managing a whole team of people. They're people who may work on their own or who may be a member of a team, and they've got a role to play. And we use assistance. I mentioned a little bit about some of the automation, but there are ways that they can use AI and generative AI to do their work in a faster and more efficient way, again so that they can participate in the job market. If you look at where things are going, we went from like you mentioned, search using something like Google or using a search engine. It gives you the answers, but then you've got to read everything. You have to summarize everything.
Lydia Logan [00:16:26]:
You've got to do it on your own. Now we move to generative AI. You can talk to these large language models and with generative AI, create a prompt in regular conversational English and it'll give you back the summary, not just the result, result of the search, but actually summarize all that information for you. That's what starts to get us into assistance. In the next wave that we'll see are agents. These agents are not only able to do this, the research and the summarizing for you, but then act on it. Act on the choices that you're making. Right.
Lydia Logan [00:17:05]:
If you think about trying to book a trip, there are sites that you can go to and they'll give you all the choices. With agents, they'll be able to give you the choices. You tell it the one you want, it books the flight for you. You don't even have to do that on your own. There are large amounts of data and speed with which we're doing some of these tasks and crunching numbers and doing, you know, high mathematical encrypted data encryption and other kinds of things. With Quantum coming that will be sped up. So we're looking at, we're on the precipice of a wave and it's all moving very quickly. So we've started using assistants, we're moving into using agents and creating agents.
Lydia Logan [00:17:48]:
And then we'll move into an era where quantum is even doing more compute power possible faster to solve some of the biggest, most intractable problems that we have in society.
Jason Altmire [00:17:59]:
And I thought that was a good place to close on that topic. As you're aware, you know, in education, one of the problems with education historically has been that we're training and educating people for jobs that were here yesterday or even at best, jobs that are here today. With very little thought about the evolution of the workforce. You're looking with, with the concept of quantum skills, the fact that it's going to grow in demand and there's going to be a steady advance in technology and it might be scary to some. We're talking about AI. It's still relatively unknown. A new concept to people, but upskilling the sort you're talking about doesn't end with AI. Are going to be new waves of technology and new things in the future.
Jason Altmire [00:18:46]:
Talk about how you are adjusting to that more futuristic view, the evolution of these tasks.
Lydia Logan [00:18:53]:
Yeah, I think start with where you are today. Learn something, lean in. I think there are a lot of people who are concerned about some of the fear mongering that they've heard in the press about how AI is going to take over. But it really can start to make your everyday life easier at home and at work. And so through Skills Build, you can take some foundational courses, you can watch some videos and understand what it is and how you can use it in ways that are fun and interesting. We have a cybersecurity game that people can play that gives them an idea about threat hunting. So it really is starting to get familiar with the concepts and the tools and starting to understand how you can use it. You can go to skillsbuild.org and create your account.
Lydia Logan [00:19:41]:
You can participate in some of the webinars and things that we have to offer, but my advice is become a lifelong learner. Technology is continuing to evolve. It's going to require all of us to move beyond the high school degree, the associate's degree, the college degree, whatever degree it is we have. You're always going to be learning in order to keep up. Now's a great time to jump in.
Jason Altmire [00:20:03]:
And if somebody wanted to get in touch with you or your team or learn more about IBM Skills Build, how would they do it?
Lydia Logan [00:20:10]:
Yeah, they absolutely can come to our website. There are lots of answers there. They also can connect with me on LinkedIn. My profile is there. And I'll give a shout out to Sonia Malik on my team, who leads a lot of our course development and content development. We're always interested in hearing from people about what it is that they want to learn and how we can offer more. But get started. Come to skillsbuild.org, create your account, start learning, keep up with the trend and prepare for tomorrow.
Jason Altmire [00:20:43]:
Our guest has been Lydia Logan, the IBM Global Vice President for Education and Workforce Development. Thank you for being with us, Lydia.
Lydia Logan [00:20:51]:
Thank you, Jason. This has been a pleasure.
Jason Altmire [00:21:01]:
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Career Education Report. Subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. For more information, visit our website at career.org and follow us on Twitter at CecuEd. That's CecuEd. Thank you for listening.