Dear Higher Ed, Employers Are Talking

Dear Higher Ed,

For as long as I’ve worked in education, whether in teaching, policy, or now higher education journalism, there has been a long distance between what employers want and what colleges actually teach. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is bound to make that distance even longer if colleges and universities don’t teach students how to use it—especially in North Carolina. Employers here have all but set aside fears of machines becoming self-aware and dived headlong into AI adoption. 

North Carolina, in fact, has become something of an epicenter for AI. In early September, Chapel Hill hosted the G20 Innovation Ministerial, which brought OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to town. Duke University is building a new computing facility, set to open next year, to support research using AI. In June, the Wall Street Journal profiled Zain Lakhani, the 23-year-old chief AI officer at Raleigh-based Pendo,  a burgeoning digital services outfit. He has since reshaped how Pendo interviews software engineering candidates and is preparing the company’s 780 employees for wider AI adoption. 

The Triangle Business Journal—which boasts a “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” category on its website and to which I reluctantly bought a subscription just to write this essay—recently ran the headline, “Triangle Execs: For Job Seekers, AI Fluency Is the New Advantage.” 

Its opening line reads: “Job seekers need to embrace artificial intelligence — and sooner rather than later,” citing executives at several Triangle-based companies. 

One of those executives was Anke Kokrhoun, head of human resources for Siemens Electrification and Automation USA, who also answered a few questions I sent her about what employers expect from college graduates. 

Kokrhoun told me that Siemens is looking for, among other things, “digital fluency” and “the ability to work effectively with AI and alongside emerging technology.” 

She recommended that college students become familiar with as many commercially available large language models as possible, including “Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.” More important than learning any one tool, she added, “is the ability to learn and adapt as new AI tools are constantly being released.” 

The rapid rate of AI adoption by some of the state’s most prominent employers has obvious implications for higher education, which has long sold itself as the gateway into the workforce. This is especially true for institutions in the Research Triangle, whose graduates may well remain in North Carolina to—if AI doesn’t take every job—work. If employers increasingly demand AI skills, then colleges must consider how the degrees they grant students will remain relevant in the coming years. 

And, frankly, universities have very little time to determine how they shall remain relevant as employers are already looking beyond college graduates to fill available jobs. 

For example, at an August roundtable sponsored by Western Governors University, ApprenticeshipNC director Chris Harrington argued that Americans need to abandon the assumption that everyone should attend college. Nate Denny, secretary of North Carolina’s Department of Information Technology, said his agency relies on apprenticeships and internships to fill positions. 

And it’s not just graduates of technical fields who will need AI skills. 

Asked about humanities and liberal arts graduates, Kokrhoun acknowledged the value of creative writing and critical thinking but emphasized that those skills will be useful in discovering “new and original ways of applying AI tools.” 

“At Siemens, we do not necessarily hire for ‘AI experts’ in every position,” Kokrhoun said. “Instead, we are looking for people who can learn continuously, work alongside digital tools, and adapt as technology evolves.” 

Never mind the we must beat China refrain; higher education is concerned with student cheating and cognitive offloading, problems made worse by already low academic standards. So, many academics are debating what to do with AI. 

Mark McNeilly, in the first essay of this series, recommended requiring AI literacy in general education, preferably during students’ first semester, and then expanding that instruction to how AI is used in their respective disciplines through courses in their majors. The University of Chicago Law School, on the other hand, banned AI and electronic devices from its core first-year courses. 

Employers, however, aren’t waiting for academia to finish its deliberations. 

Even if it means students will have to do even less thinking for themselves, colleges and universities have little choice but to incorporate some kind of AI instruction into their curricula if they want to remain relevant to employers and continue selling themselves as pathways to good jobs.

Efficiently yours,
Jared Gould