Technology skills for the next generation
And how to learn those skills.
I'd consider my household "tech-forward." My spouse and I have both worked in the tech industry, so technology has been an integral part of our adult lives. Our house is full of Amazon Alexa devices and smart plugs. My kids enjoy video games and use school-issued Chromebooks.
I've thought a lot about the technology my kids will use in the future and the skills they might need. But there are a lot of unknowns. Back in college, I thought having a laptop in my dorm room was a big deal. But iPhones didn't exist yet, and social media wasn't part of my vocabulary. Even two years ago, artificial intelligence seemed like a futuristic concept. I knew that it might be embedded in products I might use, but never considered the technology would be something I would interact with directly.
The breakneck pace has a lot of people wondering. My oldest is 15 — a few years away from finishing high school — and my youngest is seven. It reminds me of the distinction between myself and my younger brother, who is six years my junior. I didn't have my own cell phone until I was 21, and didn't have a smartphone until I was 27. But his relationship with cell phones, and certainly smartphones, started much younger since the iPhone was released while he was still in high school.
I listened to a podcast that recapped an experience from "The Curve" — an AI conference in Berekely, California. One of the attendees interviewed said that they had stopped saving for retirement because they are convinced that once artificial general intelligence (AGI) arrives, money will have no meaning.
I'm definitely not at the point where I'm going to give up on my 401(k). But I wonder about the role of traditional colleges, what the future workforce will look like, and what skills my kids might need — and how they will acquire those skills.
What the schools are teaching
My high schooler is learning how to use ChatGPT in the classroom. I've seen the prompts (created by the school), and they are impressively specific. They're using ChatGPT to get feedback on assignments, but in a way that's constructive. For example, my teen might drop in a paper they're working on along with the grading rubric, and ChatGPT could suggest ways to improve the paper
Meanwhile, a friend of mine is a college professor and struggling with how her students are using AI. The students are essentially on their own: there's no university-wide approach and each professor defines the acceptable uses of AI in their classrooms. Students turn in assignments and papers that are obviously generated by AI.
How AI should be used is an ongoing conversation among educators right now. The current crop of college students lack some of the fundamental skills that younger students are learning about AI.
In one of my school papers, I cited a new-ish website called Wikipedia. I didn't know much about it, but it seemed like an excellent resource. My teacher knew nothing about the website and accepted the citation. Today (and, undoubtedly, even shortly after I turned in my paper), teachers would demand that students track down the original source. But that's the never-ending struggle with technology: at the moment, we are all learning.
A few decades ago, people would include their typing speed on resumes, because it wasn't an assumed skill. Back when I was in high school, I had to take a typing class. My kids' elementary school issues Chromebooks in first grade. They learn some of the formalities of typing in 7th grade, but it's 10 minutes at the start of class over the course of a "quarter." My current 7th grader says, "I never follow [the skills taught]," and my high schooler says, "I have my own method." Neither considers typing a skill they have to "learn" because using computers has been a natural part of their entire existence.
Learning AI "skills" at school may be entirely different when my 7-year-old reaches high school, seven years from now. My kids are the current version of the "in flux" generation, much like my own relationship with a smartphone versus my brother.
My brother and his wife have kids under 5 years old. At the current speed of development and integration into everyday life, I'm sure their experiences and interactions with AI will be entirely different than my own kids.
What we are learning at home
There's no doubt in my mind that that AI will become an expected skill in the future workforce. Right now, it might be a skill listed on a resume, but eventually, it will become a baseline assumption.
The in-between generation is the one that has the hardest time as technology emerges and people don't keep up. Early in my career, I spent many years as a software trainer. Banks and credit unions would purchase the product and I would teach employees how to use it. Some people would catch on quickly and could fly through the software after being shown once. Others could barely double-click a mouse. The struggle was ongoing. Since the bank/credit union had decided to invest in the software, everyone was expected to use it. Waiting around for everyone to "catch up" came at a cost.
The in-between generation may not learn these skills in school, because they're going through classes while the technology is being released. People who are uncomfortable with new software products likely never (or rarely) used software in school and at home. My kids use new software in the classroom all the time.
But I recognize that schools may not be enough for my own kids as AI continues to permeate how we interact with technology. It becomes a learning gap: this micro-generation of tweens to college-aged students will have to learn some AI skills on their own.
In an effort to preserve my own sanity, I've told my older two kids that they need to add their own events to our family Google calendar. But my immediate thought was, "What if they add an event in the future and then forget to tell me about it?" I don't want to look at the day's calendar and be surprised by something.
So I set up an automation (through Zapier) that sends me an email notification if events are added by my kids. My 15-year-old was immediately intrigued by the possibilities. They wanted to know how it worked, so I explained APIs. I could see the lightbulbs turning, as my 15-year-old wondered aloud if automation would work to help them keep track of some assigned schoolwork in a Google Sheet. (Answer: probably yes).
I'm not going to set up some kind of specific learning "curriculum" for my kids at home. But it's the conversations we continue to have about automation and AI — as a technology-loving family that sometimes discusses AI at the dinner table — that will hopefully fill part of that gap.
