My physical therapist and I recently got onto the topic of AI, and he asked what every parent wants to know: What will this mean for my kids?
His kids are in middle school, and it’s not easy to predict what the world will look like when they get their first professional jobs. But there are some bets that are a lot safer than others.
Skilled trades and healthcare services that require a human touch, like physical therapy, are one good bet. So one option is to follow in their dad’s footsteps. The other is to lean into learning durable skills—things like communication, creativity, and collaboration—and keep their options wide open. Formal education is a great way to develop those skills, but so too are work, sports, extra curricular activities, and just life experience.
Making that bet is one that’s always been a winner. Durable skills are less about what you know, and more about how you learn and work in the world. They involve things like self management, working with others, and generating ideas. They cross every imaginable career, and as the name implies, they’re skills that should serve you well no matter what AI-fueled world ultimately serves up.
They’re durable. And that’s of huge value in any period of great change. But such skills are particularly valuable as we move into the age of AI—precisely because they encompass the kinds of things that machines still can’t do for people. At their most basic, they’re people-to-people skills.
We’ve been talking about the importance of durable skills—whether they go by the name soft skills, power skills, human skills, or emotional intelligence—for decades. And groups like America Succeeds have invested heavily in bringing together what we know about durable skills from across schools, colleges, and the workplace.
So, what’s really different about today?
First, the urgency around AI and how it will change work is both new and justified. We don’t know exactly what this change will look like, especially when it comes to the impacts of fast-developing generative AI, but it’s already reshaping jobs in industries like tech and finance—and most experts believe much bigger change is on the horizon.
“Much of the tactical work, the efficient work, is going to be able to be done through automations—through AI, through technology—and so what's left for humans to do is to deal with other humans,” Candice Faktor, co-founder of Disco, a community-building platform, said at a major edtech conference recently.
Low-wage workers in particular are vulnerable to being displaced by different forms of AI, from machine learning to robotics. Workers earning less than about $38K a year are 14X more likely to lose their jobs to all types of automation. These workers are disproportionately women and people of color. Helping them develop durable skills—or demonstrate ones they already have—in order to transition into new roles will be critical to both their well-being and to healthy businesses.
“You can squeeze out better earnings by cutting development budgets or not focusing there, but over time it'll catch up with you,” Stephen Bailey, CEO of ExecOnline, said at the same conference. “You're going to be outcompeted by the companies that do make those investments."
The second reason this moment is different is that we have more tools, many of them AI-powered, to cultivate and assess durable skills. For instance, chatbots and virtual reality can provide interactive practice for improving communication and interpersonal skills. A growing number of services are specifically designed to use conversational AI to help users build emotional intelligence and self-awareness. AI language models can also provide feedback on written communication, while other types of AI can listen or watch a learner perform a task and give feedback.
These tools are particularly useful when incorporated early in the learning process, when people are just beginning to practice a new skill or use it in a new situation. An AI model can provide immediate feedback in a way that a teacher or faculty member may not be able to.
Advanced data analytics and modern assessments also offer more powerful ways to define and measure durable skills.
It is somewhat ironic then that just as durable skills are having their moment, the educational offering that has long been expected to develop them—the four-year degree—has fallen out of favor. Employers are no longer content to rely on the degree as a proxy for skill and, instead, are looking for other ways to measure what candidates know and can do. For many students, though, forgoing a bachelor’s degree would be a mistake. A broad education in the liberal arts isn’t the perfect proxy anymore, but it still remains a great way to develop durable skills.
It is not, however, the only way. Nor is it the most accessible way, especially for frontline workers with families to support. I’ve long maintained that you can teach critical thinking alongside coding just as easily as you can teach it alongside Chaucer. It’s not so much what you teach, as how you teach it.
And that perhaps is my strongest piece of advice to my physical therapist’s children. In the age of AI, don’t focus too much on what you learn. Focus on how you learn.
