Andrew Seaman: From the way people apply for jobs and hiring managers, screen applicants, to the actual kind of roles available, AI is reshaping every aspect of getting hired today. AI-powered tools hold enormous promise for job seekers, but they also pose some potential challenges. So how should you be thinking about your career in the context of AI? Well, whether you’re just starting out, looking to pivot or trying to climb the ladder, we’re getting into all of that on today’s show.
From LinkedIn News, this is Get Hired, a podcast for the ups and downs and the ever-changing landscape of our professional lives. I’m Andrew Seaman, LinkedIn senior managing editor for Jobs and Career Development, bringing you conversations with people who like me, want to see you succeed at work, at home, and everywhere in between. Joining me today is Joseph Fuller. He’s a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and the co-leader of the Managing the Future of Work Initiative.
Professor Fuller is an expert on what’s known as the skill gap in the US labor force, which is the space between the current skills of the US workforce and the skills needed to get work done. He’s written extensively about policy solutions to address it. We met up at the Walmart Opportunity Summit in Washington DC to discuss how AI is changing the nature of work and hiring. I kicked off our conversation by asking why it’s so important to be thinking about the role of new technologies in the future of work right now.
Can you tell us a little bit about what you think of today’s gathering and what you hope people will get out of it?
Joseph Fuller: Well, I think today’s gathering actually is a bit of a recognition that the way large companies particularly have been approaching challenges in the labor market need a refresh and a rethink. People are executing as best as they know how the old playbook and the old playbooks just, they’re not moving the ball at the rate they feel they need to in terms of cultivating the right skills base, having more agile workforce. And there’s some bedrock assumptions on which a lot of hiring has been made and talent sourcing is made that the American K through 12 system will consistently create large numbers of people who are work ready, that the post-secondary sector is going to create people with relevant job skills.
It does, but 44% of college graduates end up underemployed when they graduate. So there’s just a lot of warning signs, and I think you get this many very prominent companies sending very senior people to something like this. It’s more than just an active contributing to the commons and trying to do the right thing. It’s an expression of business necessity.
Andrew: Well, what do you think about this moment overall, especially with the arrival of AI because we’re seeing the companies talk about skills, but with the specter of this huge technological shift? So how do you think people in the workforce who feel maybe like cogs on a wheel, how should they view this moment?
Joseph: Well, in terms of AI, AI is really the culmination of an arc of technological development we’ve seen over the last 20 years. As many people understand, AI of different forms has existed for a long time. Generative AI though is this capstone development and it’s going to be different than previous technologies in so much as it has a couple of features. One is it’s an augmentative technology by which would mean it allows people to do elements of their job very well. It’s not an automation technology where just one for one you install the software in this case and the job goes away.
It also is asymmetrically oriented toward knowledge workers and higher wage workers. Most technological revolutions have more or less addressed middle skills worker, lower wage workers, the bottom end of the white collar distribution. So this is going to very much affect different populations that would affected both make more productive, but also make their be greater pressures on their employability.
We’re now in an age where in multiple instances, the half-life of a technology is about equal to the time it takes to master the technology. That’s just crazy. That’s so off the map of the known world. And that gets us a little bit to the question about individuals. Our data suggests that people are very curious about AI. Many of them are very hopeful about AI. So I think for individuals right now, the first thing you’d understand is this is here to stay.
It’s designed to be navigable by a human being who can type and pretty soon it’ll do audio recognition. So playing with it, even just the open available, no monthly fee, understanding that it’s going to show up in your work sooner or later, so it might be a little intimidating, but time to stick your toes in the water.
Andrew: In your work, you talk to a lot of companies and the sense I get from a lot of them is that they’re kind of in the same boat where they’re like, “We want to use this technology,” and obviously they are, but at the same time they’re still trying to be like how though? They’re still trying to figure out exactly how it will be beneficial to them, right?
Joseph: Yes. And what I’d add to that is because it’s an augmentative technology, it’s much harder to adopt than an automation technology. A lot of companies are essentially saying, “Well, wow, using this is complicated.”
Andrew: Right.
Joseph: When companies started moving from horsepower to electrical power, that was complicated too. And this technology is fundamental as that. This is the most important technological development since controllable power. So what you have to do as a company to deploy it is you have to not intrude it into your existing process, you have to re-engineer your process around what it can do. That means you’re going to change job descriptions, metrics, the process flow. And so a lot of companies are actually having negative margin impact right now because they’re paying to spread AI throughout the workforce, but they haven’t had the confidence or the knowledge of yet what costs it can take out to offset those costs.
Most adoption curves in new technology was like this are shaped like an S. Early adopters could be hobbyists even. Then the economics start to get more favorable scale economies, and you get that ramp up and then you get the late adopters that have no need… For AI, generative AI, it’s actually J shaped. It’s cash negative margin negative right now for a lot of companies. The question is how soon can they make the associated changes with the way they do processes. Today, adopt AI, displace those calls and then bounce out the other end. But when they bounce out, it’s going to be with a very steep slope.
Andrew: What strikes me is how dynamic it is, especially in customer service examples where the high performers, they don’t benefit from AI, but the low performers in a call center, they benefit.
Joseph: You’re citing that MIT staff research, which is terrific. It turns out as a great leveler. We did research at Harvard Business School on this as well, looking at analysts in a prominent consulting firm. And what you saw there, which was startling, is that in the existing performance management system, a 75th percentile performer was viewed as 40% more productive than a 25th percentile performer. That gap closed to about 15% if both groups had access to AI. And I think this gets back to how the individual should think about it.
A lot of people are going to hear from new technology AI, Arnold Schwarzenegger, oh my gosh, Matthew Broderick and whatever that movie was called. And in fact, for many people what it’s going to do is help them do elements of their job which maybe don’t come easily to them a lot better with more confidence, better performance, which is going to enhance their standing with their employer, with their boss. And the more comfortable you are with it, the more you’re going to find it’s going to free up time, especially for those urgent, unimportant things that tend to wreck your calendar. A lot of that kind of routine transactions that AI will be very good at, and you can escape that and focus time on the higher value added activities in your role.
Andrew: And we’re back with Joseph Fuller, professor of management practice at Harvard Business School.
I think also what we’re talking about here is for individuals to think of themselves, not necessarily as a teacher or accountant, but you have these skills and it can be transformed into different professions. How should people view that? Because they might say, “Listen, I went to school to be a teacher, or I went to school to be an accountant,” and they may resist that.
Joseph: Well, there are certain jobs. A technical writer would be a good example where it’s going to be very hard to imagine a future where a lot of those man hours are not displaced. But if you look for example, what Khan Academy is doing with Khanmigo and AI for teachers, it’s doing everything from creating an environment where they’re trying to teach the student how to use AI but prevent the student from overlying on AI, but also doing diagnostics for what Jimmy or Joanie actually understand or don’t, but also giving feedback to the teacher.
We looked at your 20 students in American history and they are very confused about a Louisiana purchase or all over the map on causes of the Civil War, or frankly, none of them can write a topic sense. So the opportunities to make people, even in white collar trades like that, more productive focus on areas of improvement and user satisfaction. I won’t call students and high school customers, but an awful lot of opportunities.
Let people do the part of the job they really enjoy and the animating reason they pursued the profession in the first place. I have 90 minimum 2,000 word papers to grade in the next two weeks. I love my students. I think a lot of these will be really good papers, but I’m not looking forward to reading 180,000 words. That’s the length of Anna Karenina.
Andrew: It sounds like there’s so much potential for so many benefits, but it sounds like there might be definitely growing pains on all sides to get there, right?
Joseph: Yes. And I think smart C-suites, smart boards of directors are going to understand this is going to be a multi-year program. I think heads of institutions or public servants that have service delivery roles like school committees and heads of school districts are going to have to understand that this is not going to be entirely easy, but there’s incredible potential there. Just in the education sector alone, the opportunity to level the playing field, let’s go back to what you mentioned about customer service reps or I talked about consulting analysts. Exact same thing is going to happen for learners, for teachers, new teachers and the ability to get big, big improvements in productivity and job satisfaction, and user satisfaction in a win cubed type model. It’s going to be remarkable. I’m really an optimist about AI relative to legitimate uses. We have to fear AI in the hands of bad actors.
Andrew: What would you say from your experience for job seekers that are navigating the current kind of weird labor market, I think for most people, what would you say is your best advice to them navigating that landscape?
Joseph: We don’t use the word weird at Harvard Business School. We use a technical term goofy. The current labor market is manifesting a couple of phenomenon. The first is that we are a post-industrial economy. It is an economy that requires digital literacy, not super digital competence. It doesn’t mean that you need to be able to code in Python or something or explain how a touchscreen works, but you have to be comfortable with digital devices. And someone who isn’t needs to find a way to address that.
Also, it’s very, very important to be able to demonstrate or refine your social skills. A lot of people, unfortunately because of COVID because of the growth of social media, their amount of social interaction is lower than previous generations. Even their older brothers and sisters and cousins. So how do you do those things? Because it sounds like I’m saying, “Well, if you don’t have it by now…” Well first of all, you can try to gain some experiences and the amount of free material that already exists and the types of capabilities that are going to come soon to address issues like that are pretty remarkable.
ChatGPT already has ability to, with a fairly brief tape of you speaking, replicate your voice with a hundred percent fidelity. If you want to hear how you in a job interview, you’ll be able to do that and actually have a conversation early enough with yourself. At Harvard Business School, we studied a few years ago where do business people go as a first source for an explanation of a business concept they don’t feel they understand? For many, many years, it actually was the Harvard Business Review. So we’re very proud of that. It isn’t the Harvard Business Review anymore, it’s YouTube.
So if you want the resource in YouTube, if you want to learn about something, are awesome. So be honest about your portfolio of skills. Try to augment them to the degree you can. And look, using resources like LinkedIn about what are the skills that people that have the job you aspire to talk about, what do they talk about in terms of what they did? Look at their previous jobs. Build a little bit of a portrait of what you think your desired industry and desired entry level position is seeking, and then be objective about contrasting what you’ve got versus what they’re looking for and see if you can’t backfill a couple of spots, attributes or skills or experiences if you’re seeing a gap that you think is impeding you from realizing that ambition.
Andrew: That’s super helpful. Thank you so much.
Joseph: You bet.
Andrew: That was Joseph Fuller, professor of management practice at Harvard Business School. If you’re leaving today’s conversation with a new learning to apply to your job search or career, I’d like to invite you to write about it in a review on Apple Podcast. Our team really enjoys reading what you learn from our shows, plus it helps other people discover our community. Speaking of community, remember that we’re always here backing you up and cheering you on. Connect with me, Andrew Seaman and the Get Hired community on LinkedIn to continue the conversation.
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Get Hired is a production of LinkedIn News. This episode was produced by Grace Rubin. Assaf Gidron engineered our show. Joe DiGiorgi mixed our show. Dave Pond is head of news production. Enrique Montalvo is our executive producer. Courtney Coupe is the head of original programming for LinkedIn. Dan Roth is the editor-in-chief of LinkedIn, and I’m Andrew Seaman. Until next time, stay well and best of luck.