The AI Skills Gap: Why Entry-Level Jobs Are Disappearing with Ryan Lufkin

Right About Now - Legendary Business Advice

Ryan Lufkin, VP of Global Academic Strategy at Instructure, discusses the growing AI skills gap in the workforce with Ryan Alford. They explore how

Key takeaways

• AI is accelerating workforce transformation faster than education systems can keep up.
• Communication, creativity, collaboration, and subject-matter expertise are becoming more valuable as AI automates routine tasks.

Main topics

• AI skills gap
• Education reform

Notable quotes

"You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it."

Conclusion

The future of work demands a shift from rigid education models toward con

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) This episode is brought to you by High Level. If you're interested in learning more, visit gohighlevel.com slash Ryan Alford for a 30-day free trial. If you run a business, you know leads rarely arrive when it's convenient. A call comes in while your team is helping another customer. Someone reaches out, but the follow-up gets delayed. An invoice sits unsent, or a promising lead gets stuck in the wrong stage of your pipeline. That's why High Level's voice AI and managed AI agents caught my attention. High Level's voice AI can answer incoming calls. qualify leads using information from your website or uploaded documents, and even book or reschedule appointments. When your team is busy, Voice AI can keep that conversation moving instead of letting a potential customer slip away. Then high-levels managed AI agents can handle multi-step actions across your CRM. They can update pipeline stages, send invoices, and execute follow-up sequences across SMS, email, and social. For me, the real value of AI isn't adding another complicated tool. It's using technology to handle the work that slows your team down so your people can focus on building relationships, serving customers, and growing the business. If you're ready to create better systems and get more from every opportunity, check out GoHighLevel.com slash Ryan Alford and see what its AI tools can do for your business. Speaker 1 (1:06) Well, why do I need to be the expert? Someone's got to check its work. It's great at doing research. It's great at being that assistant and accomplishing tasks that can be time consuming, but it's not infallible. We can't trust it to that level yet. Maybe someday, but we still need to be the experts. We can't offload that to the machines. Speaker 3 (1:23) You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it. 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real. No theory, no fluff, no shortcuts. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford. Speaker 2 (1:44) Hello and welcome to Right About Now. We're always talking about what the world has going on right now in the world of business, marketing, personal development. We cover the gamut ultimately, but we're here to help you get ahead. Entrepreneurs, executives, everyone out there listening, we know you have choices. Thank you for being here. New data shows that about 70 % of U.S. workers feel unprepared for today's workforce. That raises a bigger question. Is the problem education, employers, or how we think about skills altogether? Today, I'm joined by... by Ryan Lufkin, the VP of Global Strategy and Structure. He has spent years helping companies and institutions rethink how people actually become job ready. And we're getting into what's broken and what needs to change. Ryan, welcome to Right About Now. Awesome. Thanks, Ryan. Hey, Ryan and Ryan, you got a good start already, man. We're like brothers from another. Speaker 1 (2:32) Talk to me, man. Instructure, what that word means. We're the makers of Canvas. Canvas learning management system, at this point, about half of all the college students in North America and about a third of all K-12 students in North America use Canvas on a daily basis in learning. We're all about instruction. Instructure is the name of the company. It's funny, you wear a Canvas shirt to Home Depot and people are like, oh, you're giving me flashbacks to college. You wear an Instructure shirt, not as many people know. I always like to explain that connection. I Speaker 2 (2:58) did recognize that in our notes and that name, I was twitching a little bit. I'm not sure. Speaker 1 (3:05) Well, it's funny. You can tell how good their educators were at designing courses in Canvas if they were like, oh, I love Canvas or, oh, I hate Canvas. You're like, the teacher probably wasn't using it right. Yeah, yes. Speaker 2 (3:18) That's your point of view, I guess. It's probably how literate they were with technology. And Speaker 1 (3:22) a lot of times it's how much support they had in what does a good online course or a good hybrid course look like. I think too often it's, especially if they learned really rapidly at the beginning of COVID. Our solution grew rapidly because people had to move online over the course of about two days. You could tell the educators that we're giving a lot of support and a lot of resources and really trained what good looked like. And then the ones that were kind of thrown into it without that support. Our goal really has improved over the last five years of that level of online learning and course design. Speaker 2 (3:48) There's some meta talk there, Ryan. The meta of the fact that the teachers weren't prepared to use the software appropriately. And Speaker 1 (3:54) we're talking about how workers in general feel unprepared. You talk about this pace of change that started in six years ago, March of 2020, and that pace of change hasn't slowed. Just when everybody thought, oh, COVID's over, we can take a breath. November 30th of 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT and we got everything got turned on its head again. The last three years from that have been just an incredibly fast-paced evolution of how do we use this technology? I have a chart and tell them the seven stages of grief going through all of that. We're really in the acceptance phase with AI now and how are we applying it appropriately? 70 % of workers feel unprepared. What does that really mean? You've got this kind of schism between education that in many ways is still really dealing with academic integrity idea. This idea that AI is just for cheating versus businesses that are trying to figure out how do we optimize our jobs with these tools? And in many cases, don't feel like universities are preparing them for that. It's even worse in K-12. When you look at K-12 and there's a kind of an anti-technology and education movement going on that ignores some of the more glaring benefits of using technology to... reach people that have accessibility challenges and rural and frankly, just maybe are missing school, things like that. We've got to get everybody on the same page. And Google announced a really great program trying to provide free AI education to 6 million educators across the United States. We're getting ready to release some courses around AI literacy and even the detractors, those educators that are scared of AI or have doubled down and said, we're not using AI. Honestly, take an AI literacy course, at least understand how these tools work. Then you understand what they're capable of. And then you can actually make the... more informed decision about how deeply do you want to use these tools and put you in Speaker 2 (5:28) a Speaker 1 (5:28) better position to help your students understand how to use them ethically, how to use them effectively, things like that. Speaker 2 (5:34) Today's episode is sponsored by Vinted. I'm not somebody who spends a lot of time thinking about my closet. Honestly, I rotate through the same five shirts, a couple pairs of jeans, and maybe two jackets. But somehow my closet was still packed. So I finally went through everything and found a bunch of clothes I hadn't worn in forever. Instead of putting them back and telling myself I'd wear them someday, I listed a few on Vinted, the secondhand marketplace app. Vinted was actually really simple to use. Getting the items listed didn't take much time. And when something sold, Vinted created the prepaid shipping label for me. I just packed it up and sent it out. And Vinted has no seller fees. So I kept everything I earned. Once that first item sold, I went back through another drawer and found even more stuff to list. It changes how you look at the clothes sitting around your house. What used to feel like clutter was suddenly extra money I could put towards something I actually wanted. Now I have more closet space, a little extra money, and I'm not hanging on to clothes I know I'm never going to wear again. Ready to clean out your closet and make some extra money? Download the Vinted app for free and start listing. With no seller fees, you keep every dollar you earn. Today's episode is sponsored by Vinted. I'm not somebody who spends a lot of time thinking about my closet. Honestly, I rotate through the same five shirts, a couple pairs of jeans, and maybe two jackets. But somehow my closet was still packed. So I finally went through everything and found a bunch of clothes I hadn't worn in forever. Instead of putting them back and telling myself I'd wear them someday, I listed a few on Vinted, the secondhand marketplace app. Vinted was actually really simple to use. Getting the items listed didn't take much time. And when something sold, Vinted created the prepaid shipping label for me. I just packed it up and sent it out. And Vinted has no seller fees. So I kept everything I earned. Once that first item sold, I went back through another drawer and found even more stuff to list. It changes how you look at the clothes sitting around your house. What used to feel like clutter was suddenly extra money I could put towards something I actually wanted. Now I have more closet space, a little extra money, and I'm not hanging on to clothes I know I'm never going to wear again. Ready to clean out your closet and make some extra money? Download the Vinted app for free and start listing. With no seller fees, you keep every dollar you earn. Speaker 2 (7:42) If we're going to learn something for the sake of learning and for teaching ourselves how to problem solve, are these the problems that we should be solving? Do we need to learn calculus? Do we need to learn things that AI can do and will perceivably be around unless we all go back to the old ages because power goes away or something or Wi-Fi goes away? Are we really teaching what we should be teaching and why do we still need to learn the things we learned 30 years ago? Speaker 1 (8:04) I will point to what was called the strawberry conundrum. ChachiBT 3.2, if you ask it how many R's were in the word strawberry, it would tell you two. And you'd say, go back and maybe look that again and tell me how many are there. And it would say, there are two R's in strawberry. Of course, there's three R's in strawberry. And they could not figure out, because essentially large language models are a black box. You don't know what's going on inside there. They could not figure out why it