I’m the president of a college that prides itself in getting students ready for future-focused careers. Now my own children are rising college seniors and will soon enter the workforce.
Like many their age, they are trying to make sense of what artificial intelligence means for their futures. Their social media feeds are filled with stories of students booing AI at graduation ceremonies, concerns about AI’s impact on art and creativity and protests over data centers. A recent Gallup survey found Gen Z (13-28 year-olds) is more angry and less excited about AI.
They are right to feel unsettled. The world is in flux. Employers are redefining entry-level roles and AI is moving the goalposts every few months. But the entry-level job is not disappearing, it is changing shape.
This is the advice I gave my children about launching their careers in an AI world.
Employers will love you for your brain. Everyone has access to the same generic AI models. AI adds unique value when it amplifies your unique intelligence.
We do not plug our brains into the matrix. Instead, we are building “second brains” so AI can work off of our unique knowledge and context.
Your “second brain” captures all the passions and ideas that drive your work. It can include things like your personal notes, thought-provoking articles, summaries of interesting conversations and your best writing.
AI organizes this accumulated knowledge so it can perform better on any project that draws on your expertise. The smarter your “second brain” gets, the more powerful your AI.
Organizations are massively investing in “second brains” by bringing together their team’s expertise, customer data, communications, work products, and company culture to power their AI tools. Organizations with the best “second brains” will have an exponential advantage over their peers.
Learn to build “second brains.”
START HERE: Build your personal “second brain.” Note: check for free access to pro plans through your college or university.
You don’t know it but you have been promoted to management. An AI agent is not a chatbot that answers your questions — it is an AI that takes on a task, works through the steps on its own, and comes back with the finished work.
Agents now do the kinds of tasks that used to fill first jobs. That is why your first job is to direct them. As a new graduate, you have a virtually unlimited number of agents at your disposal. Your team is waiting for you as soon as you are ready.
Wharton professor Ethan Mollick observes that, in learning how to direct AI, we “are basically reinventing management.”
Leading a team of AI agents takes expertise. At a simple level, recent graduates need to understand the work well enough to know what to ask for, specify how the work should be done, set the quality bar and make improvements.
As AI workflows stretch across organizations, graduates that have knowledge across multiple domains -- like product development, marketing and finance -- will be able to direct teams of agents that get better as they train them.
Develop the expertise and management skills you need to lead teams of agents that 10x your impact, and your organization’s. There are roughly 38 million US businesses and nonprofits, and nearly all of them are trying to figure this out.
START HERE: Create an AI skill.
You can build anything. What is worth building? AI is driving an explosion in entrepreneurship. Hiring a large team is no longer required to bring a new idea to life.
I recently watched a friend, a non-technical entrepreneur, use Claude to build a new education tool by himself. He interviewed his educator friends to give him feedback on his prototype. As a “solopreneur,” he brought a new product to market and secured his first customers.
The hard part is no longer figuring out how to build something. You can build anything. The challenge is choosing what to build. The challenge is convincing people why they should care about and pay attention to your idea.
AI is giving technical and non-technical people alike the courage to build. Derek Thompson points to Chicago Fed data that shows that “the share of all US companies with fewer than five employees has surged in this decade to its highest level on record.” Smaller, more powerful teams are another way employment is changing shape.
The best entrepreneurs think like scientists, psychologists, marketers, financiers, culture leaders… creatively combining their expertise to will new ideas into existence.
Entrepreneurship skills become even more valuable with AI.
START HERE: Use AI to prototype an idea you have for a product or service. Extra credit: find your first paying customer.
Master the ancient traditions of IRL (in real life). The latest AI models are shattering benchmarks for knowledge work, like coding and research, every few months.
But think of the things AI innovation is not improving at the same rate.
Relationships. Community. Shared purpose. Morals and values. Culture. Inspiration. Authenticity.
People primarily develop these IRL: locally, slowly, in the physical presence of others.
Young people will increasingly be hired for their ability to form relationships, build communities, empathize with others and navigate local cultures, not to perform basic knowledge work.
Similarly, AI is not 10x-ing the speed at which our brains learn. We see all the ways AI magnifies human expertise, but human knowledge primarily develops socially, locally, through productive struggle (thinking).
This long-term investment in learning is what allows us to judge and manage AI’s output. Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham argues that you can’t think about something you don’t know.
As the world becomes more “futuristic,” the young people who master the ancient traditions of the local, offline world will consistently thrive.
START HERE: Participate in activities where you can form relationships and deepen your connections with other people IRL. Extra credit if you leave these activities feeling inspiration, admiration, and/or trust.
The world is in flux. The worst thing we can do is wait for the waves to wash over us.
Learn deeply. Be more human. Will your ideas into existence. This future will amplify your greatest gifts.
Alex Hernandez is the president of Champlain College in Burlington, VT.
Thanks for this, Alex, we’re seeing the same AI phobias with our Gen-Zers, and this is a cogent flip-side for becoming successful in the AI world. Glad you also included your thoughts on the importance of IRL! Glad for your leadership at Champlain and modeling a new approach to higher ed.
This is great. I learned a new acronym IRL