Recently, one of the most famous American multinational technology companies, Amazon, announced re-education of one-third of its American workforce with a $700 million plan.
According to Mark Bernfeld, a professor of the practice in finance at the Northeastern University, the training programs in new technologies will be voluntary and predominantly free for 100,000 employees by 2025, amounting to a promising and necessary adaptation. The workers are smart and can learn to do other stuff. However, he says that it is incumbent on employers to open the door and give workers that opportunity to learn the other stuff. Bernfeld believes that it is an international problem and not just a US issue. In other countries around the world they’re going to feel this too, especially in the developed countries where the job profiles are going to be changing. People don’t really understand what artificial intelligence is capable of.
Again, Raj Echambadi, the dean of the D’Amore-McKim School of Business, believes that it is actually a strength of the American workforce being one of the world’s most productive workforce. Echambadi predicts the need for a collaborative partnership between higher education, employers, and government that can enable workers to invest in a 60-year curriculum of lifelong learning and specialised retraining programs. He also says that artificial intelligence can help schools like Northeastern in providing customised programs to keep up with the recent times. He is of the view that artificial intelligence is going to change higher education and if used in the right way, it can help deliver personalised education at a scale, which is very difficult to do right now. Echambadi calls personalised education as the Holy Grail for us.
“They said overwhelmingly that they now knew which jobs they don’t want—because those jobs might not be there in the future,” Bernfeld says. “They don’t know exactly which jobs they want. But they are very aware of the shift that is coming.”
Shahjadi Jemim Rahman