Navigating the AI Revolution: Upskilling for the Future of Work

There has been a consistent message from experts since generative AI became widely available: adapt to and learn the technology. Data suggests people and organizations are accepting the advice, but likely not fast enough to address the ever-widening skills gap.

On this week's episode of Get Hired with Andrew Seaman, we're talking all about the age of AI and its projected effects on the workforce. 思科 Senior VP and Global Innovation Officer Guy Diedrich is Andrew's guest. Guy's entire job is to work with government and business leaders to digitize at scale while creating jobs and more. He knows a lot about educating people en masse, too. Guy, who holds a PhD, was a vice chancellor at the Texas A&M University System.

Andrew and Guy discuss whether the workforce is ready for AI. They talk about the many ways people can harness and learn the new technology. Plus, Guy discusses some of the training programs Cisco offers to help people learn digital skills and move into new careers.

A transcript of the episode is below. You can listen to the conversation above or on your favorite podcast platform by clicking here.

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TRANSCRIPT: "Navigating the AI Revolution: Upskilling for the Future of Work"

Andrew Seaman: Did you know that more than 10% of professionals hired today have job titles that didn't even exist in the year 2000? We all know that change is scary, and right now you're probably feeling a lot of change thanks to AI. LinkedIn estimates that by 2030, 70% of skills used in most jobs will change largely due to AI. As technologies change at a rapid pace, it can feel overwhelming to try and keep up. If you are interested in or feeling scared of upskilling in AI, today's conversation is for you. Stick around for more after this short break.

Andrew: 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's editor-at-large for jobs and career development, bringing you conversations with experts who like me, want to see you succeed at work, at home, and everywhere in between. Today I'm joined by Guy Diedrich, a senior vice president and the global innovation officer at Cisco. In this role, he leads programs and initiatives that upskill workforces and drive mass-scale digitization around the world. The two of us explore what AI means for the future world of work and how it's changing the ways we all should be thinking about upskilling. Guy has a wealth of knowledge in this area. Before his current role at Cisco, he was vice chancellor at Texas A&M. He combines his passion for education and opportunity with his understanding of technology and innovation. Today he's here to remind us that learning doesn't begin and end in school. Far from it, it's a constant part of a thriving career. I kick things off by asking Guy what being a global innovation officer actually means.

Guy Diedrich: I run the Digital Impact Office. That is an umbrella name for a program called Country Digital Acceleration as well as our Networking Academy, learning and certification, and professional development. So essentially all skilling for the 87,000 employees of Cisco. We also do Country Digital Acceleration, which is a program that we stood up in 2015. 2015 was a pivotal year because we started to see digitization emerge as a topic. Yet world leaders, presidents, prime ministers, ministers really didn't know what that meant. They had spent a couple of million bucks with a consulting firm to develop a national digital agenda, but it was a PowerPoint.

It didn't come with an execution plan or budgets. And so we developed a process whereby we could show them what it means to digitize healthcare, what it means to have a smart city, what it means to digitize education, to deploy security across the nation. Today, the CDA program is in 50 countries around the world. 50 presidents and prime ministers of countries have chosen Cisco to help them make some of the most important decisions they'll make for their populations in the next 20 years. So it's a privilege and an honor, and we take it very seriously.

Andrew: When you talk about digitizing a country or leading digital projects, that already sounds, especially depending on the country, quite an undertaking. But then you add AI in there and I think most people will just be like, "Oh, I'm out." Obviously, AI has been around, but now that it is really in vogue and people know that it's there and we can harness it, how has that changed your work?

Guy: As you rightfully point out, AI has been around for a long time. I mean, AI has been embedded in Cisco networks for over a decade. Research has been done on AI and products being developed since the late '60s, early '70s. It's nothing new. It is ChatGPT that brought it to the public consciousness, and all of a sudden now we're finding all sorts of different ways to deploy it. AI is changing everything, and here's why. Sam Altman had that rather famous and accurate quote that "you may not be replaced by AI, but you probably will be by someone that uses and understands AI." And so even if you thought that you had reached a learning maximum, that you were at a point where you could rest for a few years and be happy with what you know, that's all been upended. That's all changed now. You remember Moore's Law?

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Guy: Moore's Law was a proposition that every 18 months processor speed would double and the cost of that processor would be halved. Now, take Moore's Law and apply it to our entire industry. Take Moore's Law and apply it to all technology. It's churning every 18 months. So what we have to learn and what we have to keep up with is a rapid-fire change. And with the pace of churn of technology, we're going to have to skill at the pace of innovation.

Andrew: And there's so much to unpack here because I think even before AI came into the public consciousness, there was the idea of a digital skills gap. What is the state of skills around the world when it comes to actually being able to harness the power of our current digital capabilities?

Guy: It's a great question, Andrew, because 35% of the population on the planet is unconnected to the internet in any meaningful way. So there's an entire 35% that don't get to do what you and I are doing right now. They don't get to participate in what would be considered the modern economy. So what we're finding is the skills gap is increasing because we're on a rocket ship right now. I mean, we are heading to the stratosphere. We're going to have AI, we're going to have the introduction of quantum, we're going to have all of these things that are going to be available to us. But if you're not connected, you don't get availability to that. It's not accessible. So that's a big part of what we do in the Country Digital Acceleration program is we make sure that we can connect the unconnected. That is just bare bones foundational in terms of closing the digital divide.

Now, for the connected, it's going to be, again, all about skilling. And you have to be able to make skills accessible, not just available. We can go on and we can find a dozen different ways to learn AI right now or more, but if you can't afford to go through that program, then it's available but not accessible. That's why the Networking Academy is so important. The Networking Academy has been around for 26 years. And originally we formed it to allow people that bought our equipment to learn how to install it, maintain it, innovate using it, etc. And then we branched it out. It has always been free. And today we've trained up over 26 million students in 191 countries, and everything from networking skills to AI to basic programming.

To this day, it's still the golden ticket for our industry. It's instant employment. It's not overly difficult to get through the lower levels. Then we have ascending levels that go all the way up to what's called CCIE, which is the equivalent of a PhD in networking. And in security, you can go in and in a few weeks have the credential to be a security technician and be making 50, 60 plus thousand dollars a year. Because today there's four and a half million open security jobs around the world, we can't train them fast enough.

Andrew: I guess as you look across this landscape... And it's so interesting to talk to you because you obviously have such a strong educational background, but then you also have now this very large view over the abilities of whole workforces. So when people come to you and say I don't know about this AI thing, and, oh, that's a young person's game or something like that, what is your advice to them?

Guy: Embrace curiosity and learning. Don't look at skilling as an event. It's a process and it is a process that you will have to engage in for the rest of your career. There's so many pivots that happen. And as long as you have that natural curiosity and that desire to learn, the resources are out there for you. And you can change your own life, you can pivot your own career very inexpensively if not for free, and set yourself on a new path.

Andrew: Yeah. That's something I often try and get across to people is: When they talk about oh, I have to go back to school or all this other stuff, I say, "You actually don't even need to make that investment." Because even here in the United States, there are industries or programs that are trying to train people to close the skills gap. So a lot of these countries or industries are actually subsidizing some of this training, right?

Guy: They absolutely are. And this is sacrilege for a former university vice chancellor to say. So I'll just qualify that. There are huge parts of the population that will never see a university campus because they don't have to. Universities now are so expensive. And you have a fundamental choice to make. Do I want to invest four years and $200,000 in tuition and fees to get a degree, or do I want to enter a industry that is churning every 18 months? Because whatever I learn at that university is going to be relevant for a very short period of time, but if I am constantly learning and evolving, I'm going to be relevant forever. I referenced the term economic churn for illustrative purposes. I reference it like you're riding the crest of a wave. And you never want to get too far in front of that wave or you'll get churned under. You never want to get too far behind that wave or you just lose it. You want to stay at the crest of that. And what keeps you at the crest is learning.

Andrew: And also I think one of the things I often tell people is your willingness to learn too. Because I always get across to people, at this point, I think, unless you want one of those roles, no one's expecting you to be an AI engineer or no one's expecting you to build your own large language model. So right now it's just your openness to play around with these tools for the vast majority of people, right?

Guy: That's correct. It's going to change though. So would you like to discuss the AI consortium?

Andrew: Oh, yeah, please.

Guy: The AI consortium was formed by several different companies, so Cisco, Google, Accenture, Microsoft, SAP, to take a look at the 50 most popular jobs in our industry, and put all of the skills required to be hired and accomplished in those jobs. And what we found was that 90% of those jobs were going to be moderately to significantly impacted by AI. In short, everybody is going to have to know some degree of AI in order to be competent in their job. What we also learned was that if we can provide a roadmap for people to get from where they are to where they need to be, they will follow that roadmap.

The other thing that we're doing at Cisco, and I know that this will become pretty standard I think throughout the industry, is that we want to create a one company, many careers organization. Where if you are inside the company and you know that your job is being diminished in terms of importance, but this rollover here in AI is emerging and we're going to have to hire a bunch of AI folks. Give them the roadmap over the course of a year to get from where they are to where they need to be. Give them access to that training. Give them access to the opportunities. They will follow that path and be qualified to be hired into that position. One company, many careers.

Andrew: We'll be right back with Guy Diedrich.

Andrew: And we're back with Guy Diedrich, a senior vice president and the global innovation officer at Cisco. Obviously, there are a lot of small employers around, especially the United States. I grew up in rural Northeastern Pennsylvania where there really aren't huge companies like LinkedIn or Cisco or Microsoft or places like that. And also, this is just a reminder that LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft since we mentioned that earlier. I just always have to get that plug-in as a disclaimer. But for the people at small employers who maybe they don't have the leadership or the guidance right now to say, hey, this is how you should be learning AI. Where can people look to figure out what they should be doing? Is that something that you could turn to AI for?

Guy: So it's very interesting that you bring that up because we're just about to release our latest AI training and we're using an AI tutor to teach people AI. If you just put in I don't get this, or I've just written this bit of code and it didn't do what it was supposed to do, or whatever it happens to be. You can get instruction on that because the AI tutor is right there alongside you. I think that's what you're going to see. Now, you absolutely can use AI to find AI education resources. You can do that right now. And you'll see loads and loads of content that's out there. You pick one that resonates with you, that looks like it meets the time requirements and the subject requirements, and what am I actually going to know coming out of it. Focus on the outcome that you want and find the program that you'd like to pursue. And believe me, it's out there.

Andrew: Yeah. And I think you hit on this earlier is that, the one thing though in all of that is, it can't learn for you. So like you said, you're going to have to put in the investment to actually sit with the technology or go get the resources to actually learn how to do it. There's no basically shortcut to the learning.

Guy: No, there has got to be a proactive motion on your part. You've got to seek it out. Now, maybe one day AI may come in and poke on you and say, "Hey, I'd like to teach you," but it isn't happening yet. And it's another interesting point regarding churn. We're having an AI moment. This is not an age. Remember, we used to have the industrial age. Decades, right? The information age, decades. Now we're having, call it an AI micro age. I've just returned from Davos, it's my 12th year, and everyone's now talking about quantum. And it's not quantum in 2035, it's quantum in 2028 and 2030. So it's on top of this. So we have this AI micro age, it's the shiny thing right now, and then it's just going to be embedded in everything that we do while we move on to the next and then whatever micro age after that. So that's the point of churn. That's the point of making sure that you have access to the training and the scaling you need to stay relevant as everything swirls around you.

I refer to it as seeing what's fit for purpose, where purpose is your purpose. Where does technology fit in to who you are, what you want to be, what you want to become? And then it's a tool that you can leverage to get from where you are to where you want to be. But it doesn't mean you have to be expert in everything. Nobody is. You find what is fit for your purpose and pursue it.

Andrew: I think that is such a good way to think about it, especially now where people are freaking out about, oh, I don't know AI. I'm the person that's like, "What do you mean you don't know AI? Do you know what it is? Have you played with ChatGPT?" And if you mean that you can't build an AI large language model, I'm like, "Neither can I and most of the people on Earth." So yeah, I think that is a great way to think about that. And obviously, we mentioned a lot of things that Cisco has going on right now. Where can people find more information, especially about the Academy and some of the skills trainings that you do?

Guy: So there's several places. I mean, you can obviously go to Cisco.com, but there's also netacad.com, which is N-E-T-A-C-A-D, short for Networking Academy. Anybody at just about any age or any level of familiarity can engage. So those programs are meant to meet you where you are. One of the things that we're working on right now that's really fascinating is project-based learning. And you're going to see more and more of that because more people are going to want to demonstrate what they're capable of. So as you're going through the modules and you're completing them, it's contributing to say an AI project. And at the end of that, you hit I'm done and you get your certificate, but you also publish your first AI project that becomes a part of your CV. I mean, there's so many interesting things that are going to be happening, and we're going to need so many people that have foundational AI skills or a foundational AI knowledge that it's going to be very accessible and available.

Andrew: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Guy. I really appreciate you going through all this with me. And I think hopefully, people are a little bit less fearful of upskilling, but also of AI and technology.

Guy: Well, thank you for the opportunity to visit with you, Andrew. I appreciate it.

Andrew: That was Guy Diedrich, a senior vice president and the global innovation officer at Cisco. If you're curious about the resources Guy recommended, you can find links to them in the episode's show notes.?

Before you go, we want to hear from you. Get Hired launched an audience survey to help us understand what you want to hear on this show. You can find a link for it in the show notes.?

Get Hired is a production of LinkedIn News. The show is produced by Grace Rubin and Emily Reeves. Assaf Gidron engineered our show. Tim Boland mixed our show. We get additional support from Alexandra Kuznietsova and Ali McPherson. Sarah Storm is our senior producer. Enrique Montalvo is our executive producer. Dave Pond is head of production and creative operations. Maya Pope-Chappel is director of content and audience development. Courtney Coupe is head of original programming. Dan Roth is the Editor-in-chief of LinkedIn and I am Andrew Seaman. Until next time, stay well, and best of luck.