70% of Workers Feel Unprepared: How Instructure Is Rethinking Learning with Ryan Lufkin

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1:20That's right, free at ZipRecruiter.com slash zip. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash zip. ZipRecruiter.com slash zip. Why do I need to be Chagip? He's 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. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month.

1:57Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now. 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.

2:33Is the problem education, employers, or how we think about skills altogether? Today, I'm joined by Ryan Lufkin, the VP of Global Strategy in 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 Write About Now. Awesome. Thanks, Ryan. Hey, Ryan and Ryan, you got a good start already, man. man. We're like brothers from another. 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.

3:10We'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 give me flashbacks to college. You wear an Instructure shirt, not as many people know. I I did recognize that in our notes and that name. I was twitching a little bit. I'm not sure. 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 I hate Canvas. You're like, yeah, teacher probably wasn't using it right. Yeah. Yes. That's your point of view, I guess. It's probably how literate they were with technology.

3:46And a lot of times it's how much support they had in what is a good online course or a good hybrid course look like. I think too often, especially if they learned really rapidly at the beginning of COVID, our solution grew rapidly because people had to move online in over the course of about two days. You can tell the educators that we're given 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.

4:12There's some meta talk there, Ryan, the meta of the fact that the teachers weren't prepared to use the software appropriately. And 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.

4:42It's almost 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 the 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 than 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.

5:25We'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 are 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 a better position to help your students understand how to use them ethically, how to use them effectively, things like that.

5:56If 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 we'll foreseeably 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? I will point to what was called the strawberry conundrum. Chachi BT 3.2. If you ask it how many R's were in the word strawberry, it would tell you two.

6:27And 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 hung up on that. And it wasn't until the next model, 3.3, came out, they fixed that. That's the reason that we all need to be experts. ChatTBT has a high propensity for what we would call hallucination. More often, it's confidently incorrect. What it's trying to do is give you what you've asked it for.

6:58Some cases, it makes things up. It'll make up links, sources. It'll make up whole sets of information because it's just trying to give you what you want. And if it doesn't find it or doesn't spend the time to find it, it just kind of makes it up. We don't know exactly why. But when we are the experts, we can double check that work and say, oh, you know what? That's not right. Let's go back and fix it. Let's not perpetuate that strawberry conundrum. What's really scary is that next generation that takes that approach that you're talking about and says, well, why do I need to be Chagipides the expert?

7:25Someone'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. me, 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. So there's one thing I've learned running multiple businesses. It's how fast things fall apart when communication gets messy. Missed calls, scattered text threads, team members not seeing the same conversation. That stuff quietly costs you time and revenue. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O, the smarter way to run your business communications.

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10:22even at advanced levels that's fairly black and white are you saying that math is done wrong by jess gbt i think it's the reasoning behind it one of the things that's really important about math isn't just getting the answer it's actually having the logic and reasoning behind how do we get from here to there there's a whole bloom's taxonomy if you're in education you understand what bloom's taxonomy is it's this skill tree there's a new bloom's taxonomy that actually says okay these are the skills that are going to be easily replaced by ai and these are the skills that aren't. These are the human skills and their problem solving, their creative thinking, their communication, their consensus building, their things like that.

10:58And that's why to your point, we will always have jobs. We will always have the ability because we need to be able to connect with other humans while we let AI do the more mundane tasks. And in some cases, yeah, it might get math wrong. It might get very convoluted. An accountant, the idea of an accountant giving up control of their books or understanding the formulas and letting them run without being able to double check that is scary. And not every job needs advanced math. If we're in marketing, I don't use advanced math on a daily basis, but there are occasions when it's important to have that reasoning, that logic.

11:26If math is still fairly critical learning and important to keep in the curriculum, what are the things that should be changing then? I don't want to pretend that what we were doing 30 years ago, but I do hear some of the subjects and some of the stuff. And I'm like, that's the same thing. Someone with a higher pay grade, smarter than me knows if that's what they need to be learning. And I'm like, that is not real life applicable. When does K-12 become more preparatory for the real world versus the standard topics that we've always taught because it was important 30, 40, 50 years ago that we did that?

11:57That's where the tension, especially in K-12, comes right now. There's this kind of undercurrent of anti-technology going on. But then our STEM scores are going in the toilet. How do we address STEM if, you know, science, technology and math, science, technology, engineering, math? How do we do that if we're not going to actually leverage technology and the teaching of those things? Meanwhile, you've got a group that's pushing that we should be teaching cursive again. And why aren't we teaching cursive in all the school? No one writes long form letters during the Civil War when they would write the pen poetic letters.

12:26We don't do that anymore. There's been a lot of nudist articles on that lately. Who's pushing that and why? How does that benefit us? There's a really great story. I was at a California system meeting and we had a panel of educators. It was a professor of product design. And he said, okay, we used to spend the first 60 % of a course designing a product, doing specs, doing market analysis, doing all this stuff. The last 40 % kind of analyzing the work, presenting to each other, things like that. Now, AI, we can do all of that within the first 10 % of the course. Come up with an idea, have AI help us do a product design, have it do the research around that for us.

12:58Now, he makes his students actually reach out and contact experts in the market, set up a meeting, and present to them this idea. and get their feedback. And I always say, if I call my daughter, she won't answer the phone. She'll text me right back. She's a junior in college. She does not answer the phone. She doesn't pick up the phone. He's pushing those students to lean back into those more human skills, reaching out, making a connection, setting up a presentation, presenting your thing, collecting feedback, those things that AI can't easily do for us. That's really the focus. It's kind of that evolution in teaching.

13:29We're not necessarily teaching entirely new things, but we're doing it in more innovative ways that lean into those human skills and not just assigning 20-page papers that kids are going to use AI to write. Are schools teaching the wrong things or just teaching them the wrong way? It's the wrong way. Really, it comes down to the assessment of mastery. How do we actually know whether or not somebody has learned that skill? How do we make sure it sticks in their brain isn't just, I memorized these data points, I took the quiz, I dumped those memory points out of my brain, and I move on to the next thing.

13:56How do we really teach skills? That's the biggest challenge right now was educators who are already underpaid and underappreciated and school classes that are too big are being asked to evolve how they're teaching, fundamentally redesign their courses, and then measure those outcomes in truly significant ways that can then be reported on to the Department of Labor and things like that. That evolution, teaching online and with technology during COVID, we need to address this the same way. We need to provide educators the resources they need to involve how they're teaching with AI, with preparing those students, because it's not going away.

14:28And I think those educators that I can opt out. We've had students say, I want to opt out. You're not going to be able to opt out of AI. There's a Waymo that just drove past people's houses. They don't get to say you don't get to drive past here. Nope. That automated car is driving down the street. You're going to be involved with AI at some level and understanding it, embracing it, understanding the ethical aspects of it are really important. Talking with Ryan Lufkin, the VP of Global Strategy and Instructure. Ryan, you kind of teed this up. You're teeing all my notes up perfectly. I really like this.

14:55You're an excellent guest. Skills versus degrees. It seems like we're in a skills-based economy versus a degree-based economy. And I don't know if degrees hold the same value they used to. You can prove me wrong. What skills actually matter most right now? We've talked about those human skills and how important they are. I will say I'm still a big believer that the degree, the associate degree, the bachelor's degree, the master's degree, they are still the preferred currency in hiring. And then there's a reason for that because they're not just about the hard skills generally, the math, include the soft skills, working with groups, being empathetic, building consensus, communication, like all those things that are incredibly important, those human skills that we're talking about, they embody all of those.

15:35A year or two ago, you saw a lot of businesses kind of crow that they were taking out a degree as a requirement for hiring. And what you saw is a lot of them slowly reintroduced that because it really is the best barometer of whether or not a person is prepared to enter the modern workforce. That said, because of this pace of change, we live in a world that we all need to be lifelong learners, every single one of us. That means go to school for 12 years or 16 years or 20 years. Then we would go to a job, often the same job for 30 years. Then we would retire with our pension. And I mean, that was our parents' generation.

16:05That doesn't exist anymore. The average tenure at a job is about three years. They're saying, well, we're going to work until we die. There's no pensions anymore. It's incumbent on us to prepare ourselves to be upwardly mobile within the job market by constantly training new skills. And in most cases, employers aren't owning that. The college and university system still owns that upskilling and reskilling of adult learners. And they really have done an amazing job post-COVID, especially, of rolling out new credential programs. Because you can actually roll out a credential program, a certificate program, without all of the regulatory requirements for accreditation that a standard college program needs.

16:41In many cases, it's the same or similar content repackaged in more bite-sized chunks. So you can go and take a three or four course certificate. But then that certificate, I can post to LinkedIn. I can post to an employer and show, look, if you look at my LinkedIn, I've got certificate in data driven marketing from eCornell. I did an AI regulation and compliance course from Oxford's Ad Business School. I'm doing my master's right now with Arizona State University because to me, I enjoy learning. It's one of those things. But it's also that way that you qualify yourself for being up with a mobile in a job.

17:11That's one of the things that we've shifted towards. And it's not necessarily breaking it down to the component skills. We haven't all agreed on like a skills taxonomy that makes sense to everyone. And a lot of the old skills taxonomies are really outdated. They don't capture a lot of the more modern skills that we need. Not quite there yet, but getting those certificates to help demonstrate for employers that I'm a learner. I want to evolve and these skills. We're getting there pretty quickly. Hey, guys, if you've ever built a website before, you know how quickly it can turn into a time suck.

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18:37I wish that we had gotten there when I was in college. Definitely learning soft skills. I would dare say make this statement, Ryan. And I have made more money per GPA than anyone that I went to school with. I had the lowest. I graduated 2.01. I was one point away from not graduating on a calculus test, mainly because I never went to class. I started with the highest grade I could get was a 90 because I deducted 10 points. So I had to essentially make A's on everything just to pass the class, essentially. Because I was bored. I'm an entrepreneur. That's the thing. I'm partly ADD. I know I'm wired different.

19:08But it taught me absolutely nothing. Now, here's what I learned. You nailed it. That's all skills. people coming to consensus absolutely probably was worth the money just for that however i might could have learned that and gotten further towards where i wanted to go doing something different if different had existed what's cool though yeah to your point there are more educational opportunities more paths to find yourself into a well-paying job than there ever have been in the history of the world and the biggest challenge is finding out what do you want to do and then finding through all the noise what's the what's the best path to get together and it's not always a two or four year degree.

19:42But I was the same way. I'll be honest, I'll diagnose ADHD, miss class a lot on academic probation at one point. What you learn is all of a sudden you're like, it clicks and you're like, oh, if I go to class, if the teacher knows my name, if I do the basic studying, I will graduate. And those are the things. It's those social skills. College is almost about as much as learning what you need to do to be successful. There's a lot of kind of noise around employees not being prepared for the job. They don't want to come to the office. They don't want to show up on time. They don't want to spend the time there.

20:13What college does is train you that you need to be. You need to be here from this time to this time. You need to make connections with the people that your bosses, your educator, and your peers. And those are what make you successful. That model applies in the workspace in ways that we're really kind of just starting to really appreciate. As we do the debate between remote work and in-person work, how do we make sure we judge that? One of the challenges I face too is I had a job working for an ad agency when I was a senior in college. And I was like, well, why do I need to, I've already accomplished my goal, which is getting hired, why do I need to finish?

20:41And that was at odds for me. But my first job was working for Koch's ad agency in the Western United States, writing 20-second customized radio bumpers for Leadville, Colorado, and Boise, Idaho, and St. George, Utah, things like that. There were four interns and that's what we did. All of those can be done by AI by one person now. Entry-level job that really got my foot in the door and got me hired by the agency full-time and was the start of my career is now gone. What are schools doing to provide more experiential learning to better prepare students to make that leap? And then what are businesses doing to maintain those entry-level positions?

21:16That's one of the biggest challenges right now that people need to be talking more about. Yeah, great point. I do want to talk about Canvas a little bit. Workers falling behind because of tech or because of how we train them. And it seems like Canvas is helping close that gap. The goal really is to provide this framework for students to understand how they navigate learning. We've added some AI features and things like translation and discussion summaries that save educators time and help keep students on track. But the bigger aspect is we provide this open architecture. We work with Google and Gemini and Microsoft and Copilot and Claude and Anthropic, the big players.

21:50For schools, they want that choice. What do we plug in? What do we make available based off of the contracts we have and the organization that we want? Our goal really has been to be the framework that supports all that innovation, make sure that they meet the unique requirements of education. Accessibility, privacy, security, those are non-starters for education. We are governed by very strict laws around student data privacy and accessibility. And so how do we make sure that these tools support that? We support K-12, higher ed, and more increasingly, the government and corporate space as well.