I recently wrote about how AI is killing junior hiring. The short version: AI is automating the work that justified hiring juniors, the apprenticeship model is breaking, and junior talent isn't developing the judgment needed to be useful. That piece focused on what individuals can do. This one is for educators.

If you're working in education, the problems I described should concern you. Your students are graduating into a market that is less willing to train them than ever before. Here's what you can do about it.

Embrace vocational skills

Universities get well-deserved criticism for graduating students with unemployable skills. Over the last several decades, schools that started as trade schools have gradually and unnecessarily shifted into pseudo-liberal-arts schools. For the illiterates on LinkedIn, yes, there is a place for the small, private, liberal arts college, but that education is a luxury. If you're coming from a lower socioeconomic background, like I did, you probably go to school to get a job.

Historically, a school could take 3-4 years of a student's time to teach them general knowledge and employers would take the responsibility of training graduates on the specific skills necessary to do their work. However, that willingness to train is evaporating, and if a student wants to graduate into a job, they should know both the general knowledge and the specific skills.

Schools who want to graduate employable students would benefit from returning to vocational training. White collar education should look more blue collar: the further a school sits from academic abstraction, the more likely it has a good model for training people who can graduate with the skills they need for employment. I find it incredible that a student can graduate with a degree in accounting without ever having touched a real corporate bank account.

Schools don't need to sacrifice their pedigree and status to do this. Waterloo is a shining example in tech. Through its co-op program, students complete four to six paid work terms, up to two years of real work experience, before they graduate. The work experience is a graduation requirement, not an optional internship. Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke has said that 40% of Shopify's interns come from Waterloo because the school produces "a different tier of talent."

Waterloo is one of the top schools people look at for engineering talent:

• It ranks #1 in Canada for computer science, math, and engineering.
• Over 8,000 employers hire from the program.
• In my time working with top-tier startups, I've seen Waterloo go from a relatively unknown source of talent to a school with street cred. On a call with entrepreneurs swearing off hiring junior employees, there was still consensus that Waterloo was a source for "cracked" engineers.

By the time Waterloo students graduate, they know what work in the field looks like. The model isn't complicated. Make students do real work before they graduate. Employers trust the graduates because they've already proven they can work, which makes the school more attractive, and draws stronger students.

Hack your curriculum

Most professors and administrators have no idea what awaits their students in the real world. If you teach or design curricula, I recommend following tech people on X. Industry people still take it seriously and LinkedIn influencers are generally behind. Build a pool of people who are tracking trends and ask them to share their insights periodically. Seek your most entrepreneurial alumni, contact the hiring managers at your most sought-after employers, and ask professors to identify the tinkerers in class. Bring them together to share what they're building.

If you are an educator and you see what's happening, you are undoubtedly in for a hard time trying to get your school to change. Waiting for consensus and a perfect new program isn't an option. By the time committees have convened and surveys have been completed, any program will be outdated. The best bet is to find the most relevant existing resources and repurpose them for this new reality.

Figure out which courses already exist and repurpose them. Open them up as auditable courses, elective options, or certificate components so that students get closer to graduating as part of taking the course.

When I first started teaching, my college's Dean and I wanted to introduce a course on tech startups. The Dean knew it would take too long to go through the correct department, so he found a course that was under his department and which I met the requirements to teach. We finessed every ambiguity in the Business Law 4391 course description, and I ended up teaching a course I called "Legal Issues for Startups." I taught as little law as I reasonably could and focused on exposing students to the things I had learned from founders at Stanford and in Silicon Valley.

And then there's the professor problem. Too many educators spent the last three years obsessed with preventing students from using ChatGPT instead of figuring out how to teach alongside it. Some want to put their head in the sand and pretend none of this is happening. Some believe that it shouldn't happen. However you feel about it, it is happening, and people need to face it head on. Debate the ethics. Write the papers. Hold the symposiums. But none of that should come at the expense of the education students are paying for.

Schools have always been in the business of preparing people for the world they’re about to enter. That world is changing faster than most institutions can adapt, but adapting slowly is better than not adapting at all. The students paying tuition right now don’t have the luxury of waiting for a five-year strategic plan. Get a grip on what’s happening to work, give students vocational skills, expose them to real work, and get out of the way of the tools that will define their careers. The schools that do this will produce graduates that employers actually want. The rest will produce rapidly deprecating credentials.