How Students and
Professionals Can Prepare
To create a career that will weather the
storms of change, you need to build skills
and practices that will augment, but not
compete with, AI:
1. Build T-Shaped Skillsets
You need the depth of knowledge in one area, but also breadth of
knowledge in parallel areas of relevance. This ability to be versatile is
crucial as technology develops.
2. Develop Human Skills
Develop skills that AI cannot, including creativity, ethics, empathy,
communication and collaboration, leadership and complex problem-
solving.
3. Learn How to Work with AI
The most successful people will be those with the ability to work
alongside AI tools, knowing what the tools can do and what they cannot.
4. Create Cross-Domain Knowledge
There are enormous new values available to professionals who can
integrate technological knowledge with sectors such as health, finance,
education, sustainability, etc. They hold a key zone of value that distinct
technologist do not.
5. Build Continual Learning
The half-life of any technical knowledge is getting shorter, we need to
establish habits and systems of continual skill development, not focus on
static knowledge.
6. Focus on Outcomes Versus Activities
As AI will automate more and more tasks, the value it creates will shift to
outcomes and solutioning problems, not task based activities.
CASE STUDY 2: THE RISE OF THE DATA
ANALYST
Maya started her career running SQL
queries and creating basic dashboards.
As these tasks became easier due to
automation, she began to invest time
learning causal inference, experimental
design, and thinking through business
strategy. Today, she is a decision scientist
who looks at the “why” behind data, and
has abstracted her analyses to allow
business strategy decisions to be made.
CASE STUDY 1: THE NEW SOFTWARE
DEVELOPER
Real-World Examples of
Evolution and
Adaptation
Five years ago, Alex had a job title of full-
stack developer, and a majority of his day was
spent writing code. Today he may still have a
job title of full-stack developer, but the
nature of his job has changed. He spends a
lot more time defining problems clearly,
architecting designs, and enlisting the help of
AI assisted coding programs. His productivity
increase has improved 5 fold, which has
allowed him to take on even more ambitious
projects.