What College Graduates Need to Do to Compete with AI in the Job Market

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Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of The Five Minute Leader.

There's something very interesting happening in the talent world, and this is really related to what we're seeing with AI. Depending on the numbers—depending on the stats that you look at—anywhere between 70 to 90% of organizations or hiring managers are very reluctant to hire new grads from college.

Why is that the case? Because they're turning to AI instead.

So if I'm a hiring manager at an organization and I'm thinking of hiring a new grad, the first thing that I'm going to ask is: Is it possible for me to use something like ChatGPT to do whatever this new grad was going to do to begin with?

And there are a few problems here. One of the big problems is that a lot of educational institutions are focused on knowledge—on teaching things from an academic level, not from a practical level. So if we're purely teaching people from an academic level, right—to pass what's on the test—we have ChatGPT for that. We don't need you if you're a recent college grad.

One of the big things that we need to get back to inside of organizations is apprenticeships, interns, things of that nature. I recently spoke with the President of Kettering University, and one of the things that they do is they blend the academic aspect with actual real-world experience in STEM fields.

So by the time you graduate college, you don't just have that academic background—you've already done the work. And because you've already done the work, everyone that graduates from that university already has two, three job offers by the time they get out of there.