Employers Come to Campus, Talk AI and Jobs

The panelists — Natasha Chan, principal solutions consultant at Adobe; Rui Ma, chief operating officer at AlphaWatch.ai; Jeff Shelby, commercial sales leader at Grammarly; and Sankar Venkatraman, a global evangelist at LinkedIn — talked about what they seek in job applicants. They agreed that AI skills are good to have but soft skills are even better.

“Durable soft skills. They’re the operating system of life,” Shelby said. “Critical thinking, reasoning, analysis, ethics, communication, collaboration, curiosity, active listening, empathy — all highly desirable traits.”

In a job interview, “tell me about a time that you showed empathy to a classmate or a colleague. Tell me how you solved a problem or made an impact,” Shelby added.

“Be a critical, ethical, agile user of emerging technologies,” Chan said. “Be curious. Have breadth as well as depth. Learn how to apply the theory you learn in school to the tools you use at work.”

One attendee asked: How can students learn AI literacy?

“Practice AI in the classroom,” Shelby said. “Teachers and students should learn together. Ask what you can learn from AI; ask what AI can learn from you.”

Students need four skills: cognitive, self-leadership, interpersonal, and digital, Venkatraman said. “Digital skills are the fastest-changing of the four. The tools you’re learning in school today aren’t the tools you’ll need on the job tomorrow. All the subskills are changing and obsolete in a matter of years or even months. Be able to learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

Ma agreed. “The important thing is to remain curious and eager to learn on the job,” she said. “I ask my intern to research new technology that she can use in her work. Learning is part of her job.”

Venkatraman added that “AI will democratize expertise. Nurses will know more than doctors do, and that’s OK. Young people will know more than I do, and that’s OK. If students cultivate a culture of continuous learning, that’s the best way to future-proof their careers.”