← AI for Educators Daily with Dan Fitzpatrick
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
If this episode makes you think, please let us know in the comments and support us by subscribing and leaving a review. Thank you. Today we are exploring some fascinating insights from a research piece in the Harvard Business Review titled AI Is Changing what Employers Want from New Hires. This article, penned by Jim Doucet and Vishal Gore and published on July 8, 2026, makes a pretty striking claim right off the bat. It talks about an executive at a large multinational bank who recently said, three years ago, no one in my department used genai tools. Today, 100% of the department uses gen AI every day for hours per day. Now, that's not a future prediction, is it? That's happening now. What this piece from the Harvard Business Review is suggesting is that generative AI is truly transforming employer expectations from from knowledge workers. And here's the kicker. It's not by replacing expertise, but by raising the bar for it. The authors, Jim Doucet and Vishal Gore, looked at three sectors that recruit the largest number of knowledge workers, and what they found points to a rapid and profound shift in the workplace. It's an evolution, not a revolution in terms of the underlying human need for skill, but certainly a revolution in how those skills are applied and elevated. First, let's unpack this idea of raising the bar. This isn't just about efficiency. It means that the baseline for what's considered competent is shifting upwards because I can handle the more routine, often time consuming aspects of a job. So if a machine can churn out a first draft, summarize documents, or crunch basic data in seconds, then the human expectation becomes about what you do with that output. It's about critical analysis, strategic thinking, nuanced judgment, and creative transformation. This perfectly aligns with our core philosophy of enhancement, not replacement. AI is augmenting human capability. It's not taken over the essential human role. It's helping us hold the complexity. So, so we have capacity for creativity now. What does this mean for teaching students right now? Well, it means we need to prepare them not just to use AI tools, but to operate above them. Think about your year 10 English class. Instead of simply tasking them with writing an essay, imagine a scenario where they use an AI to generate three different first drafts based on the same prompt. Their job then becomes to critically evaluate each draft using our edit framework. Evaluate, determine accuracy, identify bias, transform. They're not just writing, they're becoming editors, critical thinkers, and decision makers, choosing the best elements, identifying weaknesses, and infusing their own unique voice and argument. The real value is not in what the machine produces but but in how the student responds, evaluates and transforms it. This is teaching them not to outsmart machines, but to outthink them. Developing genuine AI workplace skills and this is the bit that really got me thinking about offbeak AI hiring changes and the broader AI impact on jobs. The article isn't just saying AI is a new tool. It's saying it's reshaping the definition of skill itself. We need to remember the principle of outsource the doing, not the thinking. If AI handles the doing, the initial grunt work, the repetitive tasks, then our students must be exceptionally good at the thinking, the judgment, the creativity, the strategic planning. This also means leaning into assessment methods that demand a cognitive stretch. Our tasks should ask, can AI complete this without the student's unique context, perspective or judgment? If the answer is yes, then we need to redesign that task. For more insights on how AI is shaping education and what it means for your school, make sure to follow and subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen. We're constantly exploring these shifts to help you stay ahead. Here's what this means for school leaders and department heads. You might need to look at your curriculum maps for Key Stage 4 and 5 and ask some fundamental questions. Are we still assessing tasks that are now automated or heavily assisted by AI? Are we truly building the higher order thinking skills that these new employer expectations demand? For example, in a year 8 geography lesson, instead of students just writing a report on climate change, perhaps they use an AI like NotebookLM to quickly synthesize information from various sources. Then their task becomes to critically debate the various proposed solutions, designing a persuasive presentation for a local council addressing potential biases in the source material the AI pulled. This shift serves not just the top 20%, but also the middle 80%, giving them tools to elevate their work and focus on the intellectual heavy lifting. This isn't just about specific classroom tasks, it's about a systemic shift in how we define expertise. The concept of generative AI employment implies a collaborative reasoning ability, which is our definition of AI literacy. It's about thinking with AI, managing AI conversations with precision and understanding AI limitations and failure modes. It's less about coding or memorizing tool features, and much more about human judgment and creativity. Machines can compute, they cannot wander, they cannot care. These remain the invaluable human domains we must cultivate and protect in our students. Ultimately, the Harvard Business Review research underscores that we must design learning that cannot be faked because it demands depth, care and imagination. That's all for today thanks for listening.