70% of Workers Feel Unprepared: How Instructure Is Rethinking Learning with Ryan Lufkin

Summary

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Right About Now – Legendary Business Advice

Episode: 70% of Workers Feel Unprepared: How Instructure Is Rethinking Learning
Host: Ryan Alford (The Radcast Network)
Guest: Ryan Lufkin, VP of Global Strategy at Instructure
Date: March 24, 2026

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Overview

In this engaging episode, host Ryan Alford sits down with Ryan Lufkin, VP of Global Strategy at Instructure (makers of Canvas LMS), to confront the pressing issue: why do 70% of U.S. workers feel unprepared for today’s workforce? Together, they dig into the disconnect between education and real-world skills, how AI and rapid shifts are changing the landscape, and what practical steps employers, educators, and individuals can take to rethink learning and job readiness for the AI age.

Lufkin brings sharp, no-nonsense insight on education’s lag, the need for “AI literacy,” the importance of soft skills, and why both schools and businesses must share responsibility for closing the gap between learning and working life.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Gap: 70% of Workers Feel Unprepared

• Stat Spotlight: 70% of US workers reportedly feel unprepared for today’s jobs (03:39).
• Root Causes Discussed:
  • Rapid tech change (post-COVID digital acceleration, AI breakthroughs)
  • Disconnect between what’s taught (esp. in K12/higher ed) and what’s actually needed on the job
  • Resistance/fear of technology among educators and institutions

2. AI: Friend or Foe?

• The Integration Dilemma:
  • Education often treats AI as a threat to academic integrity (e.g., cheating), while business sees it as an optimization tool (04:23).
  • There's a lack of universal understanding and training on AI, even as its presence grows.
• AI Literacy Is Urgent:
  • "Even the detractors, those educators scared of AI...honestly, take an AI literacy course—at least understand how these tools work." – Ryan Lufkin [04:03]
  • Instructure and Google are developing free AI courses for millions of educators.
• The 'Strawberry Conundrum': AI is Confidently Wrong:
  • Lufkin recounts how ChatGPT 3.2 insisted “strawberry” had two R’s, highlighting the “black box” problem of AI and necessity for human expertise (05:48).
  • "What's really scary is that next generation that takes that approach...Why do I need to be ChatGPT the expert?...Someone's got to check its work." – Ryan Lufkin [06:02]

3. Rethinking What We Teach

• Do Traditional Subjects Still Matter?:
  • The relevance of learning old subjects (calculus, cursive, etc.) is questioned. Are we clinging to tradition or teaching what matters most today? (05:26, 10:58)
• What Skills Are Irreplaceable?
  • Math: Not merely about the answer, but the reasoning process (09:30).
  • New Bloom’s Taxonomy: Differentiates skills easily automated by AI from those that are essentially human—problem-solving, creativity, communication, consensus-building.
• Innovation in Teaching Methods:
  • Example: Product design professor now uses AI to accelerate research, then focuses teaching on interpersonal skills like market outreach, live presentations, feedback (11:14).
  • "We're not necessarily teaching entirely new things, but we're doing it in more innovative ways that lean into those human skills..." – Ryan Lufkin [12:22]

4. Assessment, Mastery, and the Real Role of School

• Assessment Over Memorization:
  • "How do we actually know whether or not somebody has learned that skill? How do we make sure it sticks?" – Ryan Lufkin [12:43]
  • The challenge: crowded classes, underpaid teachers, pressure for major pedagogy shifts without support.
• AI Can't Be Avoided:
  • Opting out isn’t an option. "You're going to be involved with AI at some level and understanding it, embracing it, understanding the ethical aspects are really important." [13:28]

5. Skills vs Degrees: Rethinking Credentials

• Soft Skills Still Matter (A Lot):
  • Despite talk of “skills-based” hiring, degrees remain “the preferred currency”—not just for hard skills, but soft ones like teamwork, empathy, and communication (14:11).
  • Many companies that dropped degree requirements reintroduced them once they saw the value beyond technical knowledge.
  • "The degree…is still the best barometer of whether or not a person is prepared to enter the modern workforce." – Ryan Lufkin [14:21]
• Upskilling Means Lifelong Learning:
  • No more “school for 16 years, job for 30.” Workers change jobs on average every 3 years.
  • Certificates and micro-credentials are on the rise (15:02).
  • Lufkin shares his own ongoing education (E. Cornell, Oxford Said, Arizona State).

6. Real Work Experience & The Entry-Level Dilemma

• Loss of Traditional Entry-Level Jobs:
  • AI and automation are erasing many traditional “foot in the door” roles (e.g., writing ads, intern projects that AI can now do).
  • Schools and businesses need new ways to give students real-world experience and maintain entry-level pathways (18:27).

7. Instructure/Canvas: Building Learning Frameworks for All

• Canvas’s Role:
  • Provides open, secure architecture for integrating various AI tools across education (Google, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, etc.)
  • Expanding into corporate/government for lifelong learning support (20:31).
  • Accessibility and privacy are “non-negotiables” for educational tech.

8. The Overwhelm Factor: Navigating Rapid Change

• Tech Acceleration is Exponential:
  • Lufkin: "Moore's Law is out the window with AI. It’s so rapid, it's insane." [21:59]
  • Example: An open-source AI autonomously called a restaurant to make a reservation when the website was down (22:18).
  • It’s essential to "shrink your bubble" to what you can control, not to be overwhelmed.

9. Advice for Employers: Training, Onboarding & the Upskilling Mandate

• Own the Training:
  • "There's this old adage from employers: What if we train our employees and they leave? The counterpoint: What if you don't train them and they stay?" – Ryan Lufkin [24:06]
  • Both education and employers must take responsibility for AI literacy and ongoing upskilling, not passing the buck.
• Move Beyond Scarcity/Siloed Mindsets:
  • Next-generation leaders are more likely to enable flexibility and employee empowerment (25:05).
  • AI (done right) can break down old “boxes” and silos in organizations, letting people leverage broader skills (26:35).
  • “Now imagine educators...subject matter experts...suddenly have tools to create short videos, imagery, less dry writing...the potentials are just unlocked.” – Ryan Lufkin [26:58]

10. Rapid-Fire Close: Underrated & Overrated Skills, Needed Mindsets

• Most Overrated Skill: Coding (27:41)
• Most Underrated Skill: Clear communication (27:53)
• Mindset Shift Needed: Move away from rigid boxes and silos; enable employees to use AI and step outside assigned roles (27:58-28:25)
• Quote: “How many great ideas have never found the light of day because somebody was sitting in the wrong box?” – Ryan Lufkin [27:58]

11. Final Takeaways

• AI and rapid change present both risks and nearly boundless opportunities—but only if people, educators, and employers intentionally adapt.
• “We’re just at the point of building the trust, starting to use these tools in really creative ways...If we suspend our fear a little bit...there’s a lot of opportunity to uncover.” – Ryan Lufkin [28:52]

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Notable Quotes

• "Why do I need to be chatgpt, the expert? Someone's got to check its work." – Ryan Lufkin [01:00, 06:02]
• “Even the detractors, those educators that are scared of AI...take an AI literacy course, at least understand how these tools work, then you understand what they’re capable of…” –Ryan Lufkin [04:03]
• "Math isn’t just getting the answer; it’s having the logic and reasoning behind how we get from here to there." – Ryan Lufkin [09:30]
• "The degree...is still the best barometer of whether or not a person is prepared to enter the modern workforce." – Ryan Lufkin [14:21]
• “What if we train our employees and they leave? What if you don’t train them and they stay?” – Ryan Lufkin [24:06]
• “Moore’s Law is out the window with AI. It’s so rapid, it’s insane.” – Ryan Lufkin [21:59]
• “How many great ideas have never found the light of day because somebody was sitting in the wrong box?” – Ryan Lufkin [27:58]

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Important Timestamps (Segment Highlights)

• [01:00] – Human Oversight Must Check AI’s Work
• [04:03] – The Urgency of AI Literacy for Educators
• [05:48] – The “Strawberry Conundrum”: AI’s Confident Errors
• [10:58] – Should Schools Teach What They Did 50 Years Ago?
• [12:43] – The Problem is HOW, Not WHAT, We Teach (Assessment/Mastery)
• [14:21] – Skills vs Degrees: Why Degrees Still Matter
• [18:27] – AI Has Eaten Entry-Level Jobs; What’s Next for Students?
• [20:31] – Canvas as a Framework for Lifelong, Integrated Learning
• [21:59] – Keeping Up With AI: The Acceleration of Change
• [24:06] – Why Companies Need to Own Employee Upskilling
• [26:35] – AI Can Break Down Silos and Expand Roles
• [27:53] – Overrated/Underrated Skills & Organizational Mindset Shifts

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Resources & Contact

• Instructure/Canvas: instructure.com
• Podcast: Educast 3000 (by Instructure, with Lufkin & Melissa Lobel)
• Ryan Lufkin: Connect on LinkedIn

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Tone & Style

The conversation is punchy, candid, and insightful—true to “Right About Now’s” promise of “uncensored insights and hard-earned wisdom.” Both Ryans blend humor, personal anecdotes, and practical advice to cut through the noise about business, tech, and education.

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Bottom Line:
This episode gives a brutally honest yet hopeful look at the future of workforce learning, AI’s risks and powers, and what must shift in both classrooms and boardrooms to help people thrive—not just survive—in work’s new era.

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Transcript

[Commercial Narrator]

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[Ryan Lufkin]

Well, why do I need to be chatgpt, the expert? Someone's gotta check its work. It's great at doing research. It's great at being that assistant and accomplishing tasks that can be time consuming. But it's not infallible. We can't trust it to that level yet. Maybe someday, but we still need to be the experts. We can't offload that to the machines.

[Commercial Narrator]

This is Right about now with Ryan

[Ryan Lufkin]

Alford, A Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month, taking the BS out of business for over 6 years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now.

[Ryan Alford]

Hello and welcome to right about now. We're always talking about what the world has going on right now. In the world of business, marketing, personal development, we cover the gamut ultimately. But we're here to help you get ahead. Entrepreneurs, executives, everyone out there listening. We know you have choices. Thank you for being here. New data shows that about 70% of US workers feel unprepared for today's workforce. That raises a bigger question. Is the problem education, employers, or how we think about skills altogether? Today I'm joined by Ryan Lufkin, the VP of Global Strategy in Structure. He has spent years helping companies and institutions rethink how people actually become job ready. And we're getting into what's broken and what needs to change. Ryan, welcome to Right about now.

[Ryan Lufkin]

Awesome. Thanks, Ryan.

[Ryan Alford]

Hey. Hey, Ryan. And Ryan, you got a good start already, man. We're like Brothers from another Talk to me man in structure. What that word means.

[Ryan Lufkin]

We're the makers of Canvas. Canvas learning management system. At this point, about half of all the college students in North America and about a third of all K12 students in North America use Canvas on a daily basis. In learning, we're all about instruction. Instructure is the name of the company. It's funny, you wear a Canvas shirt to Home Depot and people are like, oh, you give me flashbacks to college. You wear an Instructure shirt. Not as many people know. I always like to explain that connection.

[Ryan Alford]

I did recognize that in our notes. And that name. I was twitching a little bit. I'm not sure.

[Ryan Lufkin]

Well, it's funny, you can tell how good their educators were at designing courses in Canvas. If they were like, oh, I love canvas or oh, I hate canvas. You're like, yeah, teacher probably wasn't using it, right?

[Ryan Alford]

Yeah. Yes. That's your point of view. I guess it's probably how literate they were with technology and a lot of

[Ryan Lufkin]

times it's how much support they had in what does a good online course or a good hybrid course look like? I think too often, especially if they learned really rapidly. At the beginning of COVID our solution grew rapidly because people had to move online in over the course of about two days. You could tell the educators that were given a lot of support and a lot of resources and really trained what good looked like and then the ones that were kind of thrown into it without that support. Our goal really has improved over the last five years of that level of online learning and course design.

[Ryan Alford]

There's some meta talk there, Ryan. The meta of the fact that the teachers weren't prepared to use the software appropriately. And we're talking about how workers in general feel unprepared.

[Ryan Lufkin]

You talk about this pace of change that started in six years ago, March of 2020, and that pace of change hasn't slowed. Just when everybod who thought, oh, Covid's over, we can take a breath. November 30th of 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT and we got everything got turned on its head again. The last read from that have been just an incredibly fast paced evolution of how do we use this technology. I have a chart. It's almost the seven stages of grief going through all of that. We're really in the acceptance phase with AI now and how are we applying it appropriately?

[Ryan Alford]

70% of workers feel unprepared. What does that really mean?

[Ryan Lufkin]

Well, you've got this kind of schism between education that in many ways is still really dealing with the academic integrity idea, this idea that AI just for cheating versus businesses that are trying to figure out how do we optimize our jobs with these tools. In many cases, don't feel like universities are preparing them for that. It's even worse than K12. When you look at K12 and there's a kind of an anti technology and education movement going on that ignores some of the more glaring benefits of using technology to reach people that have accessibility challenges and rural and frankly just maybe are missing school. Things like that. We've got to get everybody on the same page. And Google announced a really great program trying to provide free AI education to 6 million educators across the United States. We are getting ready to release some courses around AI literacy. And even the detractors, those educators that are scared of AI or have doubled down and said we're not using AI honestly, take an AI literacy course, at least understand how these tools work, then you understand what they're capable of and then you can actually make the more informed decision about how deeply do you want to use these tools and put you in a better position to help your students understand how to use them ethically, how to use them effectively, things like that.

[Ryan Alford]

If we're going to learn something for the sake of learning and for teaching ourselves how to problem solve, are these the problems that we should be solving? Do we need to learn calculus? Do we need to learn things that AI can do and we'll foreseeably be around unless we all go back to the old ages because power goes away or something or WI fi goes away. Are we really teaching what we should be teaching and why do we still need to learn the things we learned 30 years ago?

[Ryan Lufkin]

I will point to what was called the strawberry conundrum. ChatGPT 3.2. If you ask it how many Rs were in the word strawberry, it would tell you two. And you'd say, go back and maybe look that again and tell me how many are there. And it would say there are two R's in Strawberry. Of course there's three R's in Strawberry. And they could not figure out because essentially large language models are a black box. You don't know what's going on inside there. They could not figure out why it hung up on that. And it wasn't until the next model, 3.3 came out, they fixed that. That's the reason that we all need to be experts. ChatGPT has a high propensity for what we would call hallucination. More often, it's confidently incorrect. What it's trying to do is give you what you've asked it for. Some cases, it makes things up. It'll make up links, sources, it'll make up whole sets of information because it's just trying to give you what you want. And if it doesn't find it or doesn't spend the find it, it just kind of makes it up. We don't know exactly why, but when we are the experts, we can double check that work and say, oh, you know what? That's not right. Let's go back and fix it. Let's not perpetuate that Strawberry conundrum. What's really scary is that next generation that takes that approach that you're talking about and says, well, why do I need to be chatgpt the expert? Someone's got to check its work. It's great at doing research. It's great at being that assistant and accomplishing tasks. That can be time consuming. But it's not infallible. We can't trust it to that level yet. Maybe someday, but we still need to be the experts. We can't offload that to the machines.

[Ryan Alford]

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[Commercial Narrator]

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[Ryan Alford]

Even things as simple as math is direct in black and white. When I think of what you just described, and I agree with it by Till people, there still will be jobs because of what you said. And discernment and humanity that have to be overlaid on the top of these things is not only just that as long with certain factual applications in the real world, but when doing 10 +10 or a squared b squared c equals c squared even at advanced levels, that's fairly black and white. Are you saying that math is done wrong by jbt?

[Ryan Lufkin]

I think it's the reasoning behind it. One of the things that's really important about math isn't just getting the answer, it's actually having the logic and reasoning behind how do we get from here to there? There's a whole Bloom's Taxonomy. If you're in education, you understand what Bloom's Taxonomy is. It's this skill tree. There's a new Bloom's taxonomy that actually says, okay, these are the skills that are going to be easily replaced by AI, and these are the skills that aren't. These are the human skills and their problem solving, their creative thinking, their communication, their consensus building, their things like that. And that's why to your point, the we will always have jobs, we will always have the ability because we need to be able to connect with other humans while we let AI do the more mundane tasks. And in some cases, yeah, it might get math wrong. It might get very convoluted. Convoluted an accountant. The idea of an accountant giving up control of their books or understanding the formulas and letting them run without being able to double check. That is scary. And not every job needs advanced math. If we're in marketing, I don't use advanced math on a daily basis, but there are occasions when it's important to have that reasoning, that logic.

[Ryan Alford]

If math is still fairly critical learning and important to keep in the curriculum, what are the things that should be changing then? I don't want to pretend that what we were doing 30 years ago, but I do hear some of the subjects and some of the stuff and I'm like, like that's the same thing. Someone with a higher pay grade smarter than me knows if that's what they need to be learning. But I'm like that Is not real life applicable? When does K12 become more preparatory for the real world versus the standard topics that we've always taught because it was important 30, 40, 50 years ago that we did that.

[Ryan Lufkin]

That's where the tension, especially in K12 comes right now. There's this kind of undercurrent of anti technology going on. But then our STEM scores are going in the toilet. How do we address STEM of science, technology and math? Science, technology, engineering, math. How do we do that if we're not going to actually leverage technology and the teaching of those things? And meanwhile you've got a group that's pushing that we should be teaching cursive again. And why aren't we teaching cursive in elementary school? No one writes long form letters during the Civil War when they would write the pen poetic letters. We don't do that anymore. There's been a lot of news articles on that lately. Who's pushing that and why? How does that benefit us? There's a really great story. I was at California system meeting and we had a panel of educators. It was a professor of product design and he said, okay, we used to spend the first 60% of a course designing a product, doing specs, doing market analysis, doing all this stuff, the last 40% kind of analyzing the work, presenting to each other, things like that. Now AI, we can do the all of that within the first 10% of the course, come up with an idea, have AI help us do a product design, have it do the research around that for us. Now he makes his students actually reach out and contact experts in the market, set up a meeting and present to them this idea and get their feedback. And I always say if I call my daughter, she won't answer the phone, she'll text me right back. She's a junior in college. She does not answer the phone, she doesn't pick up the phone. He's pushing those students to lean back into those more human skills. Reaching out, making a connection, setting up a presentation, presenting your thing, collecting feedback. Those things that I can't easily do for us, that's really the focus. It's kind of that evolution in teaching. We're not necessarily teaching entirely new things, but we're doing it in more innovative ways that lean into those human skills and not just assigning 20 page papers that kids are going to use AI to write.

[Ryan Alford]

Are schools teaching the wrong things or just teaching them the wrong way?

[Ryan Lufkin]

It's the wrong way really. It comes down to the assessment of mastery. How do we actually know whether or not somebody has learned that skill? How do we make sure it sticks in their brain? Isn't just I memorized these data points, I took the quiz, I dump those memory points out of my brain and I move on to the next thing. How do we really teach skills? That's the biggest challenge right now is educators who are already underpaid and underappreciated and school classes that are too big are being asked to evolve how they're teaching, fundamentally redesign their courses, and then measure those outcomes in truly significant ways that can then be reported on to the Department of Labor and things like that. That evolution, teaching online and with technology during COVID We need to address this the same way. We need to provide educators the resources they need to involve how they're teaching with AI, with preparing those students, because it's not going away. And I think those educators that I can opt out, we've had students say, I want to opt out. You're not going to be able to opt out of AI. There's a waymo that just drove past people's houses. They don't get to say, you don't get to drive past here. Nope. That automated car is driving down the street. You're going to be involved with AI at some level and understanding it, embracing it, understanding the ethical aspects of it are really important.

[Ryan Alford]

Talking with Ryan Lufkin, the VP of Global Strategy at Instructure. Ryan, you kind of teed this up. You're teeing all my notes up perfectly, by the way. I really like this. You're an excellent guest. Skills versus degrees. It seems like we're in a skills based economy versus a degree based economy. And I don't know if degrees hold the same value they used to. You can prove me wrong. What skills actually matter most right now?

[Ryan Lufkin]

We've talked about those human skills and how important they are. I will say I'm still a big believer that the degree, the, the associate degree, the bachelor's degree, the master's degree, they are still the preferred currency in hiring. And there's a reason for that, because they're not just about the hard skills. Generally. The math include the soft skills, working with groups, being empathetic, building consensus, communication. Like all those things that are incredibly important. Those human skills that we're talking about, they embody all of those. A year or two ago, you saw a lot of businesses kind of crow that they were taking out a degree as a requirement for hiring. And what you saw is a lot of them slowly reintroduced that because it really is the best barometer of whether or not a person is prepared to enter the modern workforce. That said, because of this pace of change we live in a world that we all need to be lifelong learners, every single one of us. That means go to school for 12 years, or 16 years or 20 years. Then we would go to a job, often the same job for 30 years. Then we would retire with our pension. And I mean that was our parents generation. That doesn't exist anymore. The average tenure at a job is about three years. They're saying, well we're going to work until we die. There's no pensions anymore. It's incumbent on us to prepare ourselves to be upwardly mobile within the job market by constantly training new skills. And in most cases employers aren't owning that. The college and university system still owns that upskilling and reskilling of adult learners. And they really have done an amazing job post Covid, especially of rolling out new credential programs because you can actually roll out a credential, a certificate program without all of the regulatory requirements around accreditation that a standard college program needs. In many cases it's the same or similar content repackaged in more bite sized chunks. So you can go and take a three or four course certificate. Within that certificate I can post to LinkedIn, I can post to an employer and she'll look. If you look at my LinkedIn, I've got certificate in Data Driven marketing from E. Cornell. I did an AI regulation and compliance course from Oxford Said business school. I'm doing my master's right now with Arizona State University because to me I enj learning. It's one of those things. But it's also that way that you qualify yourself for being up in the mobile in a job. That's one of the things that we've shifted towards. And it's not necessarily breaking it down to the component skills we haven't all agreed on. Like a skills taxonomy that makes sense to everyone. And a lot of the old skills taxonomies are really outdated. They don't capture a lot of the more modern skills that we need. Not quite there yet. But getting those certificates to help demonstrate for employers that I'm a learner, I want to evolve. And these skills we're getting there pretty quick, quickly.

[Ryan Alford]

Hey guys, if you've ever built a website before, you know how quickly it can turn into a time suck. Recently I've been playing around with wix's new hybrid editor called WIX Harmony. You basically start by telling it what you're trying to build. You prompt it to generate a professional grade site just like you want it. And here's the part I like. You can easily Go back and forth between AI and hands on editing whenever you want. The AI agent Aria is an expert in website design and business. She can answer questions or perform direct actions throughout the process, which has been huge for me when I'm trying to perfect the look of my website. They've also got built in tools for selling, bookings and marketing. Pretty much all the stuff you actually need once the site's live. If you're building anything right now, a side project, brand, business, whatever, WIX Harmony honestly makes it easier to get out of your own way and start making stuff happen happen. Go to wix.com harmony that's wix.com harmony start your website today. I wish that we gotten there when I was in college. Definitely learning soft skills. I would dare say make this statement Ryan. I have made more money per GPA than anyone that I went to school with. I had the lowest. I had graduated 2.01. I was one point away from not graduating on a calculus test mainly because I never went to class. I had started with the highest grade I could get was a 90 because they deducted 10 points. So I had to essentially make A's on everything because to just to pass the class essentially because I was bored. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm partly add. I know I'm wired different but it taught me absolutely nothing. Now here's what I learned. You nailed it. The soft skills, people coming to consensus. Absolutely. Probably we was worth the money just for that. However I might could have learned that and gotten further towards where I wanted to go doing something different if different had existed.

[Ryan Lufkin]

What's cool though. Yeah to your point, there are more educational opportunities, more paths to find yourself into a well paying job than there ever have been in the history of the world. And the biggest challenge is finding out what do you want to do and then finding through all the noise what's the, what's the best path to get together. And it's not always a two or four year degree but I was the same way. I'll be honest. Undiagnosed ADHD Ms. Class A lot on academic probation. At one point what you learn is all of a sudden you're like, it clicks and you're like oh if I go to class, if the teacher knows my name, if I do the basic studying, I will graduate. And those are the things, it's those social skills. College is almost about as much as learning what you need to do to be successful. There's a lot of kind of noise around employees not being prepared for the job they don't want to come to the office, they don't want to show up on time, they don't want to spend the time there. What college does is train you that you need to be, you need to be here from this time to this time. You need to make connections with the people that your bosses, your educator and, and your peers. And those are what make you successful. That model applies in the workspace in ways that we're really kind of just starting to really appreciate as we do the debate between remote work and in person work. How do we make sure we judge that? One of the challenges I faced too is I had a job working for an ad agency when I was a senior in college and I was like, well why do I need to. I've already accomplished my goal, which is getting hired. Why do I need to finish? And that was at odds for me. But my first job was working for Coke's ad agency in the western United States, writing 22nd customized radio bumpers for Leadville, Colorado and Boise, Idaho and St. George, Utah, things like that. There were four interns and that's what we did. All of those could be done by AI, by one person. Now entry level job that really got my foot in the door and got me hired by the agency full time and was the start of my career is now gone. What are schools doing to provide more experiential learning to better prepare students to make that leap? And then what are businesses doing to maintain those entry levels level positions? That's one of the biggest challenges right now that people need to be talking more about.

[Ryan Alford]

Yeah, great point. I do want to talk about Canvas a little bit. Workers falling behind because of tech or because of how we train them. And it seems like Canvas is helping close that gap.

[Ryan Lufkin]

The goal really is to provide this framework for students to understand how they navigate learning. We've added some AI features and things like translation and discussion summaries that save educators time and help keep students on track. But the bigger aspect is we provide this open architecture. We work with Google and Gemini and Microsoft and Copilot and Claude and Anthropic, the big players for schools, they want that choice. What do we plug in, what we make available based off of the contracts we have and the organization that we want. Our goal really has been to be the framework that supports all that innovation. Make sure that they they meet the unique requirements of education. Accessibility, privacy, security. Those are non starters for education. We are governed by very strict laws around student data privacy, privacy and accessibility. And so how do we make sure that these tools support that. We support K12, higher ed and more increasingly the government and corporate space as well. People graduate and say, I really like using Canvas. Why don't I have something like that here in my job? We've moved to support that as well. That lifelong learning approach is incredibly important and we want to make sure we're there to support institutions as they deliver that.

[Ryan Alford]

I try to be reflective outside of my own curiosity and skill set or whatever I'm interested into. And then sometimes I step back, call it empathy, college, just understanding other sides of it. But it's a lot to digest. It is intimidating. I've got Claude and ChatGPT for the best answers. I kind of like that answer better than this one. Especially like when prognosticating my age, how long I'll live. I do think it is overwhelming because I'm very good with change and adapting. But I go, damn, this is a lot to take on and understand how to apply it.

[Ryan Lufkin]

There's this constant stream of new innovations and new things coming out. Moore's Law is that acceleration of technology innovation. And Moore's Law is out the window with AI. It's so rapid, it's insane. There's announcements like claw, which is an open source large language model. There was a person that said, okay, go out and make me a reservation for dinner. And it went out and it tried to access the website. Website wasn't working. So it gave itself a voice and it called the restaurant and made the reservation. And that freaked everyone out aggressively because it accomplished the task that it was given. And it did so by going outside the bounds of what the person asking it to do the task thought it was possible. We all want Jeeves. We all want the virtual assistant that we've been promised forever, that you click a button and say, oh, make me a reservation. Go do that. Book me a flight to Cancun. Find a good hotel and a restaurant, settle that up and then let's go. We all want that level of ease, but with that comes risk. And that's where we're in this kind of phase right now of how much do we trust these tools to be autonomous and how much do we really need to continue the oversight. But it's a lot. It can be feel very, very overwhelming. And you almost have to shrink your bubble into the world that you control and that you have aspect and kind of ignore it. Lot of the other noise.

[Ryan Alford]

How do you think employers should think differently about training and onboarding in this day and age?

[Ryan Lufkin]

I have really good friend Troy who was in a car accident and suffered a traumatic brain injury and was out of work for about a year. And when he was ready to go back, he would do these interviews and they'd say, well, do you know AI? And he would say, what do you want me to know about AI? And they'd say, well, but do you know AI? And what became clear very quickly was that they didn't actually know what they wanted. They wanted someone with skills in using AI and adapting these tools to come in and help them deliver that kind of innovation. He reached out to me, we had a conversation, I sent him some courses that he could take and he upskilled quickly and then got a job pretty rapidly from that. But we're in this position where a lot of college universities aren't necessarily taking ownership of teaching AI literacy and employers aren't necessarily taking ownership. They want these graduates to come out with these skills to help them. We need both sides to take ownership of training students on AI literacy and how to use these tools effectively and ethically across the board. That other aspect is there's this old adage that I've heard from a lot of employers that are like, well, what if we train our employees and they leave? The counterpoint is, what if you don't train them and they stay? We need employers to really own the upskilling and reskilling of their employees to make their workforce better, not hide behind the fear that those skilled employees will then take that training and go somewhere else.

[Ryan Alford]

Yeah.

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[Ryan Alford]

That's very flawed. We've seen both sides of it. We've come up in this innovation realm, but we're also part of the analog world, the way a lot of old employers and people thought. Very scarcity driven.

[Ryan Lufkin]

That scarcity mentality I think is really important to acknowledge. And I think what you're seeing is as the average age, as we cycle through the older leadership, we're starting to get that more innovative leadership and a of lot of industries that previously were very focused on coming back in the office. Let's not Use technology. We're being forced to really adapt to the modern world in a way. If you want to keep a good employee, you're going to have flexible hours, you're going to have good technology support. There's these new requirements for students that are just very different than when we came out of college or entered workforce.

[Ryan Alford]

These tools have an empowerment component, how much they unlock. I came up in the ad agency business too, ryan. I worked 20 years plus plus 15 work for other agencies. There's no better silo world than the ad agency business. I imagine it's gotten better, but I'm 10 years removed from it. Ryan, you're going to get this much like I was out of fish out of water in college. I was a creative strategic account guy at ad agency. I was a good writer, I think in headlines. I'm a big idea guy. But I'm actually pretty organized, pretty good account guy. And I understood strategy. It served me well because I was in a very entrepreneurial agency that actually took advantage of my skills in most agencies. A fish out of water. I bring this up through my own context because, Ryan, you got that now with AI used to be okay, how can we get the most out of this person at the cheapest possible? Give them seven hats. And it was just financially driven. But now with AI and the abilities, people can sit in a lot of different boxes because AI unlocks a lot of abilities and skills, agentic or otherwise, that allows them to do those things.

[Ryan Lufkin]

That is an incredible example. I'm going to steal that for later because I love that example of that siloed organization. I remember having an idea because I was on the account management side, a creative idea. I'm like, what if we do this? And I was told, stop, shut up. Not your department. Go talk to the customer. I had been a commercial designer. I had the right to be creative. And it was so funny that like that got shut down. Even the stages within the creative field, somebody would come up with a headline. The writers came up with headlines. The designers came up with maybe storyboards to pitch the idea. And now you can have the idea. You can actually work with AI to do the writing and improve the writing. You can actually have AI create the storyboards for you. To your point exactly. Now imagine educators, educators who are not necessarily really trained on how to be an educator. They're really subject matter experts in their field. Like I'm a history professor. I know history like the back of my hand. But suddenly I have the ability to use these tools to create short videos, to Create imagery to make my writing less dry. Things like that. If we lean into that, if we. We support that. Holy cow. The potentials are just unlocked for employees to be so much more productive in ways that, you know, but we've got to break down that frame, that box, those boxes that we put people in. Love that analogy. That was a good one.

[Ryan Alford]

That's a big opportunity. Ryan, as we close out here, I got a little rapid fire for you, if you don't mind. Three things. Most overrated skill, Coding. Unfortunately, most underrated skill. Good.

[Ryan Lufkin]

Clear communication is incredible.

[Ryan Alford]

One mindset shift people need.

[Ryan Lufkin]

I really like what you just called out around the boxing of organizations and this idea that everybody needs to stay in their box and not try to cross over. Because I think how many great ideas have never found the light of day because somebody was sitting in the wrong box? Really has kind of got me thinking now. I think that's just a great point.

[Ryan Alford]

Yeah. If we can get people thinking, the leaders going, how do we use AI to enable our people to step outside of their boxes? Because they can. What do we unlock?

[Ryan Lufkin]

It's good. Leaders being willing to be more flexible, being willing to really call out those employees that are using these tools the right way and are using them effectively again, modeling what good looks like. Show people what's possible and encourage everybody else to kind of follow that, freeing of their minds.

[Ryan Alford]

AI creates these laboratories of opportunity. And if you enable that and you empower that you're getting, it's kind of like in science and technology. How many more tests can they do? Improve the model that could change the world or at least change the organization.

[Ryan Lufkin]

We're just at the point where we're building the trust, and we're starting to use these tools in really creative ways, but they're brand new, and we don't even know exactly what they're all capable of. If we suspend our fear a little bit and if we lean into using them and learning them, I think there's a lot of opportunity that they uncover.

[Ryan Alford]

Ryan, where can everybody keep up with what you're up to? Instructure, Canvas, et cetera.

[Ryan Lufkin]

I'm on LinkedIn. Instructure.com is our website. We blog frequently. And then my boss, Melissa Lobel, who's their chief academic officer, she and I do a podcast podcast called Educast 3000. You've got a huge number more episodes. I think we have about 41 episodes. You have hundreds. We talk to some of the smartest people in education and really pick their brains to make us smarter and it's great.

[Ryan Alford]

Really appreciate you, Ryan, for coming on.

[Ryan Lufkin]

Great conversation. I really enjoyed it.

[Ryan Alford]

Hey guys, you want to find us? Ryan is right.com you'll find show notes from today, highlight clips, the full length episodes. Go check us out on YouTube. Hit that subscribe button. We appreciate it. You got to see this army green. I'm rocking. Ryan's rocking it too. We appreciate you. We're lucky that you're here. We'll see you next time on Right about now.

[Ryan Lufkin]

This has been Right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast network production. Visit ryanisright.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities.

[Commercial Narrator]

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