Students on the sidelines

NH needs to prepare its workforce for the rise of artificial intelligence

Taylor Caswell

The advance of artificial intelligence is an increasingly prevalent topic, particularly as it relates to how it will impact our workforce. Much of that conversation is about how disruptive it will be or how many jobs are going to be lost because of it. This may be true if we do not acknowledge the challenge and act now to meet it.

The issue is not whether AI will change how we work; we need to accept that as a fact. The question we need to consider is how we adapt our education and workforce training systems to this new reality. In short, we need to seriously consider how we train our workforce to function in a world with artificial intelligence.

Traditional approaches to education have been under strain for years now as we have entered the digital age. Those of us in Generation X are the last generation to have graduated high school and college without a smartphone in our pocket.

Since the onset of the internet and now artificial intelligence, that system has been placed under enormous pressure, and the experience we had back then is a completely different world from what students and teachers are facing today.

For those of us now decades into our careers, the trajectory for training was relatively well defined as long as specific diplomas, degrees and training were achieved. Workers could rely on knowledge acquired early in their careers to remain relevant for years, even decades. AI is compressing that timeline. As tools and workflows evolve faster inside jobs, the value of static skills erodes more quickly, and the ability to adapt becomes as important as what someone initially learned.

Think of it another way: training as an investment in infrastructure. Roads enable commerce and travel, broadband enables connectivity. Education and training enables knowledge and productivity. Instead of frontloading investments solely in academic achievement and riding that wave over a career, we need to build these systems to be far more adaptive: continuous learning, credential stacking and short cycle training programs aligned with specific work or employers.

Our state’s economic competitiveness has always relied on the high quality of our workforce. This is clearly directly related to the types of training programs we have successfully relied upon to maintain that competitiveness. Given the changes we are seeing all around us, we need to recognize that our competitiveness increasingly depends on learning velocity, not just traditional educational or training attainments.

Here in New Hampshire, we have extremely well-developed training systems that have proven their ability to be adaptive to the needs of employers and work to integrate academic programming with state economic strategies.

When I was in state government, we did this by building new integration between our community colleges, the university system, and high school CTE programs. This gives us a head start to maintain our economic competitiveness, because doing the same old thing or not being willing to innovate are a bigger threat than the AI technology itself.

With a good structure to build from, we need to be thinking about HOW we can begin shifting our approach to workforce training programs toward one that has even more ability to adapt and grow the knowledge of our workers. Many companies and industries are already doing versions of this within their own structures, allowing employees to retrain and move into a new role within the company with just this kind reskilling. These are models that can set a path for us.

In the end, the coming AI integration will reward economic systems that are prepared for integration, and expose those that are more rigid, and accelerate the gap between the two. And now more than ever, workforce, training and economic policy have to be a natural integration rather than existing separate silos that meet up occasionally.

We can meet the challenge. The tools and institutions exist in New Hampshire. Consolidate state workforce programs in the context of AI. Enable training institutions and programs to look at lifelong pipelines in coordination with employers to shift from front-loaded approach to a lifelong approach.

In the age of AI, economic success will belong not to the places with the most technology or the most data centers, but to those best prepared to use technology to maintain their competitiveness.

Taylor Caswell has led economic policy agencies on the state and federal level for decades, most recently serving as New Hampshire’s commissioner of business and economic affairs. You can reach him on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/taylorcaswell.