ASU+GSV 2026 Summit | Tuesday, April 14, 2026, 3:30 pm-4:05 pm | StarTrack
Speakers
- James Rhyu, Stride
- Jamie Candee, Edmentum
- Krishna Kumar, Simplilearn
- Steve Daly, Instructure
Key Takeaways
- This panel on career-connected learning featured CEOs from four education companies -- James Rhyu (Stride), Jamie Candee (Edmentum), Krishna Kumar (Simplilearn), and Steve Daly (Instructure) -- moderated by Tony Won (Reach Capital).
- The discussion revealed that while AI-driven fears about entry-level job displacement are real, panelists broadly agreed the disruption is overblown based on historical precedent, with Rhyu noting that half of jobs from 50 years ago no longer exist yet employment adapted.
- Rhyu highlighted that career education funding represents only 3% of total K-12 spending, despite families now citing career readiness as the number one factor driving school choice decisions, including through ESA/voucher programs.
- A standout example: Alabama school districts now hold "career signing days" alongside traditional college athletic signings, with students signing to enter companies like Mitsubishi at $125,000/year after completing career pathways in high school.
- The panel converged on "durable skills" (leadership, communication, collaboration, executive functioning) as the most important and most frequently missed factor in hiring, with multiple CEOs noting these skills must be cultivated starting in kindergarten, not post-secondary.
Notable Quotes
"We now have multiple partners in Alabama where it's also a career signing day. You've got a kid signing to go to Yale, a kid signing to go play football at Ole Miss, and a kid signing to go into Mitsubishi Forklift as a lead engineer paying $125,000 a year."
— Jamie Candee
"Career education funding grades K through 12 represents 3% of total funding. Just think about that for a second."
— James Rhyu
"You don't learn just by learning. You don't run by watching videos or listening to an instructor. You learn by doing."
— Krishna Kumar
"We've got to figure out how to create what the trades have done really well in the past, which is an apprenticeship program."
— Steve Daly
"The greatest mistake we make every time when we make a hiring mistake is durable skills. We very rarely make a bad hire because we misfired on assessing your technical skills."
— Jamie Candee
Full Transcript
Welcome, everybody, to our session this afternoon. I believe this is the last session of this track series, which means, you know, we can go on for hours and hours and hours, everyone, until the happy hour, but I will spare you from some of that. Again, thank you for joining us this afternoon. My name is Tony Won.
I am the head of platform at Reach Capital. We are an early-stage investor in startups that elevate human potential across learning, health, and work, and so our conversation this afternoon on career-connected learning is something that is very core, sits at the core and heart of our investment theses and our portfolio, because, you know, when we think about economic opportunity and economic mobility is really one of the most important outcomes of education and our investments in education, personal or financial-wise, and today, we are, you know, seeing one of the most dramatic shifts with the emergence of AI. It is rewiring expectations for careers at the entry level and even at the mid and more senior levels. We are seeing some headlines of some dramatic reductions and reallocations of human capital, but at the same time, like other technologies before it, you know, AI will also create new roles and opportunities.
It can unleash a new wave of entrepreneurship as we are seeing stories of solopreneurs and small businesses vibe code the way into companies on tools like Repl.it, which is in our portfolio, and at the same time, you know, we are also seeing a renewed spotlight, I would say, on some of the traditional trades and skills, particularly in healthcare and in nursing as, you know, durable paths to, you know, a pretty good career. I think that for a lot of young people, though, today, all of these changes can feel a little bit disorienting, especially for young graduates. We are seeing a lot of mixed signals and oscillations. It can feel a little bit confusing.
I think especially with how fast AI is moving, it can also be difficult for our systems that are not known to be, you know, moving, you know, change very fast to really keep up. And so today, we are fortunate and privileged to have, you know, executives from four companies who are really have the great power and, you know, greater responsibility to help shape our learners for the future. Starting from the end, we have James Ryu, CEO of Stride, Jamie Candy, CEO of Edmentum, Steve Daly, CEO of Instructure, and Krishna, CEO of Simply Learn. And my first question I'll direct to you, Krishna, but I think anyone can follow up, is that at Simply Learn, you are preparing learners for careers in the digital field and technical fields.
And so in the aftermath of some of these layoffs and reductions that we're seeing so far in the tech, you know, in the tech sector, it used to be a pretty, you know, hot, popular ticket, right, to a thriving career. But how are you seeing AI reshape entry-level expectations and skills? And how does that kind of shape the kinds of programs and offerings that you've had to kind of adjust or change at Simply Learn? So thanks, Tony, for having me here, and it's a pleasure to join Steve, James, and Jamie on this topic.
So we are in the business for the last 12 plus years, and all these 12 years, what we have done is to identify what new technologies are coming into the market and how professionals who are already working, white-collar professionals or those who want to get into technology as a field can start their career or those who already have a career can accelerate their career or kind of future-proof their career by learning something that is most in demand. So we have seen multiple shifts of this happening in the last 12 years. In the last two years, this whole AI wave that has started, and of course, it's a fundamentally very strong technologies that is making a lot of things possible, but one of the impact that we have seen in the last two years is that there are news that are blown out of proportion about how many people are losing jobs. If media has to be believed, then everybody in the tech is going to lose their jobs.
So if I'm somebody who is new to this technology field, I'm still a student, and I want to get in the technology field, what is my motivation to learn something to get into a field when I know that people who already know that are losing jobs? So from that perspective, it has disrupted the entry-level tech roles, right? If you remember, like those of you who track this field, coding bootcamp used to be a big business in America. A lot of companies operating in the nooks and corners of the country trying to help people who are what we call non-traditional graduates.
They have not gone through a four-year degree, they have done maybe high school, worked for a certain number of years, and they can go through a six-month, eight-month rigorous hands-on training and apply for an entry-level job. Many companies have built this kind of like literal pathways also independently. So all that has got impacted because there is this fear that there's no jobs. So this is the last two-year story.
But what I have seen off lately is that even a lot of large companies are also kind of cut down on their entry-level hiring for whatever reason. Maybe they had done overhiring, maybe they were still trying to calibrate the impact of AI. But in the last few months, I have seen that the interest has started coming back again. In some of the larger companies, I've seen the interest is also because they realize that at some point of time, if they're not hiring entry-level talent, how do they build talent pipeline for the future?
Because it is proven across companies that some of your best employees, some of your best performers are internally, like internal growth, right? They start with an entry-level executive and they eventually become very successful in the system. They stick for a longer period of time. You can groom them, you can make them ready for the future.
So because of that, we have started seeing that trend. And the way we look at as a skilling provider, AI is that you have to use AI. Whatever role you are, I'm sure all of you are into different, different roles, but you are definitely using AI in some shape and form already. Now, the extent of users might be different for your role, but all of you are already using.
Same thing we see with the entry-level tech roles also, that now if anyone is coming for any of the tech roles that we teach our learners, there's a lot of AI into that, that how do you, from day one, use some of this AI-first or AI-native tool to become a developer? And we have seen that entry-level talent is much more adept to learning that because they don't have any baggage as such, right? Some of these professionals who are already into the field for many years, sometimes we also see them the resistance and say, okay, what is new in that? I could have done this with some of my existing tools already.
But those who are new, they don't have any kind of baggage. So we see that this trend is a little bit moving towards positive direction. I hope it continues. Thank you, Krishna.
Steve, do you have a follow-up? I mean, we do this, right? We're hiring, and the challenge that I gave to my CTO was, look, we've got to figure out how to create what the trades have done really well in the past, which is an apprenticeship program, right? In the past, we've hired people, said, hey, just go do the job, and thrown them in, here's how you get your benefits and your paycheck, and then, you know, good luck.
And so otherwise, we're going to hollow out the workforce over time. And so we still are hiring at that entry level, but what we do with them is a lot different. James, I want to next question comes to you. I know at Stride, your history is very much in the K-12 virtual learning space, but I've noticed, you know, we've seen in the recent years that the career-oriented adult learning programs have grown considerably.
What accounts for this shift, and like, where do you, like, where is this growth coming from? And with these kinds of new AI, you know, influence expectations, do you, how do you, what is your forecast for that side of your business? Yeah, I mean, I think we sort of saw strategically that for us, career orientation, particularly at sort of starting at the high school level, was going to become an important trend, and we started that about seven or eight years ago. So we were fortunate to get maybe a little bit ahead of the curve.
I think the, to me, the fear, though, around this shift that we're discussing is actually a little bit overblown. And I think that history basically tells us that it's been overblown, because if you look 50 years ago, the number of jobs that were available to U.S. employers 50 years ago, half of those don't exist today. 25 years ago, a quarter of them didn't exist today. And if you just look at sort of the trajectory of change across this country, whether it's, you know, the migration from rural to urban areas, or the death of the manufacturing sector, the economy has shifted seismically many times over, over the past, you know, generations. And you know, if you even just, you know, consider that the employment of small businesses has exploded over the past 20 years, and, you know, 50 years ago, the service sector was only a third of the U.S. economy, and today it's three-quarters.
So these seismic shifts keep happening to us, and this one is, you know, when the Internet came along, everybody said the same thing, you know, fear of disruption of everything. And it did happen, by the way, but the resilience of the U.S. workforce remained intact. So the adaptability of the U.S. workforce, the innovation in the U.S. workforce, I think the entrepreneurialism in the U.S. workforce has really helped support all this change. So I actually think the fears are overblown.
But I also think that—
In your opening remarks, Tony, you mentioned areas like healthcare. I think a lot of the service sectors, I think those are a lot of the more durable trade skills that Steve mentioned. These are a lot of the more durable type of professions that I think will be actually helped a lot by AI and technology. I also think we have to remember that the technology in and of itself is unlikely to categorically change job prospects.
It's going to actually evolve the job prospects. That's no different, by the way, with software engineering. GitHub came along or whatever, and people are like, oh, is that going to change the whole landscape of software engineering? Well, it didn't.
It helped. We have more software jobs today by a factor of two, I think, than we did when GitHub came out. I think the fears are actually a little bit overblown. Jamie, I believe Edmentum now serves about roughly half of all.
You're in roughly half of all US school districts. Yes. Amongst these customers, how are you seeing demand from these school districts for more career-oriented programming, and how has that shaped your strategic business offer and decisions in your programs? The shift is significant.
The market's still immature. In K-12 specifically, we're a learning acceleration company. The core of what we do is we focus on career-connected learning for middle school, high school students. At the heart of what we do is teaching and learning.
We have the largest now set of online CTE courses, and we have a comprehensive career planning platform. We tie that together with workplace simulation. We have tons of partnerships with employers and local communities. That all sounds great, but the rate of adoption in public education is still quite slow.
What we're seeing now — you all know this, because most of you are serving public ed in some capacity, but it goes in this order. The first thing is policy. The first thing that has to happen, whether it's the feds or the states, have to come out and say, we're going to do something different. What's happening right now across the country is you have this reshaping of what we call the portrait of a graduate.
What do we want our students to look like when they graduate high school, and how do we create the conditions in K-12 to make sure that happens? That's the first place that we've really seen a big shift over the last five years. There's now over 40 states that have adopted a portrait of a graduate. Within that is career-connected learning, durable skills, and other non-academic measures and ways of developing kids.
The second, then, is the funding. You saw a shift now in the addressability of Perkins. You've seen federal and state grants rolling out that are specifically driving the adoption and implementation for career-connected learning, but the funding is not enough yet. We think that's going to shift over the next five years.
What we do think is the most important thing we're seeing is kids, families, and teachers are standing up and saying it is not enough anymore, whether it's a charter school, public school, private school, parochial school, you pick, whatever school. We want our kids to be ready to go directly into career, or have some idea of what a career could look like. It's our responsibility as K-12 educators to help them craft that journey. The foundations of academic learning are critical.
We know everybody's got to be able to read and perform mathematics, but we also have to help them understand when they graduate, what are all the options available to them, and then how do they go on that post-secondary journey or directly into career. To your point, James, one of the things that I think is most interesting about the evolution that we've gone through as a country is we're now recycling the jobs that we said were gone 50 years ago, and now today, some of the hardest to fill, paying $100,000, $150,000 a year, well within middle class, are plumbers, are electricians, it's what's the next generation of kids are going to take over these family businesses that are in the trades. That's where the demand is really rising again, and it's like a recycling of what we saw in the labor market over the last 50 years. Oh, I feel that.
Every time I call somebody to fix something in my house, it's $1,000 on my wallet. You know, all of us have experienced that for sure. Jamie, I want to follow up, because in our call, you mentioned that you had a kind of a strategy that's, you call it relentlessly local, right? In terms of, to your point around tying the graduates to post-K-12 opportunities, to be able to bring more opportunities in local economy and businesses, and those career opportunities into the fold and surface that to them, how are you doing that at scale, or how can we do this at scale to bring more of these community, local, regional economies?
We think this is like the holy grail to how career-connected learning in K-12 specifically really takes off, and so what I mean by that is the relentlessly local is, you know, we have over 200 CTE courses, we have 55 pathways. We can build these pathways really, really quickly, and they're based on what the local labor market is asking the school district for. One of the hardest things that guidance counselors, superintendents have, there's a lot of challenges they have in their job. One of the bigger ones is the chamber is now constantly yelling at you and trying to figure out how you prepare kids to go directly into local jobs within that community, and you're having a really hard time figuring out how you do it.
So what we're doing at Edmentum is we have built the capacity within our ecosystem to now pull those local employers in, one, so you can advertise whatever workplace learning opportunities, internships, apprenticeships you have, two, we then work with the educators in that system to say, here are the courses and the pathways you're going to have to be able to offer to get those kids directly into career. It is certainly not at scale. I'll give you one example that I think is super cool. We have school districts in Alabama that now on signing day, so you know when everybody goes and plays D1 athletics, you get a big signing day, it's really cool, or if you're going to an Ivy, we have these longstanding traditions where schools are advertising and doing big sort of celebrations for kids who make it in Division I athletics, get to the Ivy League schools, you have a signing day.
We now have multiple partners in Alabama and several states that are a little bit further ahead in this work, where now it's also a career signing day. So in the same room, you've got a kid signing to go to Yale, you've got a kid signing to go play football at Ole Miss, and you've got a kid signing to go into Mitsubishi Forklift as a lead engineer, paying $125,000 a year because he did his full pathway while he was still in high school, and that is what we're trying to figure out how to scale nationally. Steve, I want to come to you on the higher ed side. I went to college, I love college, but the public perception of the ROI on college is plummeting, to say generously, and I think a lot of that has to do with a little bit of the ROI equation, the mismatch of expectations and outcomes.
As CEO of Instructure, one of the most ubiquitous higher ed software, across your customers, where do you see the most compelling signals of change that higher ed and universities are adapting and adjusting and changing, really shaking things up to be able to meet the learners' needs? Yeah, there are a few systems that really are, I think, forward-leaning. Alabama, we work really closely with the Alabama Community Colleges System, and they have a very targeted program with local employers where they can actually, you know, what skills do you need? We create a curriculum, nail those skills.
You don't have to get an associate's, you don't have to get a bachelor's degree, and if we can present these to you, will you hire them? And they're absolutely, yeah, and it's blowing up, it's taking off across Alabama. Then we have, there's systems like in Louisiana, where what they're trying to create is a much more frictionless process for somebody that does want to go across secondary, post-secondary, and so they fund the credit hours for dual enrollment, if you're in high school, so that by the time you graduate from high school, really, if you want to get a bachelor's degree, you've got two more years and a much lower, you know, cost of education. And some of them are making the system much more flexible, so that somebody that's looking to, you know, maybe they're in a rural area, they've got to work, the ability to share courses across the system gives them a couple of opportunities.
One is, it makes courses that maybe wouldn't have been available for somebody that's, you know, in the eastern part of California, they can get courses from a UC campus. But it also allows them to now not have to provide courses at every single campus, right? And so as they're trying to deal with this exploding cost, now they can create one course and then share it across the entire UC system, for instance. So they're doing a couple of really interesting things.
The other thing is that I think the community college system is doing a really nice job of recognizing that the path doesn't have to be go get a four-year degree or even a two-year degree. And they're creating these programs that much more align to the opportunity that a student can gain. And so we're seeing, really, some really innovative changes. Right.
Are you, you know, we have seen, you know, at this conference and just from my coverage of the ed tech industry, you know, these efforts for, you know, employers, industries to partner with, you know, colleges to develop more, you know, coursework and pathways, you know, into, you know, these companies or into these fields. Like how are these changing, you know, today? Yeah. I mean, I see almost every higher ed institution that we work with is working on relationships within with the local industry.
And they are creating they are creating pathways now if you look at you know an IV It's a different. It's much different than it is with a community college a you know a state a state run r1 Obviously they have Nuances, but what we what we are seeing is that they're getting very crisp on what are the what are the Skills that I that I need to be teaching and aligning the outcomes in those in those classes to those to those skills So I I'm I'm encouraged that You know that a lot of this change it tends to happen slower than we always want it to but but Everybody is starting to recognize that they've got to do something differently I want to get into a little bit of the pedagogy a little bit and for this next question It's open to anyone by you all to respond but like What does mastery of content and skills look like today in the age of AI and how? How does the coursework or assessments that you know services like yours provide need to adapt to better reflect you know this new expectation and You know a benchmark of these skills Also, I can start so so I do think we we are so worried about AI just kind of hollowing out our ability to learn and And there's and it's you know, it's it's a it's a it's a concern that we should be worried about but I also think that that the technology some of the technology that we're working on can actually be the answer here because when we when we when we have the ability to actually scale Viva style Assessment which we can do now with LLMs and with with that technology Then we have an opportunity to see how learning is happening and we get to see the process of learning Not just the outcome right and when we can do that I think it changes it's what it's it's I think why we got to the position We got to is that we measure the we measure right at the end, right? Whether it's a grade or or a degree But we don't talk about what's being learned in the process And so I think we actually have a great opportunity as an industry to actually Think differently about how we're assessing those skills and I think the technology is going to enable it So I like to this Tony So we have been in this business of like imparting skills for more than like more than a decade And what we have seen is that when you are imparting the skills is you don't learn just by learning, right?
Just you don't run by watching videos or or listening to an instructor or listening to an expert you learn by doing so that has been core to our way of our learning pedagogy that If you're learning something and if you don't try it out in some kind of sandbox or some kind of use case Then you don't retain that learning So that that has been and the challenge of being a skilled provider is that people learn differently But still you are like forced to like Place them into different buckets, right? But the advantage with this new AI Technology is that now you can do a much more personalization compared to what was possible earlier So I think that it has become much more easier to like provide some kind of like use cases or or or or data point Which are specific to the learner so that they can they can be much more comfortable learning So I think I'm sure like all those people who are into career-connected learning thinking about it How do I help them apply that and then take them forward? So just from a k-12 perspective one of the biggest channels So first of all, we've talked a lot in a lot of panels like AI I it's been around for a long time We know this a lot of us have been working with early generations of artificial intelligence what gen AI like the what's powerful about where we're at now is for those of us who have been working in k-12 at the intersection of learning acceleration where Kids are struggling, especially at the lower grade levels to read on grade level to perform foundational mathematics And for kids who are in marginalized underserved communities power of adaptive learning large language models early generation of artificial intelligence Was the ability to figure out what was learned and what was not learned and to intervene and bring kids up by identifying skill gaps So now you fast forward to today and from a pedagogical perspective. What we think is really promising moving forward is Continuing to improve on those early generations of AI and now leveraging generative AI to give students more agency in their learning Process even if I'm struggling and it's correct right like at every age in life Everybody's learning at different levels so what we love about what's happening right now and we're really trying to do within the school systems and all schools that we Support there's a very limited time for learning in k-12 You are very constrained with how much you can actually push into the system on a daily basis And so the more that we see systems adopt mastery based learning and allow for personalization of learning With kids to happen who are at all learning levels the more you can bring non-academic learning into the school day Which is what our parents and it's what society is asking us to do So durable skills you said soft skills and when we were kind of talking about our prep We refer to those as durable skills, which is like how do we teach?
How are we very intentional about how we teach kids at a young age leadership? Inhibitory control executive functioning skills These are all skills that employers are asking for and you actually don't start teaching them in higher education or post-secondary You start teaching them in kindergarten But you got to have the space and time to do that and these technologies start to afford us More space and time to bring more of that teaching and learning into the classroom when we still have those kids Yeah, these soft skills are always some things that employers say that they want and then you know Consistently they're saying that graduates are not, you know, they're not seeing them undergraduates if the talent pool that are seeing so I don't know James if you have a kind of a perspective on you know That the soft skills are what Jamie calls durable skills and how you know how we can embed that more, you know Natively like into the curriculum and the programs at stride or other, you know other virtual learning programs yeah, I think we well at k-12 we have a pretty unique opportunity, I think because we don't operate our schools our schools are all virtual and so we don't operate on a traditional Bell schedule and sort of confined or constrained by the typical you know Public school frameworks necessarily, even though we actually operate largely as public schools I and I think the the whole concept of Of the the cycle of learning at each grade level needs to really be rethought because You know as Jamie said, I think a lot of these durable skills are actually the most important skills that kids will eventually need because you know for all of us who learned I don't know, you know the state flag of California or the state bird of Texas or we know what every state capital is and those kinds of things I'm just not sure. We didn't learn how to learn doing those things. They were pure memorization, but we spent a lot of time doing those and And while I do think it's important to understand geography in the context of you know, the world and everything kids recognize that those aren't that's not the knowledge that they need and But they're still constrained in our system to learn those things so I think as an institution we need to really rethink what we're teaching kids and I think that the more innovative programs whether it's you know An Alabama type of series of programs or Louisiana or wherever the state is or or different You know different types of programs like charter schools or magnet schools or micro schools or whatever I think that all those types of programs have an opportunity to really rethink What we're teaching kids in the in in the classroom, and I do think that both the durable skills Things like trade skills like, you know in Europe a lot of kids go no college degree required, right?
You go right from high school into an apprenticeship You go right into those trades There's hot much higher employability in there And so I think we really just have to fundamentally rethink is a college degree even required I think Industry has to lead that way. I think you're starting to see that where a lot of industry is saying no college degree required We are looking for mastery of skills. We are looking for certifications as opposed to degrees But but ultimately when you start sort of in those early grades, I think we've got a refocus learning towards things that are not memory memorization of you know, of Of information and more really building the skills that are necessary for lifelong learning for this change Do you see that being driven mostly by you know? Policy somebody at a leadership level or are there other kind of mechanisms or levers that you feel could be effective and yeah I We work we operate in a business that's very policy regulated and you're gonna have to forgive me for being maybe just a little bit cynical You know, I think that generally speaking when you look at Where innovation generally comes from at least in the past, you know, 30 40 years It's generally not coming from government, you know sort of mandated programs not that it can't but it just generally isn't so I don't think we should sit back and rely on our Government officials and policymakers to lead the way I think what we want to do is we want to advocate for them to be to support the way But not lead the way I think we have to take it upon ourselves as industry and we have to take it on Upon ourselves as a society to lead that way and then I think government will follow by the way I think you see this and I you know I think I think maybe Tony you mentioned this in one of our in one of our calls Career education funding grades K through 12 represents.
It's like 3% of total funding Okay, just you think about that for a second. Okay, three percent of all the
going for K through 12 education is specifically dedicated to prepare our kids for a career. Three percent and it's just you know so but I think it's somebody here mentioned you know like the Pell Grant stuff and you know it's gonna change slowly but they're gonna follow. We have to lead and we have to encourage the government to follow.
I just want to add to that really quickly one of the things that I think we're privileged to partner with Stride and the models that you guys have deployed like specifically how your schools are running. When you take that innovation and then you couple that with the choice movement and the ESAs and the vouchers and so what you're actually seeing happen across the country and especially in places like states like Florida, soon Texas, is in order for the public system to remain competitive and parents now understanding that there are all these different choices and that their money can go towards those more innovative choices. What we're actually seeing is a lot of reinvention of how the public school systems want to and need to start to evolve and operate and a lot of that is being based off the models that you guys and other really innovative charter models have been creating and cultivating and growing for decades and now you're starting to see that spread across the public school system which I think is really good for overall innovation for kids. How are you adapting to this you know the ESA movement which is very much largely driven by families who want better outcomes for the kids whether it's career related or you know some other content you know related things and how do you see that like you see that as a disruption or an evolution of like the public?
Tony, just for starters, what is ESA? That's the Education Savings Accounts. Their voucher programs basically that allow pretty big wave across the states that are that are really promoting the ability of it was essentially allowing fungible dollars for families to use at sort of at their discretion towards educational means. I think that at least from my perspective and you know from what we see we we see a pretty big wave of this happening.
I think the the difficulty for families is you have fairly low awareness, the administration of them is fairly complicated, oftentimes it's not very even clear how you access the dollars in some states and so the policymakers have to sort of learn a little bit from more the consumer and a company's like you got to make this easy okay there shouldn't be like a manual you need to figure out how to access dollars that your taxpayer the taxpayers have already funded this these are your dollars the government's just giving you access to the dollars that you've already given them and it should not be difficult for you to figure out how to access that and I think the the intent though is right which is it gives parents agency. Fundamentally parent agency around how their kids get educated using the dollars that they as taxpayers have provided the state is the the essence of the ESA. I think the sort of the the administration and the politics of it a little sometimes get in the way but I think the intents right and that's why again I think they're getting it they're sort of directionally moving in the right direction but we have to help lead them right way. I just say on the career piece really quickly if you look at Florida because that one I think is pretty mature in terms of it's still pretty complicated but if you look at what families are choosing and I'll give you there's a school district that we work with and I was there a couple weeks ago in two years this school district has lost 16,000 students multiple empty school buildings and so now what's happening when they when they go out and survey the community and they look at the parochial schools private schools charter schools they've lost their students to the one through line the theme that you see in all of these schools in addition to now what these public schools are trying to invest in is career learning it is the number one thing it is what families are asking for they want career exploration they want a path for their kid the college affordability issue is very real for most families and so they're trying to give their child as many options as possible and they do not want them to wait until the day of graduation to try to figure that out we've talked a lot about wanting to change in education but I want to bring you know circle back bring it back to your own companies especially when you are hiring you know for early and mid career levels at simply learn today right like what has changed about what you're looking for and what advice would you give to a young person trying to break in so Tony I think again it comes back to what we call durable skill power skills I that they were always important more at entry-level than at mid-level but I don't think we hired for any specific skill as such that somebody has mastered but we look at their ability to learn that's how agile they are right Steve we we actually asked him to to show us how they're using AI to you know and how they what they've learned and and how you know for their developer show us how you work with it in order to develop so I think it's really about my advice would be look get you know I told my kids I think my kids are in probably the worst spot because they're like the 20 somethings right and we're right in the middle of a change of everything they got trained for is maybe you know changing I told him look I'll just buy you you know a pro subscription to whatever model you want just go start playing with it and start learning how to use it so and and show because we do ask we ask our new employees how do you use it about you Jamie you have a really quickly we have we have not had an issue like we've had mass adoption in the company like we've got sales reps vibe coding to fix the MDR issues if anybody knows what MDR is you know what I'm talking about if you know you know so we've had no shortage of those issues or applicants the number one thing like my leadership teams in the back the greatest mistake we make every time when we make a hiring mistake is durable skills so I we very rarely make a bad hire because we misfire it unlike assessing your technical skills to do the job it is almost always because you lack strong communication collaboration all of those types of soft skills durable skills so we have put a lot of effort into how we now measure those and James I'm old school I'm looking for somebody who wants to work hard okay awesome all right we are right at times and so I want to thank you know the panelists for joining us for it is riveting conversation around career connected learning and I believe this is the end of the track for this room and so thank you all for coming and attending this afternoon
This transcript was put together by our friend Philippos Savvides from Arizona State University. The original transcript and additional summit resources are available on GitHub. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.