Linkedin CEO Says Fancy Degrees Will Matter Less in the Future of Work (businessinsider.com) 53
Top college degrees may no longer provide the edge they once did in the job market, per LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky. "I think the mindset shift is probably the most exciting thing because my guess is that the future of work belongs not anymore to the people that have the fanciest degrees or went to the best colleges, but to the people who are adaptable, forward thinking, ready to learn, and ready to embrace these tools," Roslansky said. "It really kind of opens up the playing field in a way that I think we've never seen before."
A 2024 Microsoft survey found 71% of business leaders would choose less-experienced candidates with AI skills over experienced candidates without them. LinkedIn data showed job postings requiring AI literacy increased about 70% year-over-year. Roslansky said AI will not replace humans but people who embrace AI will replace those who don't.
A 2024 Microsoft survey found 71% of business leaders would choose less-experienced candidates with AI skills over experienced candidates without them. LinkedIn data showed job postings requiring AI literacy increased about 70% year-over-year. Roslansky said AI will not replace humans but people who embrace AI will replace those who don't.
Hallucinations (Score:5, Insightful)
In topics that I don't know, it's damn near impossible to pick out errors. I'm fairly confident those errors still exist. But, I can't see them due to my own knowledge limitations. Regardless, the AI remains confident regarding all output whether correct or not.
The knowledge provided by university which is denoted by those fancy degrees is arguably more valuable in the era of AI due to hallucinations. You need humans who can tell when the AI is correct or not.
Re:Hallucinations (Score:5, Insightful)
This whole article is full of shallow and misguided thinking.
The reason employers are so keen on AI is because we are still in the midst of the hype bubble. We have already seen the appearance, and subsequent disappearance, of a whole lot of "prompt engineer" job openings. It is simply too early to predict the impact, and the statements made presently are fueled almost entirely by hype.
On the other hand, college degrees are losing relevance for some fields of knowledge work because the colleges have been watering-down the curriculum so grab up more of that student loan money. I have seen the trend specifically in Computer Science, where recent grads couldn't code their way out of a brown paper bag. I have heard that this applies to some other such fields as well. So there IS an issue here that may be motivating employers to care less, at least in some industries, that has nothing to do with AI.
I also have a hard time seeing a world in which practicing lawyers, doctors, certified accountants, etc., don't have formal educations (regardless of the state of AI).
Lastly, "AI Skills" are easy to obtain. Super-easy. Hell, AI can outright teach them to you. Anyone with a degree can easily learn AI skills. If these shake out to be mandatory (for practical reasons and not just hype) for future jobs, then everyone who already has degrees can easily skill up. There won't be some sort of generational gap full of old degree holders who can't learn anymore and can't get AI skills vs young people with no education past high school who have some sort of genius-level grasp of AI such that they can outperform all this educated, experienced, and accomplished talent that is already in the industry. That's just silly.
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Lastly, "AI Skills" are easy to obtain. Super-easy. Hell, AI can outright teach them to you. Anyone with a degree can easily learn AI skills. If these shake out to be mandatory (for practical reasons and not just hype) for future jobs, then everyone who already has degrees can easily skill up. There won't be some sort of generational gap full of old degree holders who can't learn anymore and can't get AI skills vs young people with no education past high school who have some sort of genius-level grasp of AI such that they can outperform all this educated, experienced, and accomplished talent that is already in the industry. That's just silly.
This wording isn't directed at folks wanting or needing to learn "AI Skills." This is directed at management teams looking to hire / fire folks. It's meant to be a scare tactic to make them think they *HAVE* to have AI skills at every job level. And it's meant to make the common worker believe the *ONLY* option they have is to jump aboard the AI hype train or they'll be left behind. It's been this specific wording for a few years now, that you either get with the AI, or the job market will move on to those
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Perhaps this is his version of:
* say something provocative
* let me know what you think in the comments
* profit!!!!!
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The Gell-mann amnesia effect but with AI instead of Journalism.
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Exactly. You may, under some circumstances, get away with fewer workers when using AI, but these need to be much better qualified, experienced and knowledgeable.
Methinks this asshole just wants to hire cheap because "no degree".
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Knowledge does not come from university alone, it can also be built from years of experience. In fact, when it comes to technology which rapidly changes the experience is more valuable than what you learned 30 years ago in class.
Believe what you want: everyone else does. (Score:5, Insightful)
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In other words, another narcissist whose only skill is convincing others to follow him.
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Correcting the headline (Score:2)
Linked-in executive says companies should relax skill requirements in their job listing.
Turning the recruiting process into first finding a way to exclude people via computer rankings or human screening instead of looking for future potential is how we are here.
The unstated problem here is that a large number of large companies make nearly no profits, subside on debt, and have nearly no sales revenue growth in the last 15 years. A long term cost cutting as a business plan results in a shrinking future for
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Man with low quality degree claims high quality degrees will be useless in future.
Man with high quality degrees disagrees.
Unemployed boy with rich parents taps friends for a summer gig, lands cushy job until he's bored, then taps another friend.
History doesn't repeat but it rhymes (Score:5, Insightful)
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Marginally better?
No ads (yes, I know this is going to be short-lived) makes it far superior at the moment.
It kind of feels like when Google first released their search; It was so clean and uncluttered.
First hit's free (Score:2)
Bias in search indexes was fun and all, but bias in robot friends is going to be *lit*.
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Spewing inhuman amounts of BS is the ideal use case for AI. So propaganda bots, sales bots, that sort of thing.
I'm surprised it took them this long to come up with the salesbots. I guess they tried for pie-in-the sky first: Automated shopping with no user input on the purchase. Oh, no one wanted that?
Sales guys should fear chatbots more than tech support. Especially if they're selling to the general public, or anyone likely to be entertained talking to a chat bot.
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college is about connections (Score:2)
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Why would you need a top notch school when you know wealthy business owners and wall street types growing up because they are your parents.
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Why would you need a top notch school when you know wealthy business owners and wall street types growing up because they are your parents.
You don't. But Harvard and Yale need you to afford others' the opportunity to meet people from your social class. People who go to those schools are bright, but what sets them apart is personal ambition. They don't go there because of the quality of the education, but the quality of their classmates and the school's alumni. But the branding on their degree was important as well. That branding is becoming much less important.
Linked in doesn't know AI (Score:3)
With all the AI posts on LinkedIn that are presented as something real, LinkedIn doesn't really know what AI is, despite claiming expertise. Seems like the CEO knows even less.
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I'm guessing his vision is, instead of education, cruising social media all day, posting reams of BS on LinkedIn in the hopes that someday, someone might be fooled as to your worth.
I think we solved the mystery of the US workers' stalled productivity in recent decades. Didn't we just have an article that the US is particularly addicted to social media?
Dream (Score:2)
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It's a reality now. Not only can they dispense BS, they can get it legally mandated to print on the labels, at the snap of a finger.
Bull fucking shit (Score:2)
And of course the last thing they want is a well-educated population who won't suck down their bullshit.
So there is a concerted effort to undermine higher education.
Just a reminder Pol pot did the exact same thing. So does every other dictator. When you see them going after higher education you're next.
CEO's are people too (Score:2)
Repeated AI Prophet / Sales Tactics (Score:2)
I've heard *EXACTLY* this phrasing from AI sales droids and would be AI prophets for about two and a half years now:
AI will not replace humans but people who embrace AI will replace those who don't.
It's a neat way of wrapping up their propaganda to those who have no critical thinking skills. It's meant to cause fear, nay panic, in those of us who have seen some utility in AI tools, but not enough to try shoehorning it into ever single aspect of our jobs. These folks want us to use AI everywhere so that the systems can gather training data on all aspects of the job market, and since they
It's the network (Score:2)
My main AI skill is fixing AI crap... (Score:2)
I have no other AI skills...
Just ability to fix the crap it spewed....
Totally a lie. (Score:5, Insightful)
Forget about debating the merits of college, fancy or otherwise. But without having a "Graduated from College" on your CV / LinkedIn profile you will not progress through the job application process in 2025. Your CV will be dead on arrival. Including , I feel quite certain, at this guy's own company(!). His comment is not based on any current, existing, reality.
Really should have a filter to block out any /. article that has "CEO" in the title..
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This may be true for large companies. But in the US, 98% of companies have fewer than 100 employees. These companies are far less concerned about degrees, they just want to know if you can do the work.
Re: Totally a lie. (Score:2)
Not really. Large companies are large bureaucracies with strict formal rules. One of could be a requirement of certain degree for a certain position.
It is there at my employer.
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That's pretty much exactly what I said.
Large companies have such restrictions. Small companies do not.
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Do those 98% of companies employ more than 10% of workers?
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Yes, 46% of all private sector workers in the US work for small businesses. https://advocacy.sba.gov/wp-co... [sba.gov]
Of course they would (Score:2)
Less experience means you don't have to pay that person as much. You don't get the same quality of work out of them—and crucially, you never will. Unless you're using an LLM to help you learn as a specific goal, you won't learn much from prompting it to solve your problems for you.
So basically you have a workforce that never gets better, no matter how many hours they put into the work, so you can continue to pay them poorly FOREVER. They're just prompt-generating meat-sacks. I've argued for years that
Less than zero? That's quite a feat! (Score:3)
His parents were real estate entrepreneurs. He dropped out of college. What really matters is having parents rich enough to support you while you make your first startup, like what happened to the CEO of Linked-in.
They don't matter much now. (Score:1)
First
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People used to tell me "Well, you'll need a degree to work for a big company like IBM." Now IBM is a giant H1B offshoring company that competes with Tata and Wipro. They don't do much American hiring at all now anyway. I have no degree. I have hired around 200 people in my career and seen multiple times when entitled degree holders get absolutely crushed by a room full of seat-of-the-pants coders with experience. I wouldn't count on a degree getting you anywhere in IT beyond academia.
First off, they are going to teach you dated trendy shit that'll be obsolete before you graduate or the "hardcore" schools will teach you ML and LISP that won't help you much IRL. The programmers you do your technical interview won't give a fuck about your degree. What they care about is not having to carry your weight and making sure you can actually help the project, not just check in "code" in their VCS.
You're absolutely right about not needing degrees.
However, people without a degree have some sort of fear that they missed out on something without a degree. I tell them they didn't but are more reticent to switch jobs and look for better opportunities.
I disagree with you about other stuff you said but I don't want to get into that now.
Education: dropped out (Score:2)
Fancy CEO without a degree, selling snake oil, tells that snake oil makes degrees matter less
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Indeed. Always interesting how only those WITHOUT a specific education level claim it is worthless.
Reality check (Score:1)
College and university became a replacement for "we checked this candidate and found them to have qualities employers in this specific field would want" in previous century.
In this century, colleges and universities decided to try to use this as a tool to push radial social agenda. To surprise of no one, this led to their status as people who can certify workers as "candidates that to have qualities employers in this specific field would want" rapidly eroding.
Well, it was a system that lasted over half a ce
Lessons learned from Project 100,000 (Score:1)
Whenever I see some kind of mention on what leads to success in the workplace I think of the failures in Project 100,000 from Defense Secretary Robert McNamara during the Vietnam war. There's plenty that needs to be said about the program and Wikipedia really only scratches the surface: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The US Armed Forces has had some kind of formalized testing for the best recruits for a very long time. By the Civil War this testing was finely tuned enough to determine who was fit to be
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lmao jordan peterson?
You know that pre-employment screening tests are literally to screen out retards?
The classic Google interview was an iq test of sorts but once you get above a certain level of intelligence people will just start studying for the test which is why programming brainteasers have gone from fizzbuzz and why are manhole covers round to "interview algorithms"
How to pick resumes? (Score:2)
So, how does HR winnow down the mass of resumes they receive? College degrees, university names, and GPAs are one way. Experience is another. Buzzwords are yet another. If not looking at these things, what will HR look at? Being "adaptable, forward thinking, ready to learn, and ready to embrace [new tools]" are all great things. How do you distinguish the people who have these traits from a sheet of paper? Even with an in-person interview, I'm skeptical that even the best interviewers can figure this
\o/ (Score:1)
He suggested the most future-proof skill would be successfully reaching the attention of <anyone> given all the noise from fake job-ads and the fact that noone receives applications any more because the automated application parsing systems deployed to handle the flood of applications don't actually work.
Uh huh (Score:2)
And where do you think students will be perceived as getting the best training in AI? At a community college?
No, it will be from people with degrees from fancy universities, just like always.
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Ever heard of "LinkedIn Learning"? Not quite sure what it is, but my inbox gets spammed with it every week. Presumably that's where he wants you to get your training.
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