What happens when entry-level jobs level up, and whose job is it to close the gap?
On this episode of Trending in Education, host Mike Palmer sits down with Lydia Logan, Vice President of Global Education and Workforce Development at IBM, to explore what Gen Z needs on day one of their first job and how higher ed and industry can get them there.
Lydia draws on a career spanning the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Broad Foundation, and Verizon Innovative Learning Schools to unpack the “broken bottom rung” of the career ladder. She explains why the on-the-job training that used to follow a degree is now being pushed into college itself, and why employers increasingly want to see a portfolio of real work. Through IBM SkillsBuild, which is on track to skill 30 million people by 2030 and has already reached 22 million, IBM is partnering with faculty across disciplines so students in business, marketing, and healthcare become builders of AI, not just consumers of it.
Mike and Lydia also dig into the divide between higher ed’s caution and the private sector’s rapid adoption of AI. Lydia shares how institutions are using red, yellow, and green frameworks for acceptable AI use, why literacy is the path to fluency, and how IBM’s own culture of 40 hours of annual learning per employee shapes what it recommends to clients and campuses.
We also discuss:
- The AI Builders Challenge, including student projects that use IBM’s AI tool Bob to make video captions accessible
- How IBM brings enterprise use cases to campus operations, from funder reports to Penn State’s campus navigation app
- Why durable “transversal” skills matter more as the half-life of technical skills shrinks
- Free certificates in AI, cybersecurity, and data analytics through state community college systems
- Preparing students to work in hybrid teams of humans and AI agents
- Why assessments that once took three years to build now need to be ready in six months
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Palmer Media 2026-11-10 10:00:00
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