Podcast Episode
Episode Description
AI isn’t just changing the tools people use at work; it’s reshaping the tasks, decisions, and skills required across nearly every industry.
In this episode, I talk with Dr. Cameron Sublett, co-author of Applied Co-Intelligence: Preparing Career and Technical Education Learners for an AI-Driven Workforce, to explore what these changes mean for Career and Technical Education (CTE) and the future of career readiness. We discuss the Applied Co-Intelligence Model, the difference between AI exposure and AI displacement, the human skills that are becoming even more valuable, and why authentic, performance-based learning is critical for preparing students to work thoughtfully alongside AI.
Whether you’re a CTE teacher, instructional coach, school leader, curriculum designer, or simply thinking about how AI is changing education, this conversation offers a practical and hopeful framework for preparing students for careers that will continue to evolve.
Episode Resources
- Dr. Sublett’s LinkedIn Profile
- Applied Co-Intelligence: Preparing Career & Technical Education Learners for an AI-Driven Workforce
- Related Blog: Rethinking Career Readiness in an AI World: What It Means for CTE
Books Mentioned:
Episode Transcript
This transcript was generated using AI transcription tools to support accessibility and provide a searchable, readable version of the podcast. While we’ve reviewed and lightly edited the content for clarity, there may still be occasional errors or omissions.
Catlin Tucker
Welcome to The Balance. I’m Doctor Catlin Tucker and today my guest is Doctor Cameron Sublett, who is an experienced educator, a researcher, and is now the senior director of innovation and incubation at the Foundation of California Community Colleges. He leads initiatives to design, test and scale solutions to expand educational access, improve outcomes, and strengthen economic mobility across the state’s community colleges.
Catlin Tucker
So I’m very excited to have him on the program to talk with me a bit about the intersection between career and technical education and AI. Well, I’m super excited to have you on the podcast, but before we dive in, I’d love for listeners to get to know a little bit about you so you can tell us about your journey in education and kind of what led you to the work that you’re doing right now. That’s kind of at this interesting intersection between AI and workforce readiness and, you know, career and technical education.
Dr. Cameron Sublett
Yeah, thanks for asking. So, let’s see, I’m the first in my family to go to college. That was a shock to the family. because I come from a family of plumbers and trades people. But I decided to go to college, went to college, and decided that I liked it and wanted more college. And then when I got to graduate school, they said, hey, you know, if you don’t want to pay for graduate school, you could teach. And I had never thought about teaching in my entire life because I had never met a teacher or an educator outside of the classrooms that I was in. And so I said, sure, I’ll give it a go, because free sounds good. And honestly, day two or day three, I fell in love because, I had never been given that platform before, and I had not realized just how much creative license you have. And I didn’t realize that I loved being creative as a person. And I also didn’t realize just how much edification I get from serving and helping others. And the classroom environment is certainly just an opportunity to open up doors and opportunities for folks that were like me first in their family to go to college and kind of looking to get through the, you know, the whole experience in the system. And so it was love at first lecture, I guess. And then I guess more college. Yeah. So then my first job out of graduate school was working at Santa Barbara City College as a faculty member, I was there for ten years, and it was the greatest experience of my entire life, made me fall in love with community colleges in particular. Finished my PhD in community college leadership, policy and research methods. And that, then allowed me to focus my research in that space. But then at some point, I kind of like did some reflection on where I come from. And again, I come from that background of tradespeople and plumbers. And I was wondering, how do I connect the dots, this love I have for community colleges and education, with the need for a trades workforce. And so that’s been the focus of my work over the past, you know, seven to eight years has been improving the nation’s career and technical education infrastructure.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah. Oh, I love that. And I just have to tell everybody listening. So I had the pleasure of being one of Doctor Sublett’s students. So when I was going through my, you know, doctoral journey, I think you taught the hardest class I personally took, for sure. Was it like a quantitative methods class?
Dr. Cameron Sublett
Yeah. Statistics.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah. I didn’t care for that. But I thought you were a great teacher.
Dr. Cameron Sublett
Well, that’s nice. I’ll let you—you know, We’ve had this conversation in the past. I will say you sandbag your own ability because you asked the sharpest questions in that entire class. So, I think you have a hidden quantitative skill set. Yeah.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah, I think this is debatable. So I have my CTE credential. So I have actually taught in a career pathway myself. But for teachers who might be listening or educators who aren’t necessarily familiar with career and technical education or CTE, can you kind of explain what it is and how it is uniquely positioned to help prepare students for this kind of rapidly evolving workforce?
Dr. Cameron Sublett
Great question. So I’ll try to answer this question. Not getting into trouble. I’m deeply tapped into the national CTE advocacy and research orgs in the country, and their answer to this question would be to remind everyone that the bifurcation, between CTE and non-CTE, the general education, pathway or yeah, journey, is unnecessary and unhelpful. Oh, interesting. And in fact modern CTE is best when it integrates itself into the educational pathway. But that said, there are some important distinctions to be made. Right. So CTE, career and technical education, is a relatively new rebrand on vocational education, right? And I think a lot of folks are familiar with that. If you say vocational education, people can kind of get it right. That’s that, you know, traditional educational experience aligned with agriculture or construction. And I think there is a lot to take away from that, historical understanding of CTE. We still very much are in the modern era of CTE. Focus on aligning students’ educational experiences in the classroom with specific occupational opportunities. So there should be no daylight in the modern CTE classroom between the experiences, that students get and the jobs that they’re preparing for, they should be fully integrated. And you can argue that’s not necessarily the case for the general education pathway, where it’s maybe more theoretical, like think about, you know, pure math, right? Or think about economics. You know, there certainly are economists out there, but not every student going through the economics pathway is going to go and become an economist. But, you know, most students, I would say, if not all going through an HVAC certificate program are going to go into, that particular trade. So there’s strong alignment between the educational pathways and experiences and, occupations in the CTE pathway. And I think that’s probably the biggest distinction. With that said, as I alluded to or alluded to earlier, you know, contemporary, advocates of contemporary, contemporary CTE will argue that the distinctions have blurred in recent years and for good reason, because vocational education does have a dark history of tracking low-income, marginalized, disadvantaged students into low opportunity occupations. So that’s your pathway. This is the pathway for others. Right. And so by integrating the two we walk away, consciously from that past dark history of tracking, and perpetuated marginalization to now an open, inclusive pathway for all students that’s going to lead to in-demand opportunities for all students.
Catlin Tucker
Oh, I love that distinction. That’s so interesting. And I knew that it was like obviously kind of an evolution or a different it was different from vocational. But that, that just that was really helpful, even for me, as somebody who has taught at a high school that has CTE pathways. But I don’t know necessarily when we were doing it, how aligned like it was everything kids learning really kind of helping them kind of focused on that career pathway that they had chosen. We had like health care pathway. We had all of these different ones. And sometimes I felt like it was almost kids opportunity to, you know, high school students don’t always know what they want to do. So it was a way to say, hey, this is kind of interesting to me. I want to check it out. Yeah. So that’s just that’s interesting to hear your because I.
Dr. Cameron Sublett
Would say there’s governance structures that are different as well. Like for CTE programs, they have advisory boards and they have workforce boards that will monitor or provide feedback on the curriculum, the core sequencing and the programs. Are they in line with modern industry standards? I don’t think you can say the same thing about like in economics or pure math. There’s not a workforce for that sitting there saying, yes, that’s the exact economic theories or tools that we’re using in the workforce. But for, you know, those trades programs at the community college, that’s very much the case where you might have, you know, local industry, or employers represented on your workforce board that are saying, hey, this is the skill set we need today. These are the tools we are using, etc.. So there’s that direct connection with industry and employers that, in theory, exist to keep CTE refreshed, contemporary and modern. So it’s not falling behind of the workforce.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah. And part of why I actually asked you to join me for this conversation was a paper you coauthored, kind of talking about AI and the implications of AI on kind of the workforce generally, but more like, what does this mean for CTE, potentially. And there’s so much conversation it feels like, right now that is focused on AI either eliminating jobs or transforming the work that we do. And so from your perspective, what do you actually think is changing in the workforce, and what are the implications of those changes in terms of how we’re preparing students for tomorrow’s careers? And maybe that’s something that these boards are actually grappling with right now as these rapid changes are happening.
Dr. Cameron Sublett
Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, that is honestly the million dollar question. That’s what everybody’s kind of focused on, right now. And if they’re not, they should be right. The tricky thing, though, is that it’s just so hard, to accurately, you know, determine the relationship between these changes we’re seeing and in AI and downstream impacts on labor. You know, in my own paper that you cite in my own work, you know, I try to not join the chorus of Hot Takers, out there because I just know that there’s so much noise in the data, and I don’t want to, you know, I want to be very careful, because there is obviously, this is a hot topic and a really pressing issue. And so I think a little bit of prudence and caution is important. So what I do in the paper is really just go back and look at the, large body of literature we do have on this topic. And there is a large body of literature. And even though, you know, AI is, you know, relatively new, at least in its latest iteration, technological disruption is not new. It’s in fact is very old. Right. And so, thankfully, we have a century’s worth of literature to draw from. Again, you know, AI is different. And I think the speed and scale at which it’s disrupting or could disrupt our labor market is different. But this is not the first game changing technology we’ve had, you know. So in the paper, I try to lean on that past research and, you know, I think we find that there’s, you know, a number of, trends that you can, you know, identify through past technological disruptions, like, you know, electricity, you know, advanced manufacturing and stuff like that. The arrival of the internet, and, you know, and so we try to we try to ground our conversation around AI and CTE on this body of literature rather than getting ahead of the moment. Let’s look backwards and see how things have shaken up the labor market over time. And so I think one thing that’s important for folks to know out of the gate is that, the way in which technology disrupts the labor market is not what folks tend to assume is the intuitive relationship. You know, if a technology pops up, it doesn’t necessarily take away a job or add a job. Technology, interacts with the labor market at the task level. So if you think about a given job like a given occupation, designated by a standard occupational classification code from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that job is composed of a number of discrete tasks, like nursing.
Catlin Tucker
Right.
Dr. Cameron Sublett
If you’re a nurse, right. You have a bunch of different tasks you need to do to perform your job. Technology influences nursing at the task level. Those discrete tasks nurses are required to perform. The technology could, for example, do the same, saying that a nurse might have had to do by hand manually the human labor. Right. And so then the need for that human labor that’s human skill goes away. So note taking, for example, now we have LLMs that are able to transcribe put together fantastic summaries. And so that particular task of the nurse is no longer needed. Do we still need nurses. Yeah. Because there’s a bunch of other tasks that the technology cannot do. The question is at what point is there that saturation across the task composition of the occupation that therefore rules out the need for that given occupation. So it’s just a, I think, important to understand out of the gate that people are worried about is technology going to take away my job? The important thing to ask is instead, is technology going to take away the skills I need to perform the tasks that compose my job? And then if you layer on top of it, the fact that the arrival of a new technology also means often the arrival development of new tasks, then the calculus gets really complicated very fast. Because sure, a new technology could eliminate the need for the human skill to perform a task. But that arrival also means the introduction of a new tasks that requires a new skill set. So I think what we’re seeing right now, and this is, I think, a safe thing to claim is that technology, AI is reshuffling the task skill, composition of given jobs. I don’t think it’s fair or responsible to say right now that AI is taking away jobs or introducing new jobs. I think we’re still early in the game. But what is pretty clear is that it’s reshuffling the tasks that are required to perform a given job. And it’s been leading to new kind of demands for skills that are, you know, related to those new tasks. So that was a very long winded answer to your question. Sorry about that.
Catlin Tucker
No, no, no, it makes me it also just makes my brain spin a little bit of like, okay, so maybe AI is taking over an increasing number of kind of time intensive, energy intensive tasks. So maybe over time you do need fewer people to for a particular position. But then I can also see the task some people in certain careers doing becoming much more sophisticated. And one of the things, at least I say when I talk to teachers is there’s this real fear around, you know, is I going to take my job? And I’m kind of like, well, if you just stand up in front of people and talk and like grade worksheets, maybe they could do those tasks for you. I can generate the videos you could show and it could do some of that, but it’s like leaning more into the human side of some of this work. Those, like what you call about, let you call like those transferable skills felt very uniquely human that become important. But I do think that was a really interesting takeaway from the paper that I kind of walked away with. And I can’t remember if you, your team wrote about so like travel agents or something, but it was like this idea that there’s this distinction between AI exposure in a job and AI displacement. And I would love for you to just flesh that out briefly for folks, because when I read it, I was like, oh, that’s a really interesting way to think about this.
Dr. Cameron Sublett
Yeah, for sure. So we spent an inordinate amount of time, as you might imagine, given my background in statistics going through the data, like, how can you I wanted to I started off this project wanting to be able to quantify, like at what, rate or what’s what, what get take a given SOC code given occupation. How exposed is it to AI automation? And I quickly realized that it was just a really naive question to ask. Because it’s not so straightforward and simple. In fact, the measures that you might use to quantify that risk exposure themselves contradict each other all of the time. So there’s a number of measures that do exist out there. And we used all of them. And we show that really the narrative that you might arrive at the conclusion is going to change based on the tool you’re going to use. So that’s another takeaway for everybody listening to this is just be very, very skeptical, of someone making a claim about a given job or set of jobs or industry based on a quantitative analysis they’ve done. I mean, it’s really just assumed, like, you know, dependent on the measures that they’re using. These are just, really new technologies and our abilities to quantify and systematically and empirically measure their impacts is very, very, very limited. So take everything with a grain of salt there. But, we show in our analysis that, yeah, you can, you know, break out the universe of SOC codes. Again, those are the jobs that the, you know, the system the BLS uses to organize jobs, every job and or occupation. And, and the country has a SOC code, and for every SOC code, we have a breakdown of the skills in the tasks that compose that code. And so what we can do is given the skills that are required to perform a job, we can correlate that with the abilities of AI. Right.
Catlin Tucker
Oh interesting.
Dr. Cameron Sublett
We know AAI can do x. We know that nurses perform x. So there’s there’s an overlap there. Not 100% overlap because we know AI can do y, but you know or x and nurses also have to do y. There’s no overlap between x and y. So but we can quantify that nevertheless. And we do see that there’s, you know, jobs at the higher end of AI exposure. That is a correlation between AI capabilities and tasks to perform a job. And we see jobs at the lower end of the exposure. The question is, just because a job is exposed to AI doesn’t mean necessarily it’s going to be automated by AI. It very likely could, but it’s not inevitable. In fact, if we were to go back and look at the research over the years, which we did, we actually see that, with other technological disruptions and a need for a greater, you know, the technological disruptions that came heralded in a demand for more technologically capable workers. Right. And so that very well could happen with AI, where you take a job that has high AI exposure. That simply means that the AI tool is able to perform those tasks. But maybe those tasks that overlap then allows that worker to perform their job better, and they’re all of a sudden now, it’s multiple times more productive in their, in their, in their role because they know how to use the tool to, perform the task. But they’re also bringing in new value and they’re able to do that. Plus, so if that’s the case, we want to make sure that everybody in those jobs knows how to use the AI, because if you don’t know how to use it and there’s that overlap, then you could be right. Yeah. You know, left out of that labor market opportunity. So that’s where questions of inequity and inequality and disparity in the classroom really become paramount. Because if students are going through their educational experiences, some of which are getting an AI, you know, getting AI exposure, getting opportunities for meaningful, you know, learning experiences with AI, then they’re going to be prepared to take advantage of those exposure moments in the workplace. But if a student’s going through for whatever reason and is not allowed to use AI because of policies or prescriptive practices, right. Or they’re in a district or school that doesn’t have the funds or resources to bring those tools to the classroom where they’re, you know, they don’t have a systematic policy in place to make sure students are getting them in meaningful ways, then that exposure environment might disadvantage them because of this person shows up and is like, oh, I know how to use AI and know how to do it in a way that aligns with the task composition of this job, but also in a way that allows me to do it now in this new AI environment where the task composition is also multiplied and changed.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah, I love that. And one of the things that I think really resonated when I was first reading the paper, which is titled Applied Co-Intelligence Preparing Career and Technical Education Leaders for an AI-driven workforce, which I will include in the show notes for this episode. For anybody who wants to check it out. But I did my own. I was sharing with you were chatting before this episode about my own kind of K-12 skills, before tools implementation guide, and the whole thing is really about because my concern is people listening might be like, oh, well, we bought these AI tools. Our students are using them, teachers are using them like, we’re good to go on the AI front. And I’m kind of like, but are we also teaching the skills that students need to interact with that AI with a high level of intentionality? Are they using their judgment? Are they evaluating? Are they using feedback from AI to iterate? Like are they doing any of those pieces that I think would truly be necessary for them to be able to leverage AI outside the little bubble that is the classroom, and how it’s used there at times. And so in the paper you introduce the applied Co-Intelligence model. So I would love for you to kind of explain what it is. And how it can help educators, new curriculum designers, CTE leaders thinking differently about how we think about preparing students for careers in which I will likely play an increasing role as some kind of a collaborative partner in that work.
Dr. Cameron Sublett
Yeah, I think so. The applied Co-Intelligence model is built on Ethan Mollick’s work. So I just want to name that out front. So Ethan Mollick is a professor at Penn and he had a book come out I think in 2024 called Co-Intelligence. And it’s all about his journey experience with, AI. In its current iteration, right when LLMs really hit, and it’s a fantastic work. If, folks haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. It’s an easy read. It’s enjoyable. You laugh, you smile, you learn a ton. And, and that’s true for me. I learned a ton after reading, Mollick’s book, though I wanted a corollary for the CTE environment, the CTE world. The book he’s written is really applicable for the knowledge worker, not necessarily the trades worker. The hands on tactile work that characterizes CTE. And so I just adapted his co-intelligence kind of model for the CTE world and applied co-intelligence. And I argue that, you know, like Ethan Mollick it’s not an option to retreat from AI you know, that’s one of his key arguments is that it’s not responsible, to just bury our heads in the sand refuse to work with AI. It’s not going away. Even if it were to go away, he argues it’s already in its current for us, massively disruptive and incredibly powerful. Even if it was to stop. Right? Like if we were to agree as a society, no more advancement, no more progress on AI. Let’s just halted. Great. It still exists now in its current state, and it’s incredibly powerful and very disruptive. So, you know, ignoring it, keeping it out of the classroom in my opinion, is very irresponsible. So we have to engage with it. And that’s his kind of key argument. And that’s the argument I make in the report as well, is that for CTE educators and system leaders, we have to have this kind of like lean in approach. And, and so that’s kind of like the core tenet. But then after you, you know, if you get past this argument about leaning in, we argue that every student coming through, every CTE pathway should leave with Applied Co-Intelligence. And applied Co-Intelligence sits at the nexus of three overlapping spheres of a Venn diagram. We say a student leaves applied Co and up with applied co-intelligence. If they develop a technical skill set which is the bread and butter of CTE. So if they’re in an HVAC program they know all the intricate details, technical understandings of, you know, being an HVAC, you know, technician or plumbing. So that’s fitting the pipes, that’s all of those technical elements that make someone certified for their training. So that doesn’t change. But what we want to also make sure is that there’s an overlap with that technical work and transferable skills. So that’s the human side of the equation. That’s being a very strong, communicator, interpersonal communicator, group communicator, team leader, team member. That’s also being a critical thinker. That’s being a analytical researcher. Right. These are all of the characteristics that really, like, underpin humanity, right? Being creative, being expressive. We don’t think those skill sets, I argue anyway, don’t argue that those skill sets are in any way diminished in an AI-driven world. In fact, I think they’re amplified, right?
Catlin Tucker
I totally agree.
Dr. Cameron Sublett
I don’t think I’m the only person to make this argument. I can’t claim that. Right? Other people have made it before I did. Like we lean heavily on James. Jamie Minnesota’s from Lumina Foundation says book human work. If you’ve not read that one, please do. That one’s fantastic. And that one even came out before ChatGPT was released. But essentially he makes the argument that was an ever increasingly technologically driven workforce. The human side of the work becomes more and more important, right? So we argue the same in the Co-Intelligence model. But then the third sphere, right, is AI mastery. And we spent a lot of time defining what that means in the report because I wanted to make sure it was tailored to the CTE environment. There’s a I’ve heard a lot about AI literacy, and I’m sure you had to it’s just seems to be kind of thrown out AI literacy and literacy. And after going to so many conferences, I’m just like, what the heck does that even mean? Like, you’re you’re saying AI literacy, but do you even know what that means? And like if we were to compare that to reading, to say someone is literate is not necessarily a compliment, right? That doesn’t mean that their skill does mean that, yeah, demonstrated ability to read and then critically analyze the literature. To say someone is literate is to say you have a fundamental understanding of the thing, but you don’t have an advanced one. So I kind of attack the AI literacy framing that I believe exists right now in the space and say, we’ve got to get beyond literacy, y’all, and move towards. Some people have suggested fluency and we do as well, but we nevertheless we lay out a spectrum that moves from AI literacy all the way up to AI mastery and the key, you know, mechanism that allows students to move up that ladder is teachers, educators being intentional about the AI applications in their classroom. Yeah. And it needs to be, we argue, tailored to the occupations. One of my pet peeves is that we can’t seem to, get our discourse around AI beyond ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, when in fact there is a constellation, a universe, a galaxy of AI tools that exist out there used by industry and employers that are none of those tools. Right, right. And those are the tools we argue, that need to be in the classroom, just allowing your students to use, you know, on day one, saying, hey, welcome to my class, by the way. You’re welcome to use ChatGPT to support your learning in the class. We argue, is not good enough, right? Because there are tools for trades, people that are specific to the work that they’re preparing for. Those are the tools that allow them to reach AI mastery. It’s aligned to their occupation, not some untethered, generic AI application in the classroom.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense. And I at least and in my from what I’ve kind of the conversations I’ve heard, it’s also like so much of the, so many of the tools that are being used right now, even if it’s not AI explicit on the surface, it’s like in the infrastructure of what’s happening underneath the hood, even where we don’t talk very much about that. Right. Like to your point, we’re talking about how do you get good results from a chat bot. And yeah, there’s value in that for the general public. But I like the point that it’s about mastery of the AI tools or the AI powered tools that you’re using for a particular profession, which you’re so unique depending on the pathway you’re in.
Dr. Cameron Sublett
Yeah. We, in addition to the report you mentioned, have authored four other reports that are specific to CTE cluster areas and to write those reports. We interviewed dozens of folks across industries, and it was just really fun to catalog all the different tools that people are using. We talked to farmers that use AI to increase dairy production. Right. Like that’s far out to me. And that’s that’s not at the top of the discourse. It’s how can we make our students better prompt engineers? And, and so I think that’s a missed opportunity. We need to get those, you know, AI tools to increase dairy production in our classrooms for sure.
Catlin Tucker
Okay. So this is slightly different from the question I was going to ask you, but obviously there’s a lot of work to be done defining, like what those tools are and how we help students in a certain pathway like reach Mastery. How do you feel like the work in that transferable skills, like where do you think we’re at in terms of that work? Is that an area where you feel like, you know, we’re talking a lot about AI, but I’m like, how well are we doing on the transferable skills front? Because I don’t think we’re doing a great job necessarily in traditional classrooms.
Dr. Cameron Sublett
Yeah, I, I, I share your assessment there. I don’t, I don’t think knocking it out of the park. And I think that’s particularly true about the CTE classrooms. And I’m not the only one to say that I can, hear out a number of reports that I lean on in, in my work showcasing that CTE environments are, overly technical to the detriment of the transferable skill development among learners. And, you know, it’s it’s difficult to find that balance in the classroom, to be quite frank with you, because there’s at the end of the day, industry certifications that students have to receive and that requires assessments and tests that are highly technical in nature. Right. And we want students leaving their HVAC and their plumbing and their welding and their nursing and their CNA programs to be able to pass the exams to get them their industry recognized credential and certification. And so there’s a lot of technical knowledge that goes into those assessments, and that oftentimes crowds out room for instruction around transferable skill development. It’s not impossible, though. It’s it’s certainly doable and certainly feasible, but it does take a intentional approach to rethinking how we deliver instruction.
Catlin Tucker
You mean like in, math class where a teacher will tell me they don’t have time for students to have discussions and collaborate around messy, real world problems because they’re so busy, like racing through the curriculum. It feels like the exact same tension. I need to get kids ready to take this standardized test on my subject area. I don’t have time for all of this real world life skill stuff that you’re talking about, which is the stuff that’s going to be even more important as we talk about AI and shaping the workforce. But I could go off on that for like 20 minutes on 421.
Dr. Cameron Sublett
In some respects, in many respects, AI is just exacerbating the problems that we have known to exist for so long. Yeah, if we had it, if we had a tackled in before. Right. I think we’d be in a better position right now to weather this disruption. But it’s just exacerbating a lot of the known issues that you’ve, you, you brought up right now and you’ve brought up repeatedly over, over your, your entire career.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we’re in this even weirder spot post-Covid where I don’t know how much of it is post-Covid world for kids who are like now in high school. And then they also have these tiny little glassy, you know, machines that they stare at and communicate through. But like, I even feel like I’m constantly wrestling with this tension of like, why don’t kids today in classrooms to want to talk to each other, right? So I’m like, well, I think we’re getting further away from the skills that are going to make them uniquely capable of being attractive in a future job market. Which is, I think, a little scary. So one of one of the things you kind of kicked off saying is like, I’m not predicting a future here. And one of the parts of the paper that I found really fascinating was when you kind of present, like both an optimistic and a pessimistic view of what I could mean for CTE learners, which I thought was really fascinating to kind of get those two perspectives. So can you kind of just share a little bit about like what you thought, you know, for going down this more pessimistic possible pathway versus more optimistic, like, what’s the difference.
Dr. Cameron Sublett
Yeah it’s great. Well they’re related. The pessimist case is related in this possibility that the CTE classrooms we provide our learners do not equip them with that transferable skill set that you were just describing. And as that transferable skills that becomes more and more valuable, you know, is at a higher and higher premium because of, tech disruption we’re seeing, then those students are going to become disadvantaged in the workplace, right? If they’re getting an overly technical education in their CTE environments and they’re not getting intentional AI integration in ways that align with their occupational trajectory, then I think they’re going to be at a place of disadvantage in the workforce, I truly do. I think it could return to that tracking mechanism that it once was. Yeah. Especially given that we know CTE pathways themselves. If you think of the verticals of CTE, the different CTE cluster areas, we know that they’re stratified by race and gender and class. We just know more females go into nursing. It’s just proven over and over and over again. We know that more males go into it. In tech. We know more males go into construction and trades. Right. That’s not necessarily or inherently bad, but if it is the case that it’s harder and more difficult to integrate a AI intentional AI into those pathways, if it’s easier to get AI, for example, into nursing, but less easy to get it into construction, and you’ve got a female male disparity around AI exposure and training there. Right? And now we know it’s the case with rural and non-rural too, right? We know that CTE pathways experiences reflect their local economic environments. Right. I would direct folks listening to the call to the work of Celeste Carruthers, who has done a really good job, in her interstate kind of collaborative that she’s pulled together, investigating exactly what these disparities look like across states. And essentially what they find is that whatever the local economic racial dynamic is, CTE pathways reflect it. So.
Catlin Tucker
Interesting.
Dr. Cameron Sublett
If we don’t if we don’t make sure that every student coming through every CTE pathway is given an opportunity to become, you know, develop AI co-intelligence, then what we do is we turn CTE back into a tracking mechanism that reinforces racial income inequalities, inequities in society. That’s my that’s my big concern. We do a lot, patting ourselves in the back right now on the CTE world because CTE has come a long, long way. Contemporary CTE is incredibly effective. And there’s a raft of really good, causal research to show that it can get students through high school at higher rates, graduation, get students into college at higher rates of matriculation, and get students employed with higher wages. It’s powerful, but there’s the potential that we get this moment wrong and it goes back to being less than. And so that’s the case. In this case we lay out, but then the optimist case is that, you know, we respond to the moment with appropriate funding, appropriate urgency, appropriate system activity and strategy, and we make sure that, you know, whatever it requires, every student coming out of every CTE pathway is given opportunities to develop AI mastery in line with the occupations they’re training for. Then, even if the workforce continues to experience or experiences the sort of disruption people are talking about, they’ll be nimble and they’ll be able to shift and move. Right. And, and that’s the best any of us can hope for, is that if your job does get displaced, by AI, you’re left with a skill set that allows you to be nimble horizontally across the labor market, rather than all of a sudden your job goes away. And that skill set that you had, is no longer applicable elsewhere.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah. Yeah. That’s fascinating. So if you could make a handful of policy recommendations to leaders making the big decisions that shape the future of CTE, what would top your list?
Dr. Cameron Sublett
Well, it’s maybe unoriginal and probably predictable, but the funding has got to be there. Yeah, this is not this is not the time for federal retreat. For CTE funding. This is not the time for the, you know, to be pulling states, to be pulling back on their funding for CTE. You know, we’ve learned from, like I said, other technological disruptions, online learning and MOOCs, we’ve learned that, educators and education systems can pivot, but oftentimes they’ll do so very, very, very slowly. So I guess it’s not really a pivot. It’s more just like a painful trudge. So let’s not painfully trudge through this moment. Let’s actually do that pivot. Covid taught us that we could pivot actually very quick. We can do things very quick if we have to.
Catlin Tucker
Yes.
Dr. Cameron Sublett
So the funding has got to be there and it has to be substantial, right. Getting educators trained up on the AI tools, how to use them. Well, in the classroom, like we argue for in our applied Co-Intelligence report is going to require resources at the end of the day. And there’s just no denying that fact. Yeah. So we need funding. That would be you know, probably the first thing I would say. Second I would say to policymakers and leaders out there to, if you’ve not already build those bridges with industry and employers, right. Because the chief way to understand exactly how AI is upending labor markets is to talk to labor markets and have an understanding of what they’re seeing, because it’s happening to them as much as it’s happening to us. Right. And so if you want to know those tools to be using in your classroom, talk to your workforce boards. If you don’t have them, then make them. And if they’re not meeting regularly, force them to, you know, there’s a lot of work out there that just shows, the pervasive distrust and lack of urgency between employers and education providers out there. I would refer listeners to the partnership imperative by folks at the Harvard, Business School. It was a fascinating piece that basically showed that community colleges are, displeased with employers, and employers are displeased with the providers for different reasons. Yeah, yeah. So build those bridges and if they’re already there, strengthen them. There needs to be closer ties. The good news about CTE, contemporary CTE is that a lot of the policy that I would argue for is in place right. An evolution from Perkins four to Perkins five right there. I think the policy mechanisms are there. I think we need, you know, we need the implementation fidelity. And, we need to, you know, walk the walk. The policy is there.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah, yeah. All right. So I always wrap up this, the interview with the same question. The podcast is called The Balance. And I think I am just in a lifelong search for that myself. So curious in your own life, personally, professionally, whatever. How do you try to kind of strive for balance between the professional, the personal, a strategy or routine? What works for you?
Dr. Cameron Sublett
Oh, so we’re not talking about I know.
Catlin Tucker
No, we’re talking about you.
Dr. Cameron Sublett
Lord have mercy. I think I’m the worst person to be asking that question to. Although I feel like you probably talked to a lot of people that are really bad at this balancing.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah, almost everybody come on. There are some people who just have the most Zen-like answers, and I’m just like, I’m so jealous of, like, how you’ve managed to create this in your life. But a lot of folks do struggle because I, you know, talking to people who are doing a lot.
Dr. Cameron Sublett
Doing a lot. Yeah. I mean, no, this doesn’t answer The Balance question. This answers the sanity question, For me, exercise, I am a person that is not built for sitting. I am not good at staying still. And so, yeah, exercise is the key to my sanity in this world. And I think it’s my balance. It’s my fulcrum. And if that’s not in place, if I’m not moving my body, if I’m not exercising, if I’m not putting myself through these tests of endurance, then there’s no balance there. Then I’m vulnerable to my human and character flaws. So, for me, exercise is the fulcrum for my balance. That was a really lame answer.
Catlin Tucker
No, I think that would be my answer, actually, as well, the times in my life when I haven’t been like every single day working out are the times in my life where I think I’ve had the most challenges for sure.
Dr. Cameron Sublett
And people are like, Cameron, I tell all my PhD students, either on day one or, more likely, around day 80 when they’re stressed out and tired. My recommendation is, hey you all, don’t forget to carve out time for your body and your wellness. Exercise and they’re like, how can you do that? We don’t have time for that. And my answer always is, how do you not have time for that? Right. There’s always time. Carve out that time, that space for you. And then you’ll see the benefits and you’ll realize, oh, it’s non-negotiable. Got it. Yep. Got to do that.
Catlin Tucker
You make time for what you value for sure. Well, I want to thank you for joining me for this conversation. It was fascinating. I will try to curate all the links to the resources you mentioned, as well as your paper in the show notes. But just really appreciate your time on this.
Dr. Cameron Sublett
Oh, thank you so much. This was fun.
Catlin Tucker
It’s always super fascinating to listen to somebody who has really dug into the research on a topic I loved reading the paper that Doctor Sublett coauthored, and I think one of the things that really resonated for me in the paper, but also this conversation is just having a clearer framework to guide the decision making about how we design learning experiences, what we focus on when we’re talking about career and technical education, and making sure that the students going through those courses are not just getting the technical kind of experience and understanding that they need to be successful in whatever their career pathway is. But also thinking about, are we making space for those transferable skills? Are we really focusing on cultivating students who are going to be able to work as a team, be those really critical thinkers? Flexible, agile, kind of in their approach to solving problems. And then, of course, the AI conversation I find really interesting because everything in terms of AI is changing so quickly. But I loved Doctor Sublett’s comment about, you know, for each career pathway, AI is going to show up in a different way. And so making sure that students have experience with the kinds of AI tools that they’re going to need to navigate their profession successfully is really kind of one of my takeaways from this conversation, and the importance of truly partnering with people who are already in the field to understand what are those tools, how do we prepare our students for them? And I really did appreciate in the paper not just the framework, but also kind of the different perspectives of, you know, there’s some that might take kind of a more pessimistic view of where this could all go, AI and the impact on the workforce, but also this optimistic view. And we have this real opportunity right now to pivot, to act fast, to prepare people for this rapidly changing workforce, and really hoping that’s the decision that we make and that we’re really thinking about how to prepare educators so they feel confident and capable preparing young people for this workforce. So just a fascinating conversation for me, especially given my experience having taught in a CTE pathway as an educator when I was teaching at the high school level. All really interesting from my perspective through that lens, as well. Thank you all for joining me for this conversation. If you have any questions, any feedback, feel free to reach out to me. I’ll include Doctor Sublett’s LinkedIn information at the bottom of the show notes as well, including that paper and some of the other resources that we mentioned on the podcast. So I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your week. And of course, I look forward to seeing you back here next Tuesday.
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