How to Master the Future of Work and AI Upskilling, with Marni Baker Stein at Coursera

Thanks. Thanks for having me.

I am joining from beautiful London and I've been here for a couple of days for the Coursera Connect conference and have been having an awesome time strolling around and taking in all of the historic sites. It's been just amazing.

I live in Park City, Utah.

Everyone asks me that. I wish I was. I wish I was a skier because everyone who lives in Park City is a skier, but I actually moved there for work a couple of years ago and really enjoy the outdoors, but I don't enjoy sliding down the mountains at great speeds.

It is.

Sure. So, yeah, I have been involved in online education pretty much my whole career and worked in higher education for a long time and it was really wonderful to join Coursera where I took that experience and sort of expanded it to the scale of the world. I am the Chief Content Officer at Coursera and I oversee our global content strategy as well as our content design and production and our partner success. So, my team sources all of our great university and industry partners and we also make sure that we're serving them well because they are content creators and so important to our mission.

Oh, it's been extraordinary. First of all, the CEO at Coursera, Jeff Maggioncalda, really got out in front of the trend and was insistent and inspiring about not only Coursera as a company figuring out how GenAI was going to have an impact on the way we operate, but also making sure that we were building GenAI into the development of our platform and development of our content. And from a content perspective, it's been a crazy ride since then. Because the technology itself is moving so quickly. And we have really been working very, very hard to make sure that we have a broad span of content representing that progress from basic courses in GenAI to very technical courses for GenAI developers. And since that time we've developed and launched over 500 courses and certificates and specializations in GenAI. And they represent, you know, IBM and Google and Google Cloud and Amazon Deep Learning but also Vanderbilt and Michigan and Duke. It's been really a full-court press for both our university partners and our industry partners. And it's been just incredible to be a part of it.

So, in terms of like the data on AI skills, what is extraordinary is that the demand for these skills just in the last year has grown over 1,000%. I think we are now having seven individuals a minute enroll in GenAI content and this content ranges, you know, across these 500 courses that we're talking about, it ranges from very generalist, what is GenAI, what are the ethical considerations of GenAI, to very specific skills-based courses for particular jobs like GenAI for marketers, GenAI for accountants. We've had over 3.5 million enrollments and that is unprecedented for us. And it's been very exciting to see that people from across demographics, across age groups are enrolling in these courses to really not only understand the new technology but to apply it. So that's what we've seen. We've seen variations across regions in terms of the types of courses that we're seeing people enroll in. So we had an explosion of enrollment in Latin America. And most of those enrollments are in general AI courses and AI application courses for particular roles. In the US we have also seen large enrollments but they're more focused on how to create new LLMs and the sort of technical higher-end courses and this may represent something about the maturity level of different economies as they're embracing GenAI. We are also seeing that GenAI interest is really exploding in cities across the globe where there are big tech and data industries headquartered. So I think a lot of people working in these industries are really trying to upskill and reskill quickly as they're seeing what's going on in their workplaces. And then the more troubling thing is once again we're seeing that in this critical tech field with these tools, women are lagging men in terms of taking on these skills. 72% of the participants are men globally.

And that's troubling.

I think it's honestly, it's probably both in the sense that we are seeing in tech hubs globally, not only in places like the US or the UK where I am now but in India and Pakistan and in Peru, we are seeing the fast growth of tech industries and tech talent and we are seeing a lot of access to GenAI education and other types of tech and data education programs in those locations and that's wonderful. And, you know, we are super excited to support that and really to understand how to drive accessibility in those areas through mobile and through the right kinds of online learning programs to make sure that folks have access to them. So that's great.

Yeah, so on the consumer side, while it's exciting that we're seeing sort of these balloons of extraordinary engagement in this content around the world in lots of different countries and economic situations. On the enterprise side we are also seeing that, I think I've read, I must have read the same article. It's like I think there was an article that came out from Penn which said in the next three years 49% of job tasks across roles were going to be impacted by generative AI but something like only 5% of employers really had a real strategic, you know, executable plan in place to make sure that people were ready for those changes. And I don't know the reference either, sorry about that, but it's troubling.

If we have this pace of change and I know we're all feeling it in our own jobs and our own roles, how GenAI is really sort of seeping into what we do. I know I am. To think that there's going to be this level of change and this velocity of change in people's jobs and employers are not sort of getting ready to support folks as that happens. It's curious. In our own experience we are seeing across sectors that it's companies where leaders really embrace this future and understand how important it is that those companies are doing really innovative things to get folks ready for the future across functions while other companies seem to be sitting back and waiting to see what happens.

Yeah, one story that I have is I was actually at Coursera Connect a couple weeks ago in Las Vegas talking with one of our content partners, MoA, and MoA seems to have come up with a really creative way to work through their Chief Learning Officer and their HR, their people practice, to incent people across functions to very creatively come up with ideas for using GenAI through a variety of tools to drive productivity and give them more time for creativity and to sort of just improve their work across the very different tasks they're doing from their marketing department to their learning department to their researchers. And it has really blossomed into a sort of very creative moment where people across functions are being empowered to embrace these tools and incorporate them into their operations. So that's the kind of work that I think is so important for companies to be doing and I was really impressed with that story. And we are seeing stories like that again across sectors from financial businesses to healthcare businesses to, you know, education providers. But like I said, there are others that seem to just sort of be stepping back and taking a beat before they go all-in and it's interesting to watch.

Exactly. And I think that's what we're seeing happen through our consumer business is we have individuals, millions of them globally, who are deciding that it's time to upskill and reskill in these areas regardless of whether their employer is telling them to or not. I mean, people see it happening. They're reading about it. They're hearing about it. And they are actively going out and chasing down those skills and figuring out how to use the new tools that are powered by GenAI. And it's exciting to watch. It's like a global learning movement.

Well, I think it's all the regular reasons in play again with this new technology. I think first of all a lot of the folks who are in this first wave of learning who are going after these upskilling and reskilling in these new areas of skill development with GenAI, they are men because they're coming from the tech industry that is predominantly male. I think women are underrepresented in that industry and are therefore underrepresented in this population of skill searchers in this early wave. So I think that's definitely part of it. The demographic just represents the profile of the learners who are coming after these skills at this point. But beyond that I think it's that women are busier in their lives as caretakers for their families. They are less likely to have the time to pursue further education or they'll have gaps in their ability to do that that sort of create friction in their path. And many women who study with us are working in industries that are tech-adjacent or a couple of steps away from tech. So they're maybe in the communications businesses or education or healthcare. And they may not be yet seeing the need to upskill in these areas that their counterparts in tech do. But I would caution that's a misjudgment, right? Because GenAI is going to be impactful across every discipline, every sector, every industry, every job category. So I think it's really critical that we make sure that women and people across different career domains understand that GenAI is not just a technical skill. It's not just for the tech sector but is for everyone.

I don't know. I think that's totally plausible, right? I think that there may be improvements hiding in this data, right? Because we want to see regular improvement of women who are involved in AI, GenAI, tech and tech-adjacent career pathways and maybe there is some improvement here that's hard to see. Still a little troubling though.

So what I am seeing now beyond the basic 101s is individuals really wanting to understand how to wield particular tools for their job or their career pathway. They're in marketing. They're a writer. They're in finance. They're an accountant. They're a project manager. And so I think a lot of people have sort of figured out what GenAI is. They've been using the various tools out there that are very accessible to them and found out that it's pretty easy to use it in the end. And it's kind of interesting to just play with it and figure it out on your own. And what we're seeing the real interest now is like, okay, that's great, but how do I wield this as a social media marketer or as a project manager? And so that's where we see the real interest and it's been great to work with a lot of the companies like Microsoft and Amazon and IBM and Google that are coming out with many of these tools, working directly with these partners to develop the content that we feel is really going to empower people to figure all of this out.

You know, it's really interesting. Python specifically is one of our still, one of our most popular courses and area of skill development. So definitely people are still finding that that kind of domain expertise is still critical even if some of the everyday tasks associated with that have been disrupted maybe in very positive ways by generative AI. So we're still seeing people coming after critical domain expertise in computer science, data science. Again, Python being one of the most popular of all of our courses and certificates of all time. That's still happening. So people are still going after the domain expertise and I feel that's interesting and important.

Yeah. So I think this is just one of the really, really powerful stories out there of a woman in Nigeria who was, she was really struggling to find work after the pandemic and she completed a genomic data science specialization on Coursera from Johns Hopkins University and then she completed a professional certificate in Google Data Analytics on Coursera. And this was not only confidence building, skill building for her but it actually enhanced her profile to the point she was able to secure a job based on these new skills after two years of looking. And it's that kind of empowerment that we're so excited about at Coursera. And that's one of hundreds of thousands of stories that really keep us excited when we wake up in the morning to come to work.

Yeah, I mean I think what we're super excited about at Coursera is that we are really maturing in our ability to understand our learner profiles and to get better at personalizing the learner experience to meet the needs of those profiles. Whether it is surfacing the right content at the right time for a learner against their career ambitions or whether it is actually using generative AI to create powerful capabilities like translations. We're now translating thousands of our courses into 21 different languages. That would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago from an expense point of view. And now it's just a matter of course. We now have intelligent agent-driven tools like Coach that are able to have very personalized and contextualized conversations with learners about their decisions around what courses to take as well as inside of courses to really help them understand concepts and understand the relevance of those concepts. And we're also really excited about our ability, you know, driven by GenAI, to provide academic integrity tools that really assure that when a person is learning on Coursera that they are learning and, you know, making certain that if a student is handing in an assessment that they really did that assessment and they've really learned that material and they're really reasoning about why that's important. So we're feeling data in very simple ways are helping us to understand what learners want, who they are, what's best for them, what's going to bring them value, but in more GenAI-powered sort of next-gen ways allowing us to personalize education like we've never thought was possible before.

Ah, that's a great question because we've been talking a lot about this. So we have a centralized data science and data engineering team and then we have allocated roles for content, product, our different segments, our consumer segment, our enterprise segment, and our degrees segment. And right now we are doing this sort of foundational work to make sure that we are all sort of reasoning about what's happening at Coursera from a shared source of truth. And that we have a consistent practice around data analytics that not only helps each of the functions and the segments to operate as we need to but also that we're learning as an organization and those data analysts are learning as a practice in some really powerful ways. So that's how we're doing it. And I've been very excited in the time I've been at Coursera to see Coursera's ever-increasing commitment to understanding we're not just a learning company, we're not just a content company, but we are a data company as well.

I believe that, I mean certainly we can see study after study that says that the vast majority of jobs and job tasks are going to be disrupted by generative AI. We see lots of studies and predictions about at the same time GenAI is going to sort of produce enormous growth, economic growth, hundreds of billions of dollars of growth in the UK and across the world. So we've got enormous growth ahead. We've got enormous disruption of work and jobs at the job task level ahead across sectors. And, you know, I think it's going to be very interesting. I think people are concerned and it's going to be up to institutions like our educational institutions and our employers to make sure they provide the sort of learning infrastructure so that people can make that transition. Whether it's universities who are preparing their learners for their first job or whether it is employers who are supporting employees through the changes ahead. This is a really critical and perhaps unprecedented moment for all of us and Coursera is just really proud to be a toolset that we think can be really, really useful in this moment.

Yes.

There are so many inspiring people, but I'm going to, I really am impressed with Reshma Saujani who is the founder of Girls Who Code. And who really is a leader, such an incredible, inspiring and effective leader in promoting diversity in tech and really doing that at a point in the life cycle of women when it's so important to make sure we capture their interest in tech and get them on the right track.

I think generative AI is going to require us to all be a lot more emotionally intelligent. I think it's going to require a tremendous amount of emotional intelligence because it's going to create such disruption and change and we're all going to have to navigate the complexities of this change. We're going to have to bring our organizations through this change and that's going to take emotional intelligence as is just the fact that, you know, the one thing this technology isn't is human and so human understanding and human empathy is going to remain paramount I think in the future.

I, you know, I love to read. I love to read fiction and non-fiction. I guess I would pick the book that's had a huge impact on me over the last couple years is a book called Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. And it's by Isabel Wilkerson. And it's a really interesting book about the notion of race throughout history and across cultures and it's really fabulous. I think they just made a movie out of it also, but I can't remember what the name of the movie is.

Yeah, I love Uptown Funk by Bruno Mars. There's nothing that gets me dancing like that song.

Oh gosh. Now I have to say this, this is corny but I am really grateful for the passion and commitment of all the teams at Coursera who are working on the problem space of education in such a complicated time. It's just so inspiring to work with all of them. This is hard stuff and it's just joyful to be around people who understand how important it is.

Thank you.