A Free Program To Help Former Feds Get Started In Ai

Interview transcript:

Balaji Padmanabhan: This is a free online AI program open to anyone in the world. And it is essentially two parts: In part one, we provide an overview of AI, but with a focus on business. And so, participants will learn about AI and see how it’s being applied in finance, marketing, operations, supply chain across the board. And in part two, we’ve actually brought in a career empowerment angle, which is about how do you find a job? How do you navigate the complex workspace today? How do you negotiate from a position of weakness if you’re looking for a job, mid-career, and how do you be your own startup if you’ve chosen to go down that path? And the motivation for sort of sticking these two pieces together is actually the fact that number one, I’m seeing and we’re seeing that AI is transformational. It’s making a big impact across the board. Every business has hundreds of AI projects. When I say every business, I mean every large business has hundreds of AI projects they’ve launched. And they need people who know this and understand this. But at the same time, I think the labor market in part in the last couple of years has been rough in many places. We’ve seen both the private sector, the tech industry have had a lot of layoffs a couple of year ago, and more recently, the federal workforce as well, which was a big motivation for us to do something to help people. And so the career empowerment side was looking at all these folks who maybe mid-career, who are experts in some domain and say, how can they use AI to pivot and move into job opportunities?

Terry Gerton: So some of that pivoting and moving might not require a person to be an AI coder, right? You talk about AI literacy here, and I’m wondering just how literate do I have to be in AI to find an opportunity in the tech and AI sector?

Balaji Padmanabhan: I’ve talked to a lot of businesses and people who are doing the hiring as well, and you think of two extremes: There are these functional domain experts, and there are tech AI experts, right? And we know them and we know the kinds of jobs they can do. But in-between, I think what we’re seeing is almost every profession looking for domain experts who can now come in with AI expertise. So these are not coders but they are very familiar with what AI tools are there, how to use it, so that they can do their job significantly better, right? So we, and I sort of talk about it in my classes, having a superpower in our pockets, right. So if each person goes into their job equipped with a superpower in your pockets and that superpower is AI and you know how to it, you’re going to be incredibly effective at your job. And that’s the kind of skill that is very broad in the labor market. And those are the kinds of jobs that I think mid-career folks can get into with tooling up on the AI space.

Terry Gerton: So if I’m an HR specialist or an accountant or maybe even a scientist who just lost my job, is this something that I might be interested in that would be useful?

Balaji Padmanabhan: 100%. And I think the program is put together to give them these examples, to give them flavors of how AI is impacting HR, how AI is impacting the supply chain, how AIs impacting science in a sense. And you know, we don’t always close the loop on every single use case of AI, but you know when we go into this program, I know that these domain experts are incredibly smart, right? And as long as we can teach them enough about AI and show them how it’s being used, they will connect the dots, and they will understand how to bring it to their world, and what tasks AI can actually help with. When that happens, I think they’ll see the world hopefully through a new lens.

Terry Gerton: So let’s go back to the course itself. You said it’s free and online. So how does it kind of work? I mean, a lot of times you think about career guidance and networking as needing to be an in-person activity.

Balaji Padmanabhan: There are asynchronous online programs are very popular now because people can take it at their own convenience, at their on place. We started to put this program together two months ago, and in two months, we’ve put together 10 modules of fresh content involving 12 faculty and interviews with industry leaders. Everything developed just for this program, right? We didn’t reuse any old material or anything. The entire motivation was to get new, highly relevant, topical content. And the content features a large number of interviews with industry experts. And I think that gives the audience a lot more viewpoints on these topics. And yes, it does not allow for real time synchronous interactions in the modality we are doing. But what I hope to do and what we hope to do is to augment this with in-person activities in the future where we can bring some of them. Now, of course, we have a few thousand people already, in the program and so on, and it may be difficult to bring them all together at the same time in the same place, but we’ll find ways to keep this community going and bring them together in places and venues where it can continue conversation.

Terry Gerton: So you have a thousand people already. What are you expecting as the subscription level for participation in the program?

Balaji Padmanabhan: And as of when I’m talking to you, I think we have close to 3000 now, and I don’t know who these 3000 are yet, but I hope to get to know each and every one of them personally. But for me, it’s less about the numbers, it’s more about making a difference even in a single person. And I’ve been teaching for a long time. Sometimes I have big classes, and some students are sleeping, eyes closed, and so on, but, for me, it’s always that one person, to whom I can make a difference. And it’s almost like the starfish story and the girl with the starfish. So in a sense, we would like to help a lot of people, but I think if through this program, even if we can make transformational differences for a handful of them, to us, it is a success.

Terry Gerton: So what do you think those transformational differences look like? Is it a career transition? Is it meeting the needs of the AI sector? It seems to be ravenous for workforce. How will you know that you’ve been successful?

Balaji Padmanabhan: I joke with my students saying that number of opportunities in AI to do big things now are huge, and what I want you all to go out there is think big, think new, create new ideas, new companies, become super successful, become billionaires, and when you become billionaries, you turn around and you donate to the university, we’ll have buildings and names in your name. But it’s this concept of getting people excited about the fact that this is a time for big ideas. But not everyone may do that, right? So there might be someone who changes the way they see their own profession, and that is transformational too, right, in that sense. And maybe the next 10 years of what they do is gonna be very different from the previous 20 years, and that may be a journey that puts them on a path that they enjoy that brings out the best in them. So it’s different for different people, but I think the possibilities with AI I truly both deep as well as wide.

Terry Gerton: And the program is hosted at University of Maryland, but it’s not limited to Maryland residents or folks who are otherwise affiliated with the university?

Balaji Padmanabhan: No, it’s not. It’s very open to anyone. It is online, asynchronous, free. So theoretically anyone in the world can take it.

Terry Gerton: And where do people go to find out more information if it’s not too late to sign up?

Balaji Padmanabhan: It will continue to be hosted online in asynchronous. If they search for University of Maryland free online AI certificate, they’ll find us.

Terry Gerton: No college application required, right?

Balaji Padmanabhan: No college application. We do have some questions they have to pass to get the certificate at the end. But our goal here has been much more content than strict testing, per se.

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