Transcript- Episode 147: Mindset Over Skillset: Preparing Students for an AI-Powered Future with Tara Chklovski, founder and CEO of Technovation Episode 147

Tara Chklovski [00:00:00]:

I would recommend to everyone, firstly, learn how to code, play along, and actually build technology. Don't just do the chatbot like prompt engineering, but actually build something with code so that you build your own confidence. Honestly, number two, I would say read more about all of this stuff of what is happening, because the more you know, the less you're afraid of what's coming, because you have time to process it. And trying to look ahead takes so much energy, but that's a very important thing to be doing right now.

 

Christina Barsi [00:00:33]:

The workforce landscape is rapidly changing, and educators and their institutions need to keep up. Preparing students before they enter the workforce to make our communities and businesses stronger is at the core of getting an education. But we need to understand how to change and adjust so that we can begin to project where things are headed before we even get there. So, how do we begin to predict the future?

 

Salvatrice Cummo [00:01:03]:

Hi, I'm Salvatrice Cummo, Vice President of Economic and Workforce Development at Pasadena City College and host of this podcast.

 

Christina Barsi [00:01:11]:

And I'm Christina Barsi, producer and co-host of this podcast.

 

Salvatrice Cummo [00:01:15]:

And we are starting the conversation about the future of work. We'll explore topics like how education can partner with industry, how to be more equitable, and how to attain one of our highest goals: more internships and PCC students in the workforce. We at Pasadena City College want to lead the charge in closing the gap between what our students are learning and what the demands of the workforce will be once they enter. This is a conversation that impacts all of us. You, the employers, the policymakers, the educational institutions, and the community as a whole.

 

Christina Barsi [00:01:34]:

We believe change happens when we work together, and it all starts with having a conversation. I'm Christina Barsi.

 

Salvatrice Cummo [00:01:59]:

And I'm Salvatrice Cummo. And this is the Future of Work.

 

I am your host, Dr. Salvatrice Cumo. Today's guest is Tara Chklovski, founder and CEO of Technovation. Tara is an engineer turned educator who launched Technovation, a global nonprofit that has empowered over 130,000 girls and families in a hundred plus countries to solve real-world problems through technology and innovation. She is a fierce advocate for closing the global digital divide and has been recognized by Forbes, the UN, and the White House for her work in AI, education, equity, and youth empowerment. We are diving into how AI is transforming the workforce faster than education systems can respond, why emotional resilience and cognitive ability are becoming core competencies, and what will it take to build a truly inclusive future of work. Tara, welcome to the show.

 

Tara Chklovski [00:02:56]:

Thank You, Satrice. And yeah, it's an honor to get to hear what your thoughts are and see how we can have a fun discussion.

 

Salvatrice Cummo [00:03:04]:

Love it. So let's just dive right in. Your background is absolutely fascinating to me, and you've had an incredible journey from physics to aerospace engineering, to really launching this beautiful global nonprofit. I want to start with what inspired you to make that shift, what inspired you to do this work, and what was the early vision for Technovision?

 

Tara Chklovski [00:03:28]:

I think it was really coming from a sense of what can you do, what are the bigger problems in the world, and what is my purpose on this planet Earth? And I think not limiting oneself to sort of a standard path of you get a corporate job and you have a certain paycheck. I think that's why I kind of left my aerospace engineering track. I didn't complete my PhD because I really wanted to work in one company. And that company kind of became a defense contractor, and I did not want to do that. They were the first makers of drones. And it kind of gave me a push into or a jolt really into maybe rethinking what as a kid I had hoped I would do. And it was a chance to kind of use my training as an engineer to kind of step back and say, well, what is my purpose as an individual? You have, each of us has a unique perspective and strengths and skills. And what are some of the big problems in the world that I could dedicate my energies to? And I think one problem was that not everybody has sort of the mindset that they can solve their own problems themselves.

 

Tara Chklovski [00:04:42]:

Because in this age where you have access to Internet, almost like most people on this earth have access to Internet, it just completely like only your mind and your sense of confidence are limiting you. And so that was sort of an education, is the answer. Because you can teach yourself anything, you can, and you can learn anything, and you can be anything. And so I think that was sort of the core of it. And I started this organization almost 20 years ago, and the goal was to bring the most cutting-edge technologies to the most underrepresented groups who are not part of the innovation conversation. And to help them build not just the competencies, but also the confidence to become the innovators, so they don't need to wait for any savior. And yeah, over the years, we were running different experiments, and Technovation really was the model of an accelerator where it was having the biggest, deepest, most durable impact on the girls going through the program.

 

Tara Chklovski [00:05:41]:

Because it's rare that even adults don't get this Experience of being a participant in an accelerator and launching a real business, that actually helps a lot of people. When you do that, it completely changes your whole identity. And that's what we offer.

 

Salvatrice Cummo [00:05:56]:

Excellent. Excellent as well. First, I want to congratulate you on leaning into your purpose. A lot of us feel, sometimes, that that's unattainable for whatever reason, because. And actually, you just nailed it earlier. It's just our own limiting beliefs. And you said, let's go against that, let me go against our own limiting beliefs and lean into something that feels good to me, feels passionate to me, leveraging my skill sets, but also solving a global issue. And so thank you.

 

Salvatrice Cummo [00:06:28]:

Thank you for doing that. And from a practitioner's perspective, through our lens, we see technology sometimes as a threat, sometimes as a leveraging point. We are in this arena of AI. We have been forever. We're just talking about it a little bit more these days than we have in the last decade. And sometimes, and not sometimes, majority of the time, our educational systems are not quite as agile and as quick to respond to new technologies and innovation. And so kind of in the space of AI here, where are you seeing how we as practitioners can prepare students or what you think needs to happen? What needs to shift for us to prepare our students for the workforce?

 

Tara Chklovski [00:07:15]:

Yeah, this is the question that's occupying almost all of my time right now. And because I see a huge gap, right? My kids are in the public school system here, and their schools are banning Google because Google's Gemini response is the first response. And so children can use that to write answers to their assignments. Right. And so schools are just shutting down on the use of Google on their Chromebooks, which is very interesting. And then on the other side, the workforce is rapidly trying to upskill their employees to say, you've got to use AI to increase productivity, so that we are innovating and our revenues are growing. And so there's just already a massive gap. And colleges are exactly doing the same.

 

Tara Chklovski [00:07:59]:

There are only a few professors who are brave enough to update their curriculum and start to prepare students for this world of AI. Right. I think the scary part is we don't really know what are the durable human skills. So we are making a lot of assumptions. Right. We all thought that knowledge work was untouchable, but turns out that's the first to crumble. One of the economists that I've been looking at more closely is Daniel Susskind from Oxford University. He was saying that not all jobs, even though it may be more efficient and cost-efficient for A robot to do them.

 

Tara Chklovski [00:08:37]:

We may not prefer the robot to do it. We may prefer the human connection. I think there's something there, what are you going to do with the 8 billion people on this world, on this planet? I also don't buy this argument that AI is like previous technologies and that a lot more new jobs will be created. I think we are saying that to make ourselves not feel so scared. But you can see yourself in your teams and your organizations. You can do much more with fewer people because of these tools. I've been looking at this report called AI 2027, where it predicts. So one of the authors, he was a former researcher at OpenAI, his name is, I think, Daniel Cocotillo, and he predicted in 2021 what would happen over the next two years.

 

Tara Chklovski [00:09:28]:

And he predicted ChatGPT, and he predicted even this whole chips war with US and China to great accuracy. And so now he's predicting how will AI agents change over the next two years. And so it's very, very interesting. Obviously, they'll get better than what we have now and at a pretty fast pace. And I'm not hearing education organizations talk about what they need to do in the next two years. Right. So there's already a big mismatch. Nobody talks about, well, what are you going to do with all the humans? Right.

 

Tara Chklovski [00:09:59]:

So I think that the social problems will intensify because you'll have more inequality in the beginning. I think companies will make a lot more money because, of course, you're becoming super efficient. So I think there may be something where governments are giving out, like universal basic income and stuff like that. But then what happens to human sense of purpose? And so some of our biggest challenges will still remain where a lot of people in this world will be poor, a lot of people will be hungry, a lot of people won't have good quality health care or education. And climate change is real. And so some of these very hard social global problems will remain. And so I think we need to be teaching our young people how to solve some of these very, very hard problems, because in the short term, I think that a lot of the jobs as they exist now will go away, but the problems are not going away. So I think, and I've been studying a lot of, like, mental models and training systems that the military and the aviation industry use because they're so appropriate for our current situation, where it's rapidly changing.

 

Tara Chklovski [00:11:10]:

There's a lot of uncertainty. You have very little information, and you've got to make some very clear decisions. And they do that through simulations. And so I think teachers are already doing project-based learning. But instead of using toy problems, I think educators should be actually encouraging students to solve these real-world problems and take a shot at that, which teaches you complex systems thinking, using technology for high-impact things like that.

 

Salvatrice Cummo [00:11:38]:

I also want to maybe kind of dive in a little deeper where we were saying as humans, let's not forget that humans, we need to have a sense of purpose. We're naturally wired that way. And so teaching current generations to come about solving these massive global issues and social issues, them being social issues, I should say, what are you seeing as the essential human skill set that's going to be needed so that we can become more focused on solving these larger issues as educators? You know, where should we be kind of pulling our attention into these human skills to solve these big problems?

 

Tara Chklovski [00:12:20]:

Yeah, and I've been working on, and with some of our other partners, we have this alliance called the AI Forward alliance. And it's a bunch of industry partners and nonprofit partners. So we are coming together to try to understand exactly this question. And so we've built a progression of skills. And at the very fundamental layer is this question of like, what is your purpose, your identity, empathy. Because only with empathy do you feel the other person suffering, because the other person may not look like you, may not be from the same background as you. But that's the larger problem that we are looking to solve. So that's the foundation.

 

Tara Chklovski [00:12:56]:

I think the second layer is just problem solving, you know, complex problem solving. I would add the specific lens in there is that of using AI as a collaborator, where you have to process a huge amount of information, because with these tools, you do have access to a lot of information. So, processing synthesis and human AI solution generation. So I think that's sort of a core problem solving is a foundational skill. I think, on top of that, I would say computational action. So, instead of programming, I would say learning to use technology not just as a consumer, but as a builder. Because a lot of the technologies that don't exist, that you need them to exist to solve these harder problems. And so you need to have the confidence to say, I'm not just a consumer of this technology, but I'm a builder of this technology.

 

Tara Chklovski [00:13:48]:

And so that's where a core part of what Technovation is that you're learning to actually create AI-based solutions and to build better AI models. A big part of that would be debugging, because I think we can all teach ourselves how to code with these very powerful coding tools. But debugging is a real skill. And so there's still a lot of room for traditional CS education, but with this lens of action, you don't need to learn how to code Hello World anymore, but you can actually learn how to build a prototype that you can then execute in the real world. And I think that's the really exciting part where teachers don't have to just rely on capstone projects, but can actually tell students that in the same amount, in a semester, you could actually do three prototypes and test them with users and iterate three times earlier. You could probably just even create a paper prototype. The execution part is very exciting. Where I think one Oxford University professor was saying, the era of the solo entrepreneur is back because one person can do so much.

 

Tara Chklovski [00:14:52]:

And I think the most important thing I would say, which is the hardest, is like building that emotional resilience to navigate uncertainty and to build cognitive resilience. Because your days are so dense with work, because you are efficient, we're not working less. It's not that these AI agents are helping us work less. We are working way more than we ever were. And so this demands, like, more cognitive resilience and I think lifelong learning, cognitive resilience, and then emotional resilience to navigate the uncertainty that's coming with all of this. Right. I'm constantly asking myself, like, AI could replace my role, right? How do I provide value to the world? And so that's a layer of uncertainty that didn't exist before in my mind, that you have to deal with.

 

Salvatrice Cummo [00:15:36]:

Thank you for saying that. Because we automatically assume that technologies like AI and others decrease the workload, when point in fact, we're just trying to pack more in. Right. And so that cognitive resilience and emotional resilience, it resonated with me when you said those words, I thought, oh, my goodness, is she talking about me? And the majority of us, the majority of us, let's just be honest. You mentioned something about the uncertainty, right? Like that's really where our headspace is. It's the uncertainty of what could become with all of the technology that's around us. You know, you're much closer to it than I am. So I'm curious about.

 

Salvatrice Cummo [00:16:19]:

Are there global models of innovation and education that higher education in the US should be paying attention to and studying, because they are closer to understanding the uncertainty? Have you come across any models that you think we should be paying attention to?

 

Tara Chklovski [00:16:36]:

As I was saying, I think the world's largest employers are the military, the healthcare industry, and the aviation industry, and I think there's a lot to learn from them because they excel at training millions of people to deal with uncertainty. Their lives are at stake. And they do that through simulations and repeated tests and constant sort of updates in their learning. And I think the aviation industry was probably one of the first to have autopilots work alongside pilots. And at that time, people would say the pilots are redundant. Pilots are not redundant, but their job has changed quite a lot. So I think there's a lot to learn from these sectors.

 

Tara Chklovski [00:17:18]:

I think that I haven't seen any university as a whole do this really well. I've seen professors, individual professors, do this really well. And I think the education sector as a whole is not geared for agility. And so that's why it's important to look outside of the education sector.

 

Salvatrice Cummo [00:17:37]:

Kind of shifting gears a little bit about imagining future of work, people in their space, in their respective environments. If we were kind of looking forward and imagining a future where people are side by side with AI, what does that actually look like, you think, day to day for us? You've already mentioned some of the skill sets that we need as humans, but I'm kind of curious about what do you think that might look like for us on a day-to-day basis, working alongside AI as we get closer and closer to understanding, specifically working in the space of uncertainty?

 

Tara Chklovski [00:18:12]:

I mean, I'll just say this is what I do today. I think the AI assistant or whatever, I have a few different subscriptions, I have them always open and I use it as a subject matter expert, I use it as a project manager, I use it as an HR expert, I use it as an MBA expert because I never went to MBA school. But then it also helps me synthesize the research in a particular space and become a better communicator. I think the project AI 2027 talks about right now the human and the AI. The human is giving the prompts to the AI, and so it's a collaborator. You could think of it as a team of research assistants, honestly, plus a team of advisory experts who, I mean, you basically have two or three teams. Like, I would say my productivity has gone up by maybe 40% easily. I do things that would have taken me, sometimes, maybe six to 12 months to do within three days.

 

Tara Chklovski [00:19:13]:

I think going forward, and I think that's what the AI 2027 was talking about, is you won't have to prompt it, it will run on its own, knowing what you are doing, and add value to it. Right. So at a very, very simple level, calendar scheduling is still not a very. You sometimes have assistance. So that's one of the top jobs that's going to go away because of this kind of multifaceted scheduling. Not a very difficult job, but it'll start to be able to do that, I think. I don't know. I was just watching a video yesterday of the Tesla robot Optimus.

 

Tara Chklovski [00:19:47]:

The video is mind-blowing because it's in a home environment and doing all the things typically I would do. Clean the table, unload the dishwasher. And there's a whole bunch of these robots, and they're doing it right now, so maybe in like two years. They are a big part of your home, helping take off quite a bit of the household chores as a load, especially for women. So I think it's very difficult right now. But I would recommend to everyone, firstly, learn how to code, play along, actually build technology. Don't just do the chatbot like prompt engineering, but actually build something with code so that you build your own confidence. Honestly.

 

Tara Chklovski [00:20:28]:

Number two, I would say read more about all of this stuff of what is happening because the more you know, the less you're afraid of what's coming because you have time to process it. And I think where you get your information is not easy. Like there's just so much you, so, so much drowning in information. But if you're listening to this podcast, it's probably a good thing, right? But yeah, like, trying to look ahead takes so much energy. But that's a very important thing to be doing right now.

 

Salvatrice Cummo [00:20:56]:

Yeah, thank you for saying that. When you said. When you gave me the example of the robot in the household kind of doing all these things that we normally do, and it made me think about access, it made me think about equity within our existing job structure, existing occupational structure. So we have gaps where women are kind of overrepresented in jobs being automated. Right. And then underrepresented in markets where they're growing really fast. Even the example of the Tesla robot, you know, what do you think needs to change in order for us to kind of get the access and have the equity in those spaces, specifically in the markets in which women are underrepresented, and it's the fastest growing.

 

Tara Chklovski [00:21:38]:

It's not access, it's mindset, right? Because anybody can go onto YouTube and learn, but people are not, because. Especially women are not. Because the social norms are so strong against that, people are too quick to talk about access. Access is not such a big problem. It'll get solved very quickly. The harder problem is mindset, when you have access to Internet on your phone, you use it to watch Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, or Netflix. You're not using it to learn.

 

Tara Chklovski [00:22:08]:

So I would not say access is the biggest problem. I think women are the biggest group that's most at risk of being left behind because they're not using AI, they're not learning about AI, and they're not. They were never building it. And the World Economic Forum released this report earlier this year, and it says, like, here are the 15 fastest growing jobs, and out of the 15, 13 are in tech, data, science, machine learning, AI. Two are renewable energy, and the third one is truck driving. And women are like, on average, only 23% of women are in those jobs. And on the other side, the fastest declining jobs are, number one, assistants, cashiers, bank tellers, and legal paralegals. And 73% of those jobs are held by women.

 

Tara Chklovski [00:23:00]:

So women are overrepresented in the fastest declining jobs, like he was saying. And so I think that the biggest barrier there is that of a mindset issue where this is not for me, and there's a huge amount of fear amongst women. And I see this a little bit too often where people, especially women, say, “Oh, these tools have a bias problem, and I don't want to put my data on there.” And when I dig a little bit deeper, it becomes very clear that, firstly, they don't understand what they're talking about. And number two, they're hiding behind this bias kind of problem, whereas they're just overall afraid of diving into the technology. And so we've been given kind of like almost like a shield, but that shield is really holding us back. And I think we really just have to lean in and start playing with it, because there's nothing that can go wrong. So start, like, actually coding something, and you'll realize, watch some videos on YouTube on how to do this, honestly, that could be the easiest way to do that.

 

Tara Chklovski [00:24:09]:

And then start to think about what is a very simple app that you want to create for yourself, and actually code that up. And that's a great way to get started. And you realize, like, your confidence builds and then you have a superpower.

 

Salvatrice Cummo [00:24:23]:

That's right. But how do we, as a collective, shift the mindset? You know, we know that's the biggest barrier. We're talking about it earlier at the earlier set of the podcast, where we're saying that how we look at our purpose, that's a mindset shift. And so is this. And so I'm wondering, how do we, as a body of collective. As professionals, as educators, how do we do that? How do we do that for the greater population?

 

Tara Chklovski [00:24:49]:

I think there's a blueprint, the behavior change blueprint. And there are four steps to it, right? Like, first, make it easy to get started, show highlight role models who are doing this next. Like, make sure, like the first steps are easy, that they're successful. And that's why I said go onto YouTube. It was never that easy. It was never that easy to learn. When you wake up in the morning, the first thing you do is open your phone, maybe go to YouTube, and start playing a video. Honestly, make it as easy as that.

 

Tara Chklovski [00:25:18]:

Instead of going onto social media, instead of going onto Netflix, say every day, I'm going to put in maybe 10 minutes to learn just that. And then I think supported by like a community of mentors, and there's so many communities you can even build like your own little group of family members and friends and say, let's explore together, right? Technovation is a great community to join. We are very, very open to people you can join as a volunteer, as a mentor, as a judge. And for me, I found like, the most powerful way to do this is to mentor a team of Technovation girls. Because mentors don't need any kind of technical background, they just have to say, I don't know, let's go find out together. And as the girls are going through their learning process, you are learning that as well from scratch. So it's a very engaging way to learn.

 

Tara Chklovski [00:26:10]:

And we learn best when we are surrounded by humans, not even a peer. But the mentor community can be a very powerful one. And last is like, I think not everything has to be online. And I think going into in-person events and communities helps ground you because we live too much in a virtual world. And that in-person physiological connection is key to sort of building our identity as problem solvers.

 

Salvatrice Cummo [00:26:36]:

Thank you. I have kind of just one small bonus question for our listeners because I think it's exciting. And by the way, this conversation has been absolutely lovely and thank you. Thank you for taking the time to. But before we wrap up the conversation, I'm curious, I'm sure our listener is very curious too, is what excites you most about the next generation of learners?

 

Tara Chklovski [00:27:02]:

I think firstly, I'm very excited to be living in this time. It's a very unusual time where the change is so fast and at a global level, you have the infrastructure set right, where you have electricity in most parts of the world, you have Internet, you have access to devices and that didn't exist before. So new innovations can just really take hold very, very quickly, which is how we saw with ChatGPT. Right. And so the potential is just very impressive. Potential for huge impact. And at the same time, right, like, you do have these very big problems still waiting to be solved. And so I think this is not something that I will be able to solve, but I think the next generations will definitely solve.

 

Tara Chklovski [00:27:50]:

And I see the Technovation alumna really having that kind of courage because they have gone through this experience multiple times, and they see the world around them. And it's not a very, very rosy picture because you can see very clearly that there will be greater inequality. And with greater inequality comes more conflict. And of course, climate change is a real issue. But I feel like Technovation has been running for 20 years. And so we have an alumni body of like 150,000 young women. And I think that many countries will be led by these Technovation alumni in multiple spaces. Entrepreneurship, civil society, governments, and industry.

 

Tara Chklovski [00:28:32]:

And I think that they are well equipped to tackle some of these problems, but they still need our support. So we have a role to play. To me, it's like a very exciting place to be in.

 

Salvatrice Cummo [00:28:42]:

Thank you. Yeah, I would agree with you. I agree with you 100%. This has been absolutely lovely, Tara. And if our listener wanted to get in touch with you, where's the best place that they can connect with you?

 

Tara Chklovski [00:28:54]:

LinkedIn. And then our website, technovation.org, and as I was saying, we're always looking for volunteers.

 

Salvatrice Cummo [00:29:00]:

Excellent, Excellent. We'll be sure to enter those into the show notes. Thank you so much for your time here. I look forward to connecting with you again in the future.

 

Tara Chklovski [00:29:08]:

Yeah, likewise. Thank you for having me.

 

Salvatrice Cummo [00:29:12]:

Thank you for listening to the Future of Work podcast. Make sure you're subscribed on your favorite listening platform so you can easily get new episodes every Tuesday. You can reach out to us by clicking on the website link below in the show Notes to collaborate, partner, or just chat about all things Future of Work. We'd love to connect with you. All of us here at the Future of Work and Pasadena City College wish you safety, safety and wellness.