Upskilling And Reskilling: Preparing new college graduates for the Gen AI era

This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on March 24, 2025 – March 30, 2025

With its meteoric adoption curve and rapid pace of innovation, generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) is no longer confined to niche use cases. It is rewriting the rules in almost every sector of the global economy.

College graduates in virtually every major discipline find themselves entering industries and job markets that are vastly different from when they began their studies just a few years earlier.

While this disrupted landscape can be daunting initially, it also represents an unprecedented opportunity for the agile, nimble and curious to sidestep the scepticism and embrace what may turn out to be the most important computing and communications paradigm of the 21st century. Here’s how.

In pharmaceutical labs around the world, AI is bringing extraordinary speed to drug discovery and testing processes, identifying the top fraction of likely candidates from among thousands of choices and helping researchers focus their efforts to cut time-to-market and improve accuracy.

In automobile design studios, engineers are applying AI to design vehicles with unprecedented aerodynamics in record time.

In education, AI automates test assessments and evaluates student work to help teachers identify learning gaps and give more precise instruction and coaching.

Throughout history, technology has continuously changed the nature of work, providing a progression of advantages in speed, productivity and quality.

There is little question that AI will clearly rank among the most profound advances in history, becoming as ubiquitous and ever-present as a web browser, spreadsheet or word processor.

In other words, AI will infuse and inform almost every knowledge-based task that we can imagine — and not knowing how to use AI will soon become an impediment (or disqualification) for many roles.

For all workers — but particularly new and recent college graduates — the rapid ascent of AI gives rise to several important questions. Will AI replace jobs? How will it affect my field? How do I acquire AI-centric skills to stay current and improve my employability?

Around the world, many top universities have made major strides to shore up their offerings by embracing and embedding AI into their computer science curricula — with tremendously positive effects.

Languages have evolved from Assembler to COBOL to C and C++ to Javascript and Python.

Today, AI provides unprecedented levels of abstraction. For example, the programmer no longer needs to research and study syntaxes and how to write functions — the AI agent can prompt him or her and provide exactly the code that is needed.

To be sure, statistics, compilers, machine learning and other areas will continue to remain essential disciplines. But by providing a radically easier level of abstraction, AI can convert difficult problems that otherwise might require days or weeks of human thought into compute problems that can be solved remarkably quickly.

New computer science graduates must have strong knowledge of AI because it will frame and characterise virtually every aspect of software development careers. While you might not need to build a foundation model or a large language model, you will need to know how they work and how to apply them. You will need to know how to integrate AI-driven systems into your processes and workflows.

But there is so much more that we must consider. As discussed earlier, the impact of the new AI landscape will not be restricted solely to computer science, of course. In fact, it is hard to imagine any corner of the economy that will not see significant change — and that should and must enter into the thinking of recent college graduates.

For instance, a paralegal’s work will evolve from clerical and administrative work to higher-value activities such as writing briefs for attorneys and verifying case citations using Gen AI.

A nurse practitioner can make smarter diagnoses and faster recommendations for treatment options — and sidestep cumbersome patient notes and insurance forms.

Teachers can partner with AI to offload administrative tasks and focus more time on individualised instruction gaps that AI can quickly pinpoint.

Moving forward, AI skills will be table stakes across healthcare, human resources, legal, energy, transport, supply chain, retail, finance and many other sectors and functions — an expected skill.

But, in most instances, this will require continued learning and upskilling. It is clearly in the best interests of AI vendors, tech companies and employers alike to help the employee market meet the requirements of these new jobs through a broad-based commitment that reaches not only new and recent college graduates, but also mid-career professionals and senior managers.

That is why we are seeing hundreds of online self-paced certificate programmes; AI-focused degrees; extensive video series; hands-on workshops and intensive bootcamps to accelerate learning; and employer-sponsored training — all at no or low cost.

At Amazon, we are taking swift action by already helping two million people gain free AI skills training as part of our AI Ready commitment. It may seem like the road is long, but our pace is quick.

The goal — democratising access to AI usage throughout the world — is worthy. And the value is inescapably clear.

Swami Sivasubramanian is vice-president of AI and data at Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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