"waves of technological innovation" have gotten faster over time, "students might now find themselves learning skills in college that are obsolete by the time they graduate"

We were taught obsolete things in university already 5 years ago

"But we refuse to train those students after school or allow them to go back to college for free."

I was taught obsolete things in college in the early 90s. But FORTRAN wasn't the useful part of the class--problem-solving and broader language exposure was.

People focus on random technologies that are being used in class as being obsolete, but that's not the point of college. You can learn technologies on your own, and if you have trouble with that, maybe practicing it in college is a good idea.

Basically we're going to drill on technology-agnostic fundamentals for 4 years, and use a wide variety of technologies and languages as vehicles for that so you get a good breadth of experience.

I remember my microcontroller course professor telling us that if we just wanted to learn how to program assembly for microcontrollers, we could just pick up a book and skip the class.

Instead, he intended to teach us problem solving with microcontrollers.

The class was based around the Intel 8085 architecture, and this was in 2010. When I left the class, I started trying to make things using 8085s and assembly. These chips were so old, they needed external memory and flash storage to operate.

Anyway, I eventually learned about the larger microcontroller world; writing C; 32bit processors, real-time debugging, etc.

Understanding the fundamental goings on of assembly has been helpful, but it was only ever a building block.

Haven’t they been saying this since the early 2000s?

See I’m ahead of the curve; I didn’t learn anything in college

The important skills haven't changed in awhile.

Version control still works the same overall.

The concept of CI/CD are still just as important.

Understanding A/A/A for unit testing is still the same.

All the useful patterns are just as useful.

All the same antipatterns are just as important to watch out for.

Largely speaking while languages may evolve, the core foundational principles of how to write Good Clean Code remains the same.

That's nothing new, I learned Novell Netware in college and Pascal in high school.

The obsolete skills they are learning are "prompt engineer".

If some piece of knowledge or skill becomes obsolete in less than 4 years from its inception than it was not important in the first place.

Funny story time, intentionally vague to shield identities:

I have a friend who was hired to teach a course at a local University for their new CS degree that had a focus on video games some while ago. He was a bit of an expert in a particular portion of the material that they needed, and when they started putting out feelers to find someone to teach the subject matter, everyone locally in the industry gave him the highest praise and said he was the man for the job. The University met with him and eventually selected him to teach, which he did for 3 semesters. After 3 semesters, they dropped him because he didn't himself have a college degree in what he was teaching (which was something he made very clear in the hiring process.)

He went into making games straight out of high school, he was basically there at the ground floor, self taught, acknowledged by everyone in the industry locally as a foremost expert in the field where they had him teaching, and they couldn't keep him because they couldn't have him teach when he didn't have a degree in the field. Without his having a degree their program couldn't be accredited. So... They wanted him to have a degree in a subject he was an originator of and without that degree they had to drop him.

He makes financial software now because the games industry was/is brutal and he wanted to see his family now and then. I've always found it hilarious that a University had to let him go because otherwise the snake wasn't eating its own tail and the ouroboros apparently can't have that.

I think the article should focus on how everyone or most people at work do keep up with the times. At least when I learned my teachers understood this issue and focused on providing a good theoretical foundation on which you can build on, the particular technologies are just examples of what's available at the time when you are being educated, it's not the actual focus of the education.

Applies to many fields. Studied translation at university and, kudos to the head teacher, he kept saying we worked on current software for illustration but the point was to learn transverse skills to apply to whatever tools are trendy once on the market. Turns out I work in a firm working outdated software older than my uni did. But I always agreed with the dude, we'll have to adapt or die as businesses.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In an essay, Hyams shared his top concerns around AI — one of which is how technologies like OpenAI's ChatGPT will affect the job market.

"With AI, it's conceivable that students might now find themselves learning skills in college that are obsolete by the time they graduate," Hyams wrote in the essay.

"The higher the likelihood that a job can be done remotely, the greater its potential exposure is to GenAI-driven change," the researchers wrote, referring to generative artificial intelligence.

The CEOs thoughts on AI come as labor experts and white-collar workers alike become increasingly worried that powerful tools like ChatGPT may one day replace jobs.

After all, employees across industries have been using ChatGPT to develop code, write real estate listings, and generate lesson plans.

For instance, Hyams said that Indeed's AI technology, which recommends opportunities to its site visitors, helps people get hired "every three seconds."

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