Last week, I was fortunate enough to join a study visit to Seattle—home to Microsoft and Amazon, among others. The visit was organised by ColegauCymru/Colleges Wales, and we were joined by other senior leaders from colleges in Wales, as well from Qualifications Wales.
It was a great chance to reflect on the opportunities the UK’s AI Opportunities Action Plan offers to colleges. The plan’s headline goal is for the UK to “become an AI maker, not taker,” noting that “we should be the best state partner to those building frontier AI” – what better place to consider this than the home of so many leading AI companies?
The AI Opportunities Action Plan includes 50 recommendations across three main areas – laying the foundations, changing lives by embracing AI, and securing our future through homegrown AI. It’s the foundation area I want to focus on, and specifically the skills side, which sits alongside sustainable infrastructure, data, and safe AI as core areas.
It’s no surprise that access to skilled staff is highlighted as a key challenge, but it’s particularly encouraging that the action plan recognises further education and apprenticeships as essential to widening access to careers in AI. It also acknowledges that lifelong learning will be crucial for the UK.
During our visit, we met the Technology Alliance, which facilitates collaboration between industry and education. There we heard from F5, a global IT services company supporting major organisations. They shared insights into the AI skills they prioritise.
Yes, they need some staff with highly specialised AI skills, but they need many more with data engineering and integration expertise. As I hopefully argued successfully at Jisc’s Data Matters conference in January, data is the lifeblood of AI, and across industry the need for people with practical data skills is as urgent as highly specialised AI experts.
Beyond that—and reinforcing what we hear time and time again—they told us they need employees with critical thinking, creativity, strong interpersonal skills, and the ability to use AI ethically and responsibly.
In the short term, AI literacy and the ability to use AI tools effectively are becoming essential. Critical thinking and creativity are key to using these tools wisely, while a strong ethical understanding ensures responsible AI use.
But we’re moving to an era of AI automation, rather than just AI tools. Increasingly we won’t interact with AI tools directly. You may have heard the term Agentic AI, where AI-driven systems operate autonomously. This might sound scary and dystopian, but I’m hopeful that, with the right investment in ethical, responsible AI, this will create more space for human activity.
We’ll need to look at adjusting curriculum to maximise opportunities for learners to develop these skills. It’s perhaps easy to think that this won’t affect many areas, but we need to learn from the sudden leap we saw with ChatGPT – we are likely to see a similar leap in robotics, which will broaden the impact across many of our skills areas.
To bring us back to the challenges of today, the AI Opportunities Action Plan stresses the importance of lifelong learning, and another of our visits highlighted a potential idea for the UK. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a skills centre in Seattle offering free basic training to anyone in the community interested in learning more about AI or cloud services.
As well as providing free taster classroom-based training, they offer engaging interactive experiences. Visitors can learn about reinforcement machine learning by driving a virtual car around a track. They can explore vast global datasets by seeing them projected onto a giant globe — whether that’s analysing animal migration patterns or exploring the surface of Mars. Our study group was entranced by this!
These kinds of activities make AI less intimidating, more engaging, and more accessible. Hopefully, they can inspire people from all walks of life to consider AI as a viable career path. It would be fantastic if we could establish a network of similar facilities in colleges across the UK.
The energy and enthusiasm around AI in colleges is fantastic, and I think now is the time for a focus both on the immediate needs around AI literacy, but also with a clear eye on the future, as the balance moves to AI automation and the even stronger demand for uniquely human skills.
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