Majority of Generation Z Students Believe AI Will Impact Their Careers — and They Feel Unprepared

New Findings from Worldwide @IBM and Morning Consult Study into #ArtificialIntelligence and #DataScience 

On International Youth Day, IBM Announced a Free, New Digital Learning Resources for Teachers and Students on AI. 

A new study published yesterday (12 Aug) by IBM and Morning Consult found while teenagers are aware that skills like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data science will change their careers, they feel woefully unprepared to work with these technologies.

A majority (68%) of the students surveyed in the study believe that AI will have a very or somewhat big impact on their life and career, but nearly half (34%) said they do not feel properly equipped to use it. 

The survey asked teenagers to rank their knowledge about emerging technologies, as well as their willingness to learn more about them and interest in technology careers. A majority (56%) of students said they were interested in pursuing a career in technology because most jobs require using technology. And while a majority (60%) were interested in emerging technology areas, such as cloud, tech, and cybersecurity, AI is the emerging tech that most students are interested in learning more about.

Almost six in ten (59%) students said they were either somewhat or very interested in learning more about AI. In the U.K. two-thirds (68%) of students report being interested in emerging technology areas, such as artificial intelligence, cloud technology and cybersecurity, despite only a third (39%) of students in the U.K. feeling very or somewhat equipped to use cybersecurity and cloud technology and only 25% of students saying the same about AI. 

In the World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report on workforce trends in 20 economies, over 42% of all jobs will change significantly by 2022 and require new skills such as analytics or design thinking and soft skills like complex problem solving.

In order to prepare this next generation of technology leaders with the necessary knowledge about AI and working with it responsibly, IBM is announcing two new, free online resource for teachers and students to learn about the foundations of AI.

This research and new Open P-TECH course builds on IBM’s Corporate Social Responsibility work to upskill young students’ knowledge about Data Science and AI with close to 7,000 teachers and 100,000 students globally.

Open P-TECH AI course for students

Open P-TECH, a free digital education platform focused on bringing workplace learning and digital skills to 250,000 students, is launching a new online course where users can earn a digital badge in AI Education. Created by ISTE and IBM especially for high school students ages 14-18, users can learn the foundational concepts behind AI systems, consider the ethical implications of AI, explore applications of AI tools, and more.

AI Education course for teachers

IBM AI Education is an immersive, online professional learning suite in partnership with MindSpark featuring free live and on-demand institutes or webinars crafted by and for educators. The nine institutes guide K-12 educators through AI’s foundational concepts and K-12 classroom connections, with topics including introduction to AI, natural language processing, ethics, robotics, and more.

They will also have the chance to earn a IBM AI Foundations for Educators digital badge and become equipped to share the foundational knowledge of artificial intelligence with their colleagues and students in their classrooms.