AI, AR likely to be key areas of job growth in future: STEM charity CEO
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High-tech jobs are likely to become important in the future as many industries move further into automation.
And Jennifer Flanagan, president and CEO of Actua Canada, wants to ensure the workforce of tomorrow is prepared.
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Actua Canada is a national charity that offers programs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) for youth ages six to 26.
And the programs vary based on age.
“When they’re younger, we’re really focusing on broad skill sets that we know will develop those foundational experiences and skills that are going to be important for jobs that we can’t yet conceptualize,” Flanagan explained.
For high school students, she said Actua also tries to help them get a better understanding of the concepts in key areas, such as big data, cybersecurity, augmented reality and artificial intelligence.
She said Actua partnered with Google earlier in 2019 to develop a framework for teaching AI in high school.
“We’re teaching them about…how AI actually comes together,” she explained.
“Some of the things that kids are all interacting with, whether that’s facial recognition or voice recognition, you know, taking something that they’re using every day on their phone, and actually breaking down the science and the tech behind that.”
She said the course material also helps teachers who may not be as confident teaching the subject.
Similarly, many kids may have experience with augmented reality through mobile games, such as Pokemon Go. But Flanagan said her organization tries to get children to think of other ways AR can be used, such as in a more traditional career, such as health care.
She said data shows health industry will continue to be an important job field going forward as we will obviously continue to need doctors, nurses and other medical professionals.
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But AI and AR are disrupting the health-care industry and future workers in this field will still need to learn about these technologies.
Flanagan is also interested to see how AR will change education itself.
“The use of something like augmented reality to teach kids complex subject, it’s engaging, it’s more interactive,” Flanagan said.
“Research also demonstrates that if you can interact with … 3D objects versus learning from a book, you’re actually using three times more of your learning capacity.“
Flanagan said Actua Canada interacts with roughly 400,000 young people in 500 communities across the country each year.
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