AI and the apprentice: what juniors stop learning
Swiss apprentices start next week. The tasks we used to give them to learn on are exactly the ones a machine now does in four seconds.
In two weeks, thousands of apprentices start their first year in Swiss companies. Many will sit down at a desk where a large part of the traditional first-year work — transcribing, summarising, drafting a standard letter, tidying a spreadsheet — is now done by software.
This is a real problem and it deserves more thought than it is getting, because the Swiss apprenticeship system is one of the things this country demonstrably does better than almost anyone.
What those tasks were actually teaching
Nobody ever thought transcribing a meeting was valuable work. Its value was that the apprentice heard how a negotiation goes, which questions the boss asks, what a customer sounds like when they are unhappy.
The boring task was the delivery mechanism for judgement. Remove the task and the judgement does not arrive by another route on its own.
The wrong response
Forbidding apprentices from using AI, so they learn the hard way. This fails for two reasons: they will use it anyway, and the workplace they graduate into will expect fluency with it.
An apprentice who leaves your firm unable to work with these tools has been trained for 2019.
What seems to work
Change what you ask for, not what they are allowed to use. Three shifts we have seen work:
Ask them to check. Have the machine draft it, and the apprentice’s job is to find what is wrong. Checking teaches more than producing, and it is a genuine skill their seniors also need.
Ask them to be present. If the meeting summary is automatic, the apprentice still attends the meeting. The listening was the point.
Ask them to explain. « Why is that number right? » is a question a machine cannot answer for them, and it is the whole of professional competence in one sentence.
Why this is worth an hour of your time in August
The apprenticeship contract is three or four years. Whoever starts in your company in two weeks will finish in a working world we cannot currently describe.
What will still be true is that somebody has to be able to tell whether the output is right. Train for that, and the rest follows.