Submitted by Gleb Tsipuirsky, PhD
Southeastern Illinois College’s career and technical programs connect training to employers in fields where practical judgment matters. That same principle should guide AI adoption.
Stanford’s August employment analysis finds U.S. workers ages 22-25 in highly AI-exposed occupations about 19% below the employment path of similarly aged workers in less-exposed occupations.
In a shop, office or clinic, routine work often teaches a beginner how the whole system behaves. If AI absorbs that work, supervisors should replace the lost learning with deliberate troubleshooting: compare outputs with reality, find the failure point, explain the fix and handle harder cases under review.
That keeps the first job educational. Southern Illinois employers should judge AI partly by whether new workers reach sound independent decisions faster, not simply by how many routine tasks disappear.
Gleb Tsipursky, PhD, a behavioral scientist, CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts, and author of The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work: From Resistance to Results (Georgetown University Press, 2026). https://disasteravoidanceexperts.com/aibook
