Trending In Ed with Mike Palmer

If companies have stopped hiring and stopped firing, how does anyone new get in the door? Host Mike Palmer takes a 4:50 AM train to Washington, D.C. for Business Roundtable's CEO Workforce Forum at the National Geographic Museum of Exploration. He comes back with two ideas that stuck: Sal Khan's "learning velocity" and Bain & Company CEO Christophe De Vusser's "human exceptionalism." Both land in a labor market economists are calling the Great Stay: fewer layoffs, fewer new hires, and more reason than ever to invest in the people you already have. Mike then sits down with Dane Linn, Senior Vice President at Business Roundtable, who leads the organization's workforce initiatives for a membership of CEOs from companies like Cisco, Walmart, UPS, General Motors, and Lowe's. Dane started out as a teacher and elementary school principal, then spent 17 years at the National Governors Association before joining BRT. He explains how BRT CEOs think about expanding access to careers, building skills, and helping workers advance, and he makes the case for evidence over "best practices." His words: best practices are for amateurs. Then, a first for the show: Mike brings in Claude, Anthropic's AI model, as a live voice co-host for a deep dive into BRT's new report, Developing Talent, Delivering Results. Listeners may remember our AI co-host experiments with Nancy back in the day. This time it's less novelty and more research partner. Claude brings the numbers, flags where the evidence is thin, and adds detail where it helps. The conversation digs into several threads: > The scale: BRT member companies create 650,000+ internships, apprenticeships, and co-ops a year, roughly 1 in 7 nationwide, and more than 100,000 of those participants become full-time employees. > The portable premium: Former interns out-earn peers by 6–8% a decade later (about $77,000 cumulatively), even when they don't get hired where they interned. > The supply gap: Employer demand for interns is at a five-year high, yet only 37% of college seniors have completed a paid internship. > Beyond "Johnny One Note": Dane's case for a full continuum of work-based learning, from career days and micro-internships to apprenticeships and rotational programs. > Proof points: EY and Alamo Colleges in San Antonio, where 95% of completers landed accounting roles at roughly $70,000 a year, and Accenture's AI fundamentals training for nearly 600,000 people. > The AI paradox: AI is pushing more judgment into entry-level work, yet employers still rank AI literacy last in what they screen for. > The policy picture: US apprentices make up about 0.3% of the workforce, compared with roughly 4% in Germany, Australia, and England. Plus Workforce Pell, WIOA, and what a new Congress could mean for bipartisan workforce investment. > Reading the fine print: Why some of the wage premium may reflect who big companies hire, and why outcomes measurement matters. Resources Mentioned: Developing Talent, Delivering Results (Business Roundtable, Sept 2026): https://www.businessroundtable.org/developing-talent-delivering-results Business Roundtable: https://www.brt.org CEO Workforce Forum 2026: https://businessroundtable.org/ceo-workforce-forum-2026 Watch the Forum sessions on Business Roundtable's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/BusinessRoundtable Mentioned in this episode: Sal Khan on AI Tutors, Durable Skills, and the Khan TED Institute: https://trendingineducation.com/2026/10/sal-khan-on-ai-tutors-durable-skills-and-the-khan-ted-institute/ 🔔 Subscribe to Trending in Education for more conversations on the future of learning, work, and what's next. 📩 Connect with Mike Palmer on LinkedIn to bring this kind of conversation to your own podcast or media program.

What happens when entry-level jobs level up, and whose job is it to close the gap? On this episode of Trending in Education, host Mike Palmer sits down with Lydia Logan, Vice President of Global Education and Workforce Development at IBM, to explore what Gen Z needs on day one of their first job and how higher ed and industry can get them there. Lydia draws on a career spanning the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Broad Foundation, and Verizon Innovative Learning Schools to unpack the "broken bottom rung" of the career ladder. She explains why the on-the-job training that used to follow a degree is now being pushed into college itself, and why employers increasingly want to see a portfolio of real work. Through IBM SkillsBuild, which is on track to skill 30 million people by 2030 and has already reached 22 million, IBM is partnering with faculty across disciplines so students in business, marketing, and healthcare become builders of AI, not just consumers of it. Mike and Lydia also dig into the divide between higher ed's caution and the private sector's rapid adoption of AI. Lydia shares how institutions are using red, yellow, and green frameworks for acceptable AI use, why literacy is the path to fluency, and how IBM's own culture of 40 hours of annual learning per employee shapes what it recommends to clients and campuses. We also discuss: - The AI Builders Challenge, including student projects that use IBM's AI tool Bob to make video captions accessible - How IBM brings enterprise use cases to campus operations, from funder reports to Penn State's campus navigation app - Why durable "transversal" skills matter more as the half-life of technical skills shrinks - Free certificates in AI, cybersecurity, and data analytics through state community college systems - Preparing students to work in hybrid teams of humans and AI agents - Why assessments that once took three years to build now need to be ready in six months Links: IBM SkillsBuild: https://skillsbuild.org IBM Institute for Business Value: https://www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institute-business-value Lydia Logan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lydiamlogan/ If you like what you heard, subscribe, write us a review, and tell your friends. Visit us at trendingineducation.com for more. This is Trending in Education.

Should kids still learn to code when a one-sentence prompt can produce 4,000 lines of it? Philip Colligan’s answer is yes, and he thinks the question matters more now than it did three years ago. On this episode of Trending in Ed, Mike Palmer sits down with Philip Colligan, CEO of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Philip joined as employee number seven in 2015, after a career in UK government and at Nesta, where his team was asking why schools weren’t teaching computer science. He sets the record straight on an origin story most people have backwards: the charity came first. A group of Cambridge engineers worried about falling computer science applications set out to build a cheap, credit-card-sized computer and hoped to sell maybe 20,000. They’ve sold more than 80 million, and the commercial company the foundation built listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2024. Mike shares how his seven-year-old reacted to a bare Raspberry Pi board handed down from the neighbors, which leads Philip into one of the conversation’s through-lines: technology shouldn’t feel like magic, and kids learn the most when they can see inside the box and build with it. On the techlash, Philip starts by saying parents are largely right. If the streets of Cambridge were as dangerous for kids as the internet, he argues, there would be police on every corner. But a curfew isn’t a long-term plan, and he sees blanket bans as too crude a tool. He then makes the case from the foundation’s position paper on why coding still matters: AI lowers the cost of building software, which should raise demand for people who understand it, and kids growing up around automated decisions in healthcare, hiring, and criminal justice need to know how those systems work so they can push back on them. The two also get into cognitive offloading versus what they agree would make a good title for a difficult second album, Cognitive Surrender. Philip previews a new research effort on how to teach with vibe coding, keeping the speed and creativity while putting back the friction where learning actually happens. We also discuss: Andrew Sliwinski’s line that friction in coding is “a feature, not a bug” for learning Small language models that run offline, on device, for places where cost or connectivity is a barrier A new UK qualification where 17- and 18-year-olds train their own AI models Papert, Piaget, Vygotsky, and why AI feedback can’t replace learning from other people Why Philip wants kids to understand that AI systems can’t care about them Dropping his son off at university, and why adults owe young people real reasons to be optimistic, not just a better story Everything the foundation offers is free for teachers, students, and parents. Links: Raspberry Pi Foundation: https://www.raspberrypi.org Why Kids Still Need to Learn to Code in the Age of AI (position paper): https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/why-kids-still-need-to-learn-to-code-in-the-age-of-ai/ Experience CS: https://experience-cs.org Experience AI: https://experience-ai.org Mentioned in this episode: Launching LEGO Education’s Hands-On AI and CS Product with Andrew Sliwinski: https://trendingineducation.com/2026/01/launching-lego-educations-hands-on-ai-and-cs-product/ Guest: Philip Colligan, CEO, Raspberry Pi Foundation If you like what you heard, please subscribe, leave us a review, and share the show with a friend.

Is edtech really just YouTube and i-Ready? Or has the backlash flattened a sprawling, layered industry into a couple of easy villains? Mike Palmer welcomes back Trending in Ed All-Star Tony Wan, Head of Platform at Reach Capital, an early-stage venture firm investing across learning, health, and work. Before Reach, Tony co-founded EdSurge and served as its managing editor, and before that he built a math game startup that he figures he could now one-shot with AI. The conversation opens with the edtech backlash. Tony takes the concerns about smartphones, social media, and screen time seriously and supports restricting personal device use in schools. But he argues that calls to ban edtech outright miss the difference between school operations tools, teacher productivity tools, and student-facing tools, along with how much daily compliance and reporting depends on them. Mike adds a parent's take on context: screen-free and voice-driven tech lands very differently than one more app on a phone. From there, they turn to writing in the age of AI. Mike's hot take is that most AI writing is mid: high floor, low ceiling. Tony, an editor at heart, misses the messy, illogical, very human drafts that let you get inside a writer's head, and he's tired of seeing friends' voices sanded down into AI-flattened prose. He also declares his intention to reclaim the em dash for Team Human. Tony then shares what Reach is seeing in the funding climate: a bifurcated venture market, a real AI premium for AI-native companies, little patience for AI washing, and why businesses built on human relationships, like training and placing healthcare workers and teachers, can tell a credible story about what AI won't replace. We also discuss: Reach's latest State of Fundraising report from Caoimhe Mac Reynolds and Jennifer Carolan, and the pushback founders should expect from investors Why "impact investing" means different things depending on who's in the room Rising ARR per employee, 10X engineers, and forward-deployed engineers at small AI-enabled startups Blackboard co-founder Matt Pittinsky's contrarian case that building a company is still more fun with humans in it EdSurge back in the headlines after Stephen Noonoo's post and Tony's appearance on The Grade, and what's been lost as the newsroom emptied out The value of a feisty, in-person newsroom and a credible forum for "little tech" founders, many of them former educators Tony closes with real concern for the state of edtech media and journalism, tempered by energy from the independent writers and newsletters who've reached out in recent weeks. Mike calls it a "probletunity." He's still workshopping it. Links: Reach Capital: https://www.reachcapital.com The Wire from Reach Capital: https://thewire.reachcapital.com Tony Wan's Substack, edtech after dark: https://tonywan.substack.com In Defense of Education Technology (Tony's interview with Alexander Russo): https://alexanderrusso.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-education-technology How ISTE Turned EdSurge Into Slop by Stephen Noonoo: https://alexanderrusso.substack.com/p/how-iste-turned-edsurge-into-slop If you like what you heard, please subscribe, leave us a review, and share the show with a friend. This is Trending in Education.

What if banning technology in schools is just like scratching a sunburn: it feels good now, and it comes back worse later? Mike Palmer sits down with Richard Culatta, CEO of ISTE+ASCD, the newly combined organization with ISTE now called the International Society for Transforming Education. Richard started out as a high school Spanish teacher and a teacher educator, then worked on education policy in the U.S. Senate, at the U.S. Department of Education, and at the state level before joining ISTE nearly a decade ago. He's also the author of Digital for Good: Raising Kids to Thrive in an Online World. Richard explains why ISTE (about 45 years old) and ASCD (about 85) came together. Conversations about technology and innovation have to be grounded in learning science and effective pedagogy, and the reverse is true too. The new name puts the focus on the outcome, transforming education, rather than on what each organization used to do. He also shares how the ISTELive and ASCD Annual conference in Orlando was built with role-based pathways that people are encouraged to step outside of, to break down the silos that make it hard to innovate. Recorded just after New York City announced a one-year moratorium on generative AI in its public schools, the conversation takes on the "techlash" directly. Richard argues the post-COVID wave of devices got ahead of how well educators were prepared, and that a digital worksheet is still a worksheet. Blanket bans are harmful too, though. Every graduating class that misses out walks into a world where digital and AI skills are expected. And approving a fixed list of products is no substitute for policy built on principles and quality standards. For parents, Richard makes the case for teaching a healthy "tech diet" instead of counting screen-time minutes. He compares it to how we teach kids to eat. He also argues for scaffolding access over time: start early with a first phone that has no data plan and just a few apps, then add more as kids earn trust. Going from nothing to everything all at once is no way to learn anything. We also discuss: - Using technology to make kids creators and problem solvers, not just consumers of content - ISTE's AI Innovator Challenge, where student teams use AI to tackle problems in their communities - The Profile of an AI-Ready Graduate and its six human skills, including learner, connector, and storyteller - The five Edtech Quality Indicators: safe, evidence-based, inclusive, usable, and interoperable - Digital citizenship as a set of clear "dos," not a list of don'ts His closing challenge: if a kid has to choose between going to school and going to Disney World and doesn't have to think hard about it, we have work to do. Links: ISTE+ASCD: https://iste.org Profile of an AI-Ready Graduate: https://iste-ascd.org/aiready Five Edtech Quality Indicators: https://iste.org/news/coalition-of-leading-education-organizations-introduces-five-quality-indicators-for-edtech-and-ai-products AI Innovator Challenge: https://iste-ascd.org/ai-innovator Digital for Good by Richard Culatta: https://iste.org/products/a1w1U0000040vwZQAQ/Digital-for-Good:-Raising-Kids-to-Thrive-in-an-Online-World Richard Culatta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Culatta If you like what you heard, please subscribe, leave us a review, and share the show with a friend. This is Trending in Education.