How higher ed institutions help advance skills-based hiring
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As state and local agencies continue to grapple with workforce shortages, an initiative from Amazon Web Services looks to turn university students into an AI-ready workforce.
State and local governments are grappling with an ongoing tech talent shortage, as outdated infrastructure, an aging workforce and tough competition with the public sector make it increasingly difficult to find and recruit young talent.
The need to fill vacant jobs to ensure governments keep pace with constituents' ever-evolving needs, particularly when it comes to digital services like online permitting, chatbots and other tech solutions, is becoming increasingly crucial.
In an effort to address the tech talent gap, President Donald Trump signed an executive order last month to bring artificial intelligence systems and education into K-12 schools. The order aims to develop an AI-ready workforce by preparing students and teachers early on for understanding and leveraging the technology.
To further that mission, higher education institutions across the nation are looking to support college students’ AI and other tech skills as they enter the workforce.
The University of Pittsburgh, for instance, recently announced it will partner with the Amazon Web Services’ Cloud Innovation Center, an initiative that aims to connect students, state and local agencies and universities to develop AI-enabled solutions to improve government efficiency challenges.
University officials said that through the institution’s Health Sciences and Sports Analytics Cloud Innovation Center, students will “develop cutting-edge applications that address the latest challenges in healthcare and sports.”
Such initiatives offer students the opportunity to have concrete projects to put on their resume as they seek employment, said Kim Majerus, vice president of U.S. public sector and education at AWS. That helps them present how they’ve helped tackle a real-world problem through AI and data, “and I think that’s the core basis of the skills that employers are looking for,” she said.
Focusing on helping students develop and upskill their AI capabilities will be critical as skills-based hiring models become increasingly popular among state and local governments, Majerus said. Prioritizing skills and certifications for tech jobs and eliminating degree requirements is one way agencies are trying to attract more job candidates to the public sector.
Twenty-five states have implemented skills-based hiring for certain positions, and 13 states have seen an increase in jobs that didn’t have a degree requirement, according to a report released in February from the National Governors Association.
Arizona State University and California Polytechnic State University also support AWS CIC programs. The latter of the two has worked with the Virginia Department of General Services Division of Consolidated Laboratory Services and the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene to develop an AI solution to improve public health data management.
Under the program, students leveraged generative AI to increase the efficiency of reporting genomic data to federal data repositories. The gen AI model helped streamline the data reporting process by using natural language processing capabilities to align and standardize data schemas and formats among public health organizations and federal repositories.
The public health data initiative helped increase the accuracy of data and reduced the time it took to conduct data submissions from up to 20 hours per week to as little as two hours.
“It’s not about a class … it’s not about the degree,” Majerus said. The program helps governments, commercial companies and education institutions “bridge that gap between a student and a job,” she said.