Right About Now - Legendary Business Advice
70% of Workers Feel Unprepared: How Instructure Is Rethinking Learning with Ryan Lufkin
24 Mar 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Well, why do I need to be judging? But he's the expert. Someone's got to check its work. It's great at doing research. It's great at being that assistant and accomplishing tasks that can be time consuming, but it's not infallible. We can't trust it to that level yet. Maybe someday, but we still need to be the experts. We can't offload that to the machines.
This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now. Hello and welcome to Right About Now. We're always talking about business.
what the world has going on right now in the world of business, marketing, personal development. We cover the gamut ultimately, but we're here to help you get ahead. Entrepreneurs, executives, everyone out there listening, we know you have choices. Thank you for being here. New data shows that about 70% of U.S. workers feel unprepared for today's workforce. That raises a bigger question.
Is the problem education, employers, or how we think about skills altogether? Today, I'm joined by Ryan Lufkin, the VP of Global Strategy and Structure. He has spent years helping companies and institutions rethink how people actually become job ready. And we're getting into what's broken and what needs to change. Ryan, welcome to Right About Now. Awesome. Thanks, Ryan.
Hey, Ryan and Ryan, you got a good start already, man. We're like brothers from another. Talk to me, man. Instructure. What that word means.
We're the makers of Canvas. Canvas learning management system, at this point, about half of all the college students in North America and about a third of all K-12 students in North America use Canvas on a daily basis in learning. We're all about instruction. Instructure is the name of the company.
It's funny, you wear a Canvas shirt to Home Depot and people are like, oh, you're giving me flashbacks to college. You wear an Instructure shirt, not as many people know. I always like to explain that connection.
I did recognize that in our notes. And that name, I was twitching a little bit. I'm not sure.
Well, it's funny. You can tell how good their educators were at designing courses in Canvas if they were like, oh, I love Canvas or, oh, I hate Canvas. You're like, the teacher probably wasn't using it right.
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Chapter 2: Why do 70% of workers feel unprepared for today’s workforce?
online learning and course design.
There's some meta talk there, Ryan, the meta of the fact that the teachers weren't prepared to use the software appropriately. And we're talking about how workers in general feel unprepared.
You talk about this pace of change that started in six years ago, March of 2020. And that pace of change hasn't slowed. Just when everybody thought, oh, COVID's over, we can take a breath. November 30th of 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT and we got everything got turned on its head again. The last three years from that have been just an
incredibly fast-paced evolution of how do we use this technology i have a chart and tell us the seven stages of grief going through all of that we're really in the acceptance phase with ai now and how are we applying it appropriately 70 of workers feel unprepared what does that really mean
We've got this kind of schism between education that in many ways is still really dealing with the academic integrity idea, this idea that AI is just for cheating versus businesses that are trying to figure out how do we optimize our jobs with these tools. And in many cases, don't feel like universities are preparing them for that. It's even worse in K-12.
When you look at K-12 and there's a kind of an anti-technology and education movement going on that ignores some of the more glaring benefits of using technology to reach people that have accessibility challenges and rural and frankly, just maybe are missing school, things like that. We've got to get everybody on the same page.
And Google announced a really great program trying to provide free AI education to 6 million educators across the United States. We're getting ready to release some courses around AI literacy and Even the detractors, those educators that are scared of AI or have doubled down and said, we're not using AI. Honestly, take an AI literacy course. At least understand how these tools work.
Then you understand what they're capable of. And then you can actually make the more informed decision about how deeply do you want to use these tools and put you in a better position to help your students understand how to use them ethically, how to use them effectively, things like that.
If we're going to learn something for the sake of learning and for teaching ourselves how to problem solve, are these the problems that we should be solving? Do we need to learn calculus? Do we need to learn things that AI can do and will perceivably be around unless we all go back to the old ages because power goes away or something or Wi-Fi goes away?
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Chapter 3: How is AI breaking down workplace roles and empowering employees?
We need to provide educators the resources they need to involve how they're teaching with AI, with preparing those students because it's not going away. And I think those educators that I can opt out, we've had students say, I want to opt out. You're not going to be able to opt out of AI. There's a Waymo that just drove past people's houses.
They don't get to say, you don't get to drive past here.
Chapter 4: How does AI require more expertise in education and work?
Nope, that automated car is driving down the street. You're going to be involved with AI at some level and understanding it, embracing it, understanding the ethical aspects of it are really important.
Talking with Ryan Lufkin, the VP of Global Strategy and Instructure. Ryan, you kind of teed this up. You're teeing all my notes up perfectly. I really like this. You're an excellent guest. It's Skills versus degrees. It seems like we're in a skills based economy versus a degree based economy. And I don't know if degrees hold the same value they used to. You can prove me wrong.
What skills actually matter most right now?
We've talked about those human skills and how important they are. I will say I'm still a big believer that the degree, the associate degree, the bachelor's degree. the master's degree, they are still the preferred currency in hiring.
And then there's a reason for that because they're not just about the hard skills generally, the math, they include the soft skills, working with groups, being empathetic, building consensus, communication, like all those things that are incredibly important, those human skills that we're talking about, they embody all of those.
A year or two ago, you saw a lot of businesses kind of pro that they were taking out a degree as a requirement for hiring. hiring. And what you saw is a lot of them slowly reintroduced that because it really is the best barometer of whether or not a person is prepared to enter the modern workforce.
That said, because of this pace of change, we live in a world that we all need to be lifelong learners, every single one of us. That means go to school for 12 years or 16 years or 20 years. Then we would go to a job, often the same job for 30 years. Then we would retire with our pension. And that was our parents' generation. That doesn't exist anymore.
The average tenure at a job is about three years. They're saying, well, we're going to work until we die. There's no pensions anymore. It's incumbent on us to prepare ourselves to be upwardly mobile within the job market by constantly training new skills. And in most cases, employers aren't owning that. The college and university system still owns...
That upskilling and reskilling of adult learners. And they really have done an amazing job post COVID, especially of rolling out new credential programs, because you can actually roll out a credential program, a certificate program without all of the regulatory requirements for an accreditation that a standard college program needs.
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