The Robots vs. The Teens, with Tallo CEO Allison Danielsen.
How do you build education for young people that leads to jobs and better lives in the age of AI?
The Kids have taken on greater importance and urgency in jobs policy the past couple years as entry-level jobs have retreated—purportedly due to AI—and more young people seem to be second guessing the option of college due to worries about debt.
Improving workforce outcomes is one of the main reasons cited by the second Trump Administration for its effort to pour many of the Department of Education’s programs into the Department of Labor. Education Secretary Linda McMahon has bemoaned colleges offering degree programs that are “worthless on the job market.” In a statement announcing the second phase of the Ed-DOL marriage, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer framed its new role in education as addressing “workforce demands” and ensuring “students from all walks of life . . . succeed and support their local economies.”
So yeah, a lot of people are talking about The Kids and all they have going on with education and the future of American jobs—but how do we actually do the things that will help them enter the workforce and earn better lives as a result?
That question was at the heart of a conversation I had last week with Allison Danielsen. Allison, a veteran of The College Board (the people behind AP credit and the SAT), is the CEO of Tallo, a digital career platform that helps talent between ages 13 and 30 explore careers, earn credentials, and get jobs. No lie, this was one of my favorite interviews for this space, and I really loved Allison’s perspective on AI in particular.
Below, we talk about how educators and employers can better work together, how to best reach young people and connect them to jobs, and how the biggest challenge with young people and AI might not be literacy, but resentment.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Nick Beadle: I just talked to someone who’s bridged employers and schools, and they described how they think educators are in one silo and employers are in another silo. As they put it, employers don’t share everything they need to share with educators, and educators don’t want to let the employers in, or they have their own pressures to face, which are not necessarily about getting someone hired. How do you break those walls down?
Allison Danielsen: A lot of times this is framed very antagonistic, and it’s not. I think so many of the educators are actually incredibly well-intentioned. They’d love for businesses to come in [and help them]. [Educators] just don’t actually have the mechanisms to do it and businesses are busy, right?
[Employers] need ways to build the pipeline and they’re really focused on, “How do you help me tomorrow?” So that’s why I think Tallo has a little bit of a benefit here. We work with folks who are career ready and folks who are coming up through that pipeline. We can help employers in multiple ways, but in my experience, they just actually need much easier ways to engage.
I also think there’s just a level of complication that is worth naming, like many employers won’t write down that what they actually hire for legal reasons. There is a lack of transparency in this system and many educators have not been in a job interview process for a long time, so they don’t know how to navigate that nuance. I do think we need to create many more ways for employers to just actually get involved more clearly and take some of the pressure off the educators.
Nick: There’s a lot of criticism right now of the education system for not being career-focused enough. Obviously, Secretary McMahon has talked about it. Do we still need to have some distance between “education” and “workforce,” or is there a way they can overlap in a way that meets “We want every education piece to align with a job description” sort of thinking?
Allison: We know that many people pursue additional education in order to get a job, and so we should just ground ourselves in the fact that often the reason people go to college is to get a job or [that they] go into workforce training is to get a job. We’ve got to understand that as we’re trying to help them make educational decisions.
I also think young people care about their future and they get disengaged in high school. Understanding the relevance of what they’re learning sooner actually keeps them more engaged and would lead to more persistence. There’s value in education and understanding that big connection.
I think when we reduce education to simply preparing you for work, we transform it from the potential that it has to actually grow you as a whole person down to very specific training. It’s interesting in the AI age that we’re seeing so many calls for durable skill development and critical thinking. Some of these things that actually come out of a more holistic education with the technical training or skill-specific training being part of the pathway you provide people. I think there should be overlap. I think we don’t actually have a need to reduce these things to “Education is for this” and “Work is for this.” Ultimately, you work to have a better life.
I think we like to be able to reduce things to like one thing or another. I don’t think it’s that simple. And I think we just need to do a better job actually connecting the different pieces of this.
Nick: Yeah, “Button A versus Button B” is one of my worst enemies on a day-to-day basis. Something you mentioned is that educators are well-intentioned. As I understood you, they just may not have employer insight or they may not have been in the position of getting hired in a while.
From your work, how can educators adjust to what employers need to better guide young people so young people can find themselves in a good job, but still get educated?
Allison: I think [educators] just have a very hard job. I think [the answer is] making sure that folks understand that the career journey is actually a cycle that we go in and out of at different points in our lives. There are going to be people who read this article who are still trying to figure out what they want to do for a living and that’s very, very normal. I don’t think it’s helpful when we ask educators to give out a career assessment and check a box and say, “You’re done.” I think [it helps if educators are] normalizing the fact that actually you’re going to go through these moments of uncertainty. Education is actually a lifelong process. It’s not just what you decide to do during or right after high school.
The other thing that educators could do is actually be really aware of the values they have and that they express about work and education. Because there’s a lot of subtle messages that young people get about what is a good job and what is a bad job and what’s a good pathway and a bad pathway and it shapes [a young person’s] decision in a really big way.
When the workforce is changing as rapidly as it is, we do a disservice to the next generation when we try to lock them into having one good path or one good job and potentially devaluing opportunities that could be good for them.
Nick: I want to ask you the flip of that question: what can employers be doing to better interact with educators? Because I hear a lot of complaints from employers that educators are just not providing them the talent.
Allison: I think they need to be more proactive in the connection and a lot more transparent in what they’re actually looking for. Because the job descriptions are insufficient. I think [job descriptions] often don’t even represent what people are looking for.
I think [employers] need to be willing to carve out some of that time to engage with educators and young people in order to prepare the next generation. In our research, we’ve seen that more than 70 percent of young people make decisions about their careers in high school. If you’re deciding what path you actually want to pursue that early, and an employer isn’t even on your radar, well, you’re not going to take the step to prepare to come into their workforce to have the right skills.
And if the message is that the skills, requirements, competencies that you actually need are different than what employers are looking for, I don’t know how educators are supposed to fill that gap.
Nick: From a technical perspective, how are y’all adjusting to this environment through Career Navigator and some of your other work? How are you adapting to both what this particular generation of young people need, but also what employers need? Because there’s a lot in the news right now about entry-level jobs going away because of AI.
Allison: There’s a few things there, so I want to make sure I’m answering all of them because it really is a complicated problem. I think the first is that we are really taking a stance of treating people as whole people because you’re going to be more than your job. Your first job is likely not to be your last job. So how do we think about the full potential of what you could develop and then really normalize that you could be learning and changing jobs throughout your life?
Just as an example, we have a community part of our platform where young people come in and connect with each other. They talk about different things. They’re able to get that kind of support from peers, mentors, employers. And we started by building communities for manufacturing or different kinds of industries. We found that young people want to talk to each other about art and music and interest-based things because they’re developing as human beings. Those things then can be taken into the workforce, right? You can actually be a graphic designer in the manufacturing industry. That’s an awareness gap that young people have and we want to foster their ability to see the potential they have and treat them as human beings.
Another [thing we’re doing] is really being clear about how we engage with [young people]. I mean, we talk to users all the time. We’ve got more than two million registered users and and a couple hundred thousand monthly active users. We put things in front of them constantly.
We’ve certainly heard, ”This looks like a boomer built it.” That is not going to get them to come back to a platform, and I think a lot of the career navigation tools we [as a field] have out there are well-intentioned, but they aren’t built for young people or users. They are built as workflow management tools. They’re built to check accountability boxes. We need tools that young people actually want to use. We have to speak to them in a way that is actually appealing and we have to put things in front of them that resonate so that they can be engaged.
I have an employee who likes to talk about putting beets in the brownies, but if they’re not there, you actually can’t give them the things that they need in terms of career readiness and career development. So, we’re really grounding ourselves in treating people as people and talking to them in a way that is relevant and resonates with them because there really is a missing piece there. That’s why they go to social media. It’s why they go to their friends. They go to these people who can understand them.
We’re also trying to figure out how we engage in the right conversation. One thing that is very concerning to me right now is this message around [how] entry-level jobs are going away and AI is taking them, and employers are eliminating jobs because they’ve used AI in such a smart way that they do not need you. We’re seeing young people now really resent AI. Like in our community, we see a lot of comments from people who are saying, “I hate it. It’s taking jobs. I don’t like what it’s doing.” We’ve seen backlash from different companies who’ve employed AI tools and replaced people. And you know, people say “I don’t want to use that product now.”
I believe in using people for work and I think that is really harmful as a message to the next generation. Because we want them actually using AI to build the solutions for the future. We want them engaging and instead we are scaring them away.
Nick: Yeah, I mean, it’s “The Robots versus The Teens”—that seems to be the battle in the news these days. Something I write about a lot is there’s a big push for kids to have AI literacy. From what you guys see, is the lift getting young people to AI literacy or is it something else? There is College Board data from a few months back showing that a lot of teens are already using AI.
How is “The Teens versus The Robots” impacting young people’s adoption of AI? And should we be doing more than AI literacy?
Allison: I really think there’s work that we need to do about how to use AI effectively. It’s less about the literacy and more about how to think about AI as a tool and not as a threat. There’s very much a language thing there.
I do think young people are engaging with it, but we’re also seeing young people reject it because they’re worried about jobs. I hear all the time that they’re like, “OK, so I got this information from ChatGPT. I’m going to Google to verify it because I don’t trust the information that I’m actually getting from ChatGPT.” And then some of them say, “I’ve given up on it because it’s actually not giving me the thing that I need on the other side.”
But many of us know that every single week there’s an entirely new drop of tools around AI and they are getting better and better and better. If we see young people give up on these tools as they are actively evolving, we’re going to be screwed because they’re not going to be ready for the workforce. So I do think it’s much more than literacy. I actually think it’s about the narrative and the engagement and the relevancy of AI because [young people] are curious, smart people who want to solve problems and build things. They will use the tools available to them.
If I teach you how to use AI today, it’s actually probably irrelevant to what you actually need to know about AI in a year. I would really hesitate about building a whole lot of curriculum around [what AI does today] and spend a whole lot more time on how we actually talk to people about the power of technology.
Nick: It’s AI as a pencil, not AI as this sort of, you know, ethereal entity.
Allison: Yes. Exactly right. And if The Robots are taking The Teens’ jobs, they’re taking our jobs, too, right? We’ve got to solve that as a society. But I don’t actually think it’s that simple, so we’ve got to send a different message.
Card subject to change.
Thanks again to Allison for a really fun interview.
Tomorrow, I’m back for what already is a loaded edition of THE MONEY. Trump II announced plans to spend big on Workforce Pell through the Department of Labor, DOL just released a key policy document on AI and it’s about to start a national marketing campaign for apprenticeship, on which I have Thoughts. Oh, and there’s a new workforce bill in the Senate.
