Enabling Enduring Skills in a World of AI
What to do for our young people...
Are my kids weird?
Well, yes, they are. (This is not a new thing.) But more weird.
All three of them (ages 12 through 19) are just not that into AI.
They’re online a lot; they play games galore (proof that game playing is in the genes and I have delivered a lasting legacy to my children.) But I added all of them as users on my Claude Enterprise account (you know, the one with more context, more tokens, Claude.ai, Claude Code, Claude Cowork) and… crickets.
The eldest is enrolled at Florida State University. The second is enrolled at a program that combines 11th and 12th grade with the first two years of college. The third is still homeschooled (as his brothers were.) What are these kids doing at school—and in their free time—if not messing around with the cool new thing?
The eldest gets excited about marine biology. The second wants to be in theater. And the youngest wants to be a YouTube star or attain fame as a wonder-kid in geography quiz shows. Maybe all those professions seem far removed from AI, but AI will irrevocably be a part of their future.
Meanwhile, I’m reading articles about how entry-level jobs will be displaced by AI, and I wonder what to do with my children (besides leave behind a trust fund). I have lots of questions, very few definitive answers, but I do have some ideas taking shape, and this blog post is a synthesis of those ideas.
Dr. Bror Saxberg is a mentor and friend, MD, PhD, and a thought leader on how to deploy learning to unlock human potential. In one of our regular conversations, he shared his perspective on ENDURING SKILLS, which include:
Executive function
Lifelong learning / Curiosity
Perspective-forming
Giving and receiving feedback
Collaboration
Persuasion
Narrative
Content curation
Pattern recognition and synthesizing knowledge
Discernment: What’s missing from the equation
What I’d love to see:
Educational institutions and EdTech companies intentionally including the development and assessment of these skills in their learning applications, courses, and programs.
I like to think that my current expertise includes a moderately high functioning set of these enduring skills, but looking back, the development thereof seemed rather accidental.
I have high executive function because my mother is an Asian Tiger Mom. (Accident of birth.)
I have high curiosity because I enjoy reading, have a compulsion to go down rabbit holes, and adore scope creep. (Accident of personality)
I have high narrative capabilities because I love story-telling and enjoy writing. (Accident of being a USA Today Bestselling Author, perhaps?)
Perspective-forming, content curation, pattern recognition, and discernment came from going through life’s personal and professional experiences—something I have decades of. My children not so much.
So what’s a young person to do?
Either very intentionally curate your own experiences such that you have opportunities to develop these skills, or hope that your learning experience drops them in your path.
Preferably both.
But how many of us, as teenagers, thought this far ahead? Right?
So, the adults in the room running educational institutions and EdTech companies will have to do it for them.
Organizations designing internships and entry-level jobs around professional skills explicitly tied to enduring skills
It’s not enough to handover a list of tasks and outcomes that we want our interns and junior employees to deliver. It’s about going the extra mile to make explicit the related enduring skills.
For example, “You’ll be working on writing client proposals. You can leverage prior proposals and AI, of course, but the goal—in addition to a really solid first draft of the proposal—is to help you understand similarities and differences in how we scope our work relative to the industry and the company’s organization maturity. (i.e., content curation, pattern recognition, discernment)”
Setting the expectation for the development of enduring skills versus just the physical outcome explicitly shifts the mental frame from “just do the work” to “do the work in a way that helps you develop the muscle for all these skills that separate you from AI”
It changes the young person’s automatic response of “I can just use AI to write the paper or code the program” to “huh…there’s more to it. How do I get to the ‘more’ part of it?”
And now they’re finally doing the real work of building their enduring skills.
Parents
I’m a firm believer in redundant systems and backup plans for the backup plans. We’re not going to just expect schools, universities, and corporations save our children. We need to save our own children.
Here’s what I’m planning to do:
Dial back my compulsion for “doing it faster, and then doing it for them if they’re not doing it fast enough”
I’m a COO by nature and by training. I do not stay in my lane. Everything is my lane and everything needs to function smoothly and run quickly. And once it does, my brain will then go, “So, what’s the next thing to fix? Gimme it.”
I need to recognize that learning is not operations. It’s not about productivity and speed. It’s about wrestling with the problem and developing the muscle for it. It’s about developing the scaffolding of prior knowledge and adjacent knowledge.
Twenty or more years ago, when WYSIWYG website design was in its nascent stage and wasn’t giving me the formatting I wanted, I switched over into HTML to fix it because I had wrestled with HTML and knew what to do.
Just last week, when I was trying to mass-tag my contacts on Google (why is this not a Google Contacts functionality?), Claude suggested several rather tedious one-by-one, by-the-book solutions. But because I’d used Google contacts long before the advent of AI, I knew enough to just upload a group of email addresses, correctly tagged, and trust that within 30 minutes, Google would flag them as duplicates and that I would be able to merge the entries into the correct tags.
Neither situation would have happened if I hadn’t spent the time learning, observing, and going deep enough to know how to work around it when it (whether it was WYSIWYG, Google, or AI) stopped working well.
I need to give my children space to do that. (Without asking when it’s going to be done.)
Create learning experiences for them that will build enduring skills
This goes right along with what I’d like organizations to do. I’ll explicitly call out the enduring skills that are being developed when I dump new To-Do things on their plates. (Well, maybe not with picking up their room. I shouldn’t have to justify that.)
Teach them to fact-check, pressure-test, and call BS on AI
This one bothers me a lot. Some LLMs are more syncopathic than others. There’ll be lots of conversations in my house around not letting silver-tongued LLMs get into their heads. (Or maybe we don’t have to worry just yet. They’re not even really using AI right now.)
But more importantly, I want my children to learn how to fact-check and pressure-test. They’ll need to know what constitutes facts versus opinion, what sources are more reliable than others, and when to push back and call BS. They’ll need to know how to do it in academic settings, professional settings, social settings, and personal settings, while realizing that the facts get murkier all along the way.
Confidence and context often derives from experience. My children can’t lean on experience though osmosis simply from years of living, so it’s going to be yet another topic of conversation around my house.
Teach them to leverage AI
And finally, AI is wonderful—if you have the confidence and context to guide and leverage it. I’m designing AI assignments and internships for my children, starting first with what they’re interested in. If it’s marine biology, great. Theater? I can work with that too. Geography? How about we build an app that’s a Geography quiz show?
Starting with the things they already love and are already good at creates a stronger launch pad for new skills. They don’t have to keep as many pieces of new information in their head at one time (i.e., less burn on working memory) and it creates connections from a familiar, well-loved thing to a new thing (i.e., motivation.)
I’m not suggesting it’ll be fast. My kids are still learning the first of the two rules I gave them: Use things they way they were meant to be used. (Like sit on the chair, not on the armrest. Hold the rail, not slide down the rail.) But AI is here to stay, so they’ll get good as good at it as they are at playing games on their iPad.
It’s just a journey that I, at least for now, will have to actively manage and curate for them. It’s part of the “parent” job description.
(Oh, and if you want to know the second rule, it’s “If what you’re thinking of doing will make your mother go WTF and not in a good way, don’t do it.”)
About Amelia Waters
Amelia Waters is the Managing Partner of EDSO Edge, a strategic growth and operations consulting firm serving PE-backed healthcare education and EdTech companies. Her background spans BCG, a decade at Kaplan, and COO roles at PE-backed companies. She writes Ideas from the Edge for executives and high-performers on systems thinking, leadership, and the operating principles she finds in everyday life.
Learn more at edso-edge.com.