Technology is changing many of the skills students will need in their future careers, but there’s one thing students must still do to land an internship or job: nail the interview.
That’s why Jason Van Nus, the director of work-based learning and youth apprenticeship programs at Lowndes County Schools in Georgia, is harnessing everything from artificial intelligence and good old-fashioned etiquette training to prepare his students to make good first impressions and advocate for themselves.
Van Nus spoke with Education Week for a special report on how AI is changing career and technical education. While leveraging SchoolAI to create a personalized chatbot that conducts mock interviews with students, he’s also revamping the staid concept of a career fair.
Many educators predict their schools and districts will offer more work-based learning and internship opportunities in the next five years—three-quarters of teachers, principals, and district leaders connected to CTE predicted so in a recent EdWeek Research Center survey. And Van Nus—who works as an education consultant in his spare time—has advice on how to ensure students are ready to make a case for themselves to prospective employers.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How are you using AI to teach students effective interviewing skills?
I have built an AI mock interview [chatbot] where my students can log in, tell [the program], “I’m an aspiring chemical engineer,” or “I’m an aspiring welder,” or “I’m an aspiring [nursing assistant],” and say, “conduct an interview with me as an aspiring construction project manager.” Then the AI begins to do that.
I’ve built that in two layers. Layer one is going to provide them coaching after each answer so it’s more of a practice. It [will] ask them a question, and then it will evaluate them based on two popular [interviewing and communication] methods: the BLUF method and the STAR method. It’ll give them feedback where it says, “Tell me about a time that you failed at something.” Then it’ll say, “situation, task, action, result,” and it’ll coach them through the question.
Then the second layer is they do the same thing, but there’s no coaching, there’s just an evaluation at the end. It will tell them how they did, and then I can see each one of their responses, so I don’t have to trust the AI to do the assessment. I can go in and see the context myself.
That’s how I use [AI] with students, and it’s been super, super effective for me. That’s preparing them for an event that I created called the reverse career fair.
What is the ‘reverse career fair,’ and why did you feel the traditional career fair needed an update?
If you’ve ever been to a career fair, it’s typically industry partners who bring their booths. They set up a table with their banners and their candy and their squishy balls and their flyers, and then you release students into that event. Students have never been trained to engage with people professionally. Nowhere in any standards nationally is there anything that requires us to teach students how to self-advocate, how to learn to sell their skills.
I noticed that what happens is typically at a normal career fair, you have industry partners who’ve given up a day to come, and then the students huddle in the middle, and there’s not really any engagement. Neither party is really having a good time.
The only way I could think to force engagement was to flip the roles. My students spend an entire semester in my third-level class building their booth [to promote themselves], learning how to sell their skills. I use a product called YouScience to help them understand their aptitudes. I bring in a company called Perfectly Polished to do some etiquette trainings. [Students] build resumes, they build business cards.
Then I release the [industry partners] into the room, and the students have their booth and have to field the questions and have a little QR code on their booth. So when the [industry partners] leave, they just scan the QR code to leave anonymous feedback.
You have integrated AI and other technologies into teaching in some creative ways. What lessons have you learned in doing that?
I don’t think teachers should be scared of AI. I would say that [AI] is just a much more capable, but parallel development as to when I was in school and the debate was: can we use calculators on standardized tests?
My job as a practitioner in work-based learning and career tech ed. is to make students ready for the professional world. If they’re using AI in the professional world, I’m doing [my students] a disservice if I’m not embracing it and teaching them how to use it ethically. I can’t say my kids are career-ready when they leave my program if I haven’t taught them how to use AI.
