A roundup of global news from The Job newsletter, including Germany’s increasingly popular degree apprenticeships and Coursera’s take on how AI is influencing jobs and education. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Subscribe here.)

Classroom Theory and Real-World Practice

Germany has long been a global poster child for apprenticeships. But as veteran journalist and author Ben Wildavsky reports from Munich, Germany’s traditional vocational apprenticeships have become less popular.

In recent years, a growing number of young Germans are enrolling in career-focused institutions known as universities of applied sciences, Wildavsky writes in Work Shift. These practical universities have partnered with employers on a small but growing path that combines applied sciences degrees with a new kind of apprenticeship.

These degree apprenticeships now make up nearly 5% of German higher education enrollment, reports Wildavsky. 

“The mixture of classroom theory and real-world practice,” he writes, “reflects a strong public appetite for a new approach—more opportunities to learn beyond secondary school in settings that combine scholarship with a focus on careers.”

The Apprenticeship Degree: Beyond Germany, these dual-study apprenticeship programs are growing in several other countries in Europe and elsewhere in the world, says Joe Edelheit Ross, president of Reach University, a pioneering U.S. institution offering apprenticeship-based, job-embedded degrees for working learners. 

After creating degree apprenticeships in the U.K. in 2015, that model now accounts for more than 6% of new postsecondary enrollments, Ross says, pointing to a presentation from Michael Gessler, chairman of the Institute of Technology and Education at the University of Bremen.

France has seen even more growth. Roughly 204K apprentices, comprising 42% of the nation’s apprenticeships, are enrolled in higher education programs.

“Apprenticeships that lead to a degree are commonplace in many other countries,” says Ross, who recently wrote about this approach for Work Shift.

In the U.S., Ross is hopeful that the model can help make a case that liberal education is career-worthy. By connecting four-year degrees to the workplace, he says, this form of apprenticeship makes good on the “tremendous push for work-relevant education.”

Yet Ross doesn’t think “degree apprenticeship” is the right term for the American take on dual-track programs. The Euro lingo doesn’t land well here, he says. And it fails to adequately tap into the bipartisan political interest in apprenticeships. 

Instead, the preferred terminology for Reach University is “apprenticeship degrees.”

“We need to do it our own way,” says Ross. “Are we modifying the apprenticeship here? Or are we modifying the degree?”

Germany Jumps on Degree Apprenticeships

As vocational apprenticeships become less popular, more young Germans take the both/and path of pairing an applied-sciences degree with a new kind of apprenticeship.

Coursera’s CEO on AI and Online Education

Along with edX and Udacity, Coursera is part of the OG trio of MOOC companies. The online course provider has changed a lot since it was launched in 2012 by Stanford University’s Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng. These days Coursera partners with 350-plus universities and companies to offer online content ranging from projects to professional certificates.

With a global reach, Coursera has a broad perspective on how artificial intelligence is playing out. 

For example, the company offers 650 courses on generative AI. Last year, it saw six new enrollments per minute in those courses. As of April, that number had risen to nine. And while the U.S. still has an edge over India for registered Coursera users—31M to 28M—interest in gen AI on Coursera among Indian learners outpaces that of their American counterparts.

A global survey released this week by the company found that 17% of students have earned a microcredential in gen AI. And 93% of students say gen AI training belongs in degree programs.

Greg Hart shared the enrollment figures with me during an interview in early April. As a longtime technical advisor to Jeff Bezos, Hart formerly ran Amazon’s Alexa/Echo and Prime Video divisions. He took the helm at Coursera earlier this year. 

For an episode of The Cusp podcast, Hart and I discussed AI’s impact on Coursera’s work and the company’s view of how the tech is influencing higher education and jobs.

“My personal opinion is that AI is just going to be the new software,” Hart says. “And that all software, regardless of what field it’s in, regardless of what space it’s in, will be augmented and/or generated by AI.”

AI and the Jobs of the Future

Concern is spiking about the potential effects of artificial intelligence on the labor market. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, hardly a disinterested observer, told Axios that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years, driving a mass elimination across technology, finance, law, and consulting.

Several corporate CEOs have joined AI lab leaders like Amodei in predicting a white-collar jobs apocalypse. Yet without firm data on AI’s emerging impacts on the labor market, experts remain at odds over what to expect during the next few years.

“Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.,” Jim Farley, Ford’s CEO, said in June at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “What are we going to do as a society for the people that it leaves behind?”

Less sweeping AI-related job warnings also have come from leaders at JPMorgan Chase, Amazon, and Microsoft, which laid off 15K workers—or roughly 9% of its workforce—in recent months. Likewise, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says the technology is handling 30% to 50% of the company’s workload.

Questioning Motives: CEOs may be trying to set expectations by using AI predictions as cover for future workforce cuts, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at Yale School of Management, told Axios’s Emily Peck. They get to look more transparent and not shock employees with layoffs.

Meanwhile, economic uncertainty has slowed the pace of hiring and created a stagnant labor market. Workers with a job are likely to stay employed, but those without one probably will stay unemployed.

Signs of economic weakness, like long-term unemployment, are more complicated than an AI-powered dystopia, Joe Wilkins writes for Futurism: “What gets presented as proof of AI’s automation potential is instead a mash of penny-pinching layoffs, outsourcing, labor market saturation, and in some cases, employer bias against recent college grads.”

Entry-Level Jobs: The technology poses a real threat to a substantial number of jobs that serve as the first step for each new generation of young workers, Aneesh Raman, the chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn, writes for The New York Times. He cites a LinkedIn survey of 3K senior executives, where 63% of respondents agreed that AI will eventually take on some of the mundane tasks currently allocated to their entry-level employees.

Office jobs are expected to feel the biggest crunch, predicts Raman. “Unless employers want to find themselves without enough people to fill leadership posts down the road, they need to continue to hire young workers,” he writes. “But they need to redesign entry-level jobs that give workers higher-level tasks that add value beyond what can be produced by AI.”

Augmentation vs. Replacement: What’s clear is that a rapidly increasing share of workers are using AI regularly in their jobs—primarily in white-collar roles. Some pundits and experts remain hopeful that the tech can mostly augment those jobs rather than replace them. 

For example, David Autor, an MIT labor economist, has struck an optimistic note, saying that AI could help people develop and deepen their existing expertise, better outfitting them for the jobs of the future.

AI also is poised to support frontline workers in retail, construction, logistics, and other industries, writes Enzo Cavalie, a principal at Reach Capital, particularly when paired with multimodal interphases like voice and computer vision. For example, Cavalie says AI copilots can provide on-the-job support that time-pressed managers often can’t.

When projecting potential job displacement, economists and other experts who study AI often draw different conclusions about which employees face the most risk, Noam Scheiber reports for The New York Times. Some argue that AI is most likely to affect entry-level workers. Others say experienced workers ultimately will be more vulnerable while novice employees are likely to benefit from the technology.

Mandate for Schools: Alex Kotran, the co-founder and CEO of the AI Education project, also is worried about the job market. Yet he says too many leaders in education are missing the forest for the trees by focusing on AI tools rather than jobs.

Writing in his newsletter, Kotran cites findings on the worsening labor market for recent college graduates. He also rounded up AI-driven layoffs across major corporations, including Intuit, Cisco, IBM, Activision Blizzard, Duolingo, Klarna, UPS, Amazon, and IKEA.

“Precious few resources are being directed to addressing the need for urgent, system-wide investment in helping schools build the capacity to understand and prepare students for this new era,” Kotran writes. “Instead, everyone seems to be focused on building tools and widgets.”

Open Tabs

Durable Skills

Job market competitiveness now hinges on a dual emphasis on technical and durable skills, particularly AI literacy combined with human capabilities like creativity and communication, ETS finds in a global report. A strong majority of survey respondents (83%) agreed that upskilling and reskilling will become the new standard for people throughout their careers, with 78% of employees saying they are interested in a digital skills credentials wallet.

AI Usage

The organizational use of artificial intelligence climbed to unprecedented levels last year, and the technology is beginning to deliver financial benefits across business functions, note the broad findings described in the 2025 AI index report from Stanford University. Computer and mathematical occupational categories dominate AI usage, the index notes, citing a recent Anthropic study, followed by arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media roles.

Supply Chains 

A full decoupling of the U.S. electronics supply from the rest of the world is not economically feasible, according to the Global Electronics Association—the newly renamed IPC. Calls for domestic production or reshoring of semiconductor production often underestimate investments required to replicate mature supply chains, the group says, including years of spending on workforce development. Electronics also now drive one-fifth of world trade.

CS and AI

Taking a single computer science course in high school boosts wages by 8% for all students, regardless of career path or whether they attend college, according to a letter signed by 250-plus CEOs. The petition created by CS for All calls for making computer science and AI a required part of every school’s curriculum, citing bipartisan support for those requirements. It has been signed by leaders of major corporations in tech and finance, among others.