The TechEd Podcast

Ask Us Anything: STEM Access, Hard Skills vs. Soft Skills & Lessons from the Manhattan Project

• Matt Kirchner • Episode 260

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Are employers hurting themselves by only asking for 'soft skills' and ignoring their real technical needs? How can homeschool students get the same access to STEM labs as students in traditional schools? And what can education leaders learn from the way the Manhattan Project mobilized talent and innovation to solve an enormous problem?

These questions (and more!) came directly from the you, and we're answering them on this episode of Ask Us Anything. Entrepreneurship, career strategy, workforce skills, and the rapidly evolving role of AI in modern organizations - we cover them all!

In this episode:

  • The best times to take entrepreneurial risks
  • Why your professional network is probably bigger than you think
  • The "soft skills" issue and why employers are actually hurting themselves by asking educators to teach them
  • Rapid-fire real examples of AI being used in business

3 Big Takeaways from this Episode:

1.Early-career risk can be an advantage for entrepreneurs. Matt explains that early in your career the consequences of failure are often much smaller, which makes it an ideal time to experiment with starting a business or pursuing a bold opportunity. With fewer financial obligations and more flexibility, young professionals often have the greatest ability to take meaningful risks.

2. Industry is hurting itself by only asking schools for soft skills instead of technical ones. Businesses frequently tell educators they want graduates who communicate well, collaborate, and show initiative. So why is industry so shocked that there aren't enough students with any technical background or interest? Employers: take a look at your job postings and start asking education to teach all the skills for those jobs: soft and technical (hard) skills alike.

3. Private schools have a unique opportunity to innovate in STEM education. Because they often have more flexibility than traditional public systems, private schools can move quickly to adopt emerging technologies, modern equipment, and new instructional models. That freedom creates an opportunity to design programs that expose students to advanced STEM fields earlier and more creatively.

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TechEd Podcast Introduction:

Announcer, this is the TechEd podcast, where we feature leaders who are shaping, innovating and disrupting technical education and the workforce. These are the stories of organizations leading the charge to change education, to rethink the workforce and to embrace emerging technology. You'll find us here every Tuesday on our mission to secure the American Dream for the next generation of STEM and workforce talent. And now here's your host. Matt Kirchner,

Matt Kirchner:

well, it is another quarter and another episode of Ask us anything. My name is Matt Kirkner. I am the host of the TechEd podcast, and we like to do this several times a year. We get so many great questions from our audience, asking things about STEM education, technical education, the workforce, technology, the list goes on and on. And so we do this once a quarter, just to address all those questions. It's one of my favorite things to do here on the TechEd podcast, and we get great, great feedback from the audience. Everybody learns something, and hopefully many things in this episode of Ask us anything. So welcome to the TechEd podcast, as I am for every episode of Ask us anything. I am joined by our producer Melissa Martin, who will pose the questions reflect on the answers a little bit. So Melissa, great to have you back on again this side of the microphone. You're on every episode of the podcast, but usually not on the camera or in front of the mic.

Melissa Martin:

So you mentioned me, so exactly which happens

Matt Kirchner:

quite often, or the guest does, right? Yeah, absolutely.

Melissa Martin:

If they mentioned PE then Yeah, absolutely.

Matt Kirchner:

Then your name comes up if we talk about private equity. So maybe we will this particular episode. We will see, we'll see.

Melissa Martin:

Yeah, no, but it's great to be back, and so I'm start with a question that actually is perfect timing, because you keynoted an event last week for the wells Association of Schools, Lutheran schools, all over the whole country.

Matt Kirchner:

Yes, I did, yeah. It was a great event, and really fun to be around all those private educators doing really, really cool stuff. We talked all about artificial intelligence, and how in many ways, there's an opportunity for private institutions of education to lead in this age of artificial intelligence. Many times, they're not necessarily bound by some of the same bureaucratic and red tape constraints that get in the way of innovating in education. So really, really exciting time for education in general, and for specifically for private schools. So I had a great, great time at that event.

Melissa Martin:

So Dan from Wisconsin, who submitted this question, is really going to appreciate what you have to say. So Dan says, is there an easier access point for students that are homeschooled or from small religious schools without the means to buy in when there are local public schools that have purchased stem products. He says, My kids go to a private Lutheran elementary school with only 100 students, and I don't feel we have the funding to be able to purchase learning systems. He says, We also play hockey with several families that homeschool their kids. So what are some ways that they and we can access high quality STEM learning systems? Sure, absolutely.

Matt Kirchner:

So you know, the A couple things, I think, to dispel along the way. The first one is that you don't necessarily have to have a big pot of money in order to do really cool STEM education projects. And so we start with the idea that, yeah, we look at and see labs in STEM education, AI education, technical education, where schools are literally investing millions of dollars. Maybe they had a referendum. Maybe there's some state funding available. Maybe they're part of a federal grant. Maybe they have a very benevolent or action oriented local employer that says, hey, we want to invest in your program. And yeah, you can see some of these labs that are literally millions of dollars. And I think a lot of times people look at that and say, well, I could never raise that kind of money. Well, first answer is, you probably could. But the second answer is that you don't have to. There's a lot of different ways to start. And so, you know, we see programs that start with as little as, you know, a few $1,000 and get going there, specific to this question of homeschooling. And we know that we've seen a lot of that over the course of the last 10 or 20 years. More and more students are being homeschooled. Lots of advantages to that, but one of the drawback certainly is that if I'm educating my student at home, I don't have a huge budget, probably that I can that I can dedicate toward hands on learning systems and so on. So a couple things. First of all, we're seeing more and more of those programs do really cool stuff with e learning, meaning that we can have student paced, self paced, really interactive experiences for students on an E learning platform where they're going through it could be anything from electro mechanical technology, applied artificial intelligence, the edge to cloud continuum. I mean, we see lots and lots of different e learning platforms, and so we can get some great exposure there. And then, you know, we're seeing more and more of these, these homeschooled students, banding together. And so as an example, I was at Western Technical College in western Wisconsin about two weeks ago, meeting with the dean and with the K 12 advocate. And they had the day I was there, by coincidence, they had about 45 or 50 home schooled kids that were at that lab. So they have a really cool lab. It's the wannick Center of Innovation. We've talked about that. I think, before on the podcast, in fact, I know we have, we had the innovators of that particular space on the podcast. So here is an example where there's a consortium of whole homeschooled students who are otherwise, you know, learning at home, being guided, probably by a parent who's who are answering exactly this question, how do I give these experiences to my students? And so they banded together, and they come and they experience that particular, that particular lab. So really, really cool way of doing that. We've heard of other programs where maybe every individual or a group of individual households buys some hands on training equipment and then shares it among a consortium of student so it's a way of taking all the benefits of homeschooling and combining it with some of the things that a lot of the things that we might see in a public or private school where students are actually physically going to the space. The one thing that we don't want to get lost in this conversation is the importance of hands on learning, that at some point we've got to get our we got to close the book, we have to turn the computer off, and we have to go experience these technologies in a hands on fashion. So credit to Dan for asking a really astute question. Yeah, perfect.

Melissa Martin:

Take advantage of those, those community resources. I mean, technical colleges are in the community. Colleges exist for the community, so take advantage of those resources. And I would also point to, especially for much, much younger students. You know, your local library probably has a Fab Lab or a maker space. Yeah, great point. You can get started with something small. But you know, when you talk about really career relevant, hands on stuff, you know, at some point we want to progress from, you know, making really cool things, 3d printing is super fun, gets kids hands on and engaged. And then how can we transition to something a little bit more robust? And so, yeah, love that tap tap into those resources. Great point. So we've got a couple questions from some folks who are talking about kind of how we think about the education industry alignment and that conversation. So the first question comes from Jeff over in Texas, and Jeff says, from the media side of manufacturing, we consistently hear about the workforce shortage. What's one thing industry leaders may be misunderstanding about how today's technical education system actually works?

Matt Kirchner:

Awesome question. And thanks to was you said Jeff from Texas. Awesome question. Jeff, well, the first one is that that it works, right? So there's an assumption in that question about that, how does it actually work? It works in many, many cases. It doesn't always. We really got away from technical education in this country, starting in the 90s, when we started moving toward, you know, computer based education. It these kind of things, and we decimated our technical education programs, we're starting to see them back, come back and and we feel like here at the TechEd podcast, we've been significant advocates and maybe a little bit of the catalyst for helping people think about technical education in a different way. For the programs that are really forward thinking, what manufacturers probably don't know is, number one, it's all about learning outcomes, and it's all about how we prepare a student for a for a particular career, or at least equip them with specific competencies and and knowledge and skills for the, you know, the next generation of work. And so a lot of times, people don't recognize that there's a whole methodology and science that goes into preparing a student for those types of careers, and I learned that the hard way. My days of manufacturing, it's like was it? Give them a machining center, give them a welder, stick somebody in there who understands it, and train them on these technologies. That's awesome, but it really doesn't get us there. We've got to think about the methodology of learning, the fact that every learner is going to learn a little bit differently, the fact that we've got to deliver the curriculum differently. We have to define specifically what outcomes we want out of a program. What do we want the student to know? What do we want them to be able to do? We have to align that to third party credentials, which is another thing that we continue to advocate like crazy for here at the TechEd podcast, is the idea that whatever you're doing in industry and in manufacturing, specific to this question, there is a certification that aligns to that. And if you were to make a list of the 20 things, for example, that you need an electromechanical technician to do, there are certifications that align almost perfectly to those 20 things. And so how do we integrate those certifications into programs and make them stackable so a lot of employers don't have any idea that these certification programs are available? The biggest thing is that it's just so much more than sticking some equipment in a program. It's got to be, it's got to be really, really well thought out in order to get the results that we're looking for, which is people, young people, who are inspired toward careers, in this case, in advanced manufacturing, equipped with the skills that are valuable to get there, have certifications that demonstrate that they have those skills, and then interaction with those employers to be able to help them understand the career pathways and how they can leave A high school program and go to Technical College, go to a four year university, or go direct to the workforce and add value right out of school.

Melissa Martin:

So in other words, it's not just here's a piece of equipment and learning. It sounds pretty robust. Yeah, no doubt, maybe speak to I'll just tack on this as my own, my own add on question, but maybe give our industrial employers some perspective on you know, if I'm a technical education teacher. What did I likely learn in my education pathway? And you know the daunting nature of having to think about teaching all of these different

Matt Kirchner:

subject areas? Yeah, for sure. So first off, shout out to all those amazing technical education teachers across America. They are doing the Lord's work in terms of preparing this next generation. And you think of. Out to your point, Melissa, what we expect these people to know? Yeah, so you think technical education has pathways, in many cases, into into subject matters as broad as healthcare to advanced manufacturing. And so you think about this poor Technical Education teacher who's trying to prepare a student. Maybe students are going into HVAC, maybe construction, maybe welding, maybe advanced manufacturing, you know, maybe, maybe healthcare, maybe. I mean, there's just all these different career pathways that they could be on, and we're expecting them to know all of that, where a lot of our technical education programs have defaulted to important for our audience to recognize. You know, the lot of states in our state of Wisconsin, University Wisconsin platform, the University of Wisconsin style, prepares a lot of technology education teachers, I would guess, just making the number up 90 to 95% of our teachers go through one of those two programs. What we're seeing them more from so in the past, I mean, I think about my days of technical education, I still remember the projects, right? You make a birdhouse, you do some woodworking project, we did some we did pencil drafting on drafting paper, right, right? We did a little bit of metal working, and that was technical education. Well, now you think about advanced manufacturing, smart sensors, smart devices, programmable logic controllers, data acquisition, data analysis, pattern recognition, troubleshooting, all these different technologies. And we're looking at that TechEd teacher who learned birdhouses and metalworking, and saying, Here, teach this. And it's a really big, big leap. So to the second part of your question and the add on to just question, we need to start morphing those programs, the technical education programs that prepare our technical educators for careers teaching the next generation of talent. We need to equip them with understandings of these advancing technologies. And there's a lot of programs that are still, and I don't mean this necessarily in a bad way, but stuck in like the technical education world of 30 years ago, and we need to pull them forward. And it's really,

Melissa Martin:

really important work. Love that. So another great question on this whole spectrum. Todd from Ohio, says manufacturers across industries like metal working plastics, composite surface finishing, they all consistently say their biggest challenge is finding skilled talent. From your vantage point, working with educators and industry, where is the biggest disconnect between how we're training students and the skills manufacturers actually need on the shop floor?

Matt Kirchner:

Well, it starts with an awesome question, Todd. It starts with what our employers, in this case, industrial employers, are asking for from their educators. And this is one of my biggest, gigantic pet peeves I have with with manufacturers. And it just happened again, not at the event that you mentioned earlier, but at another event I was at last week where the question came up, what are you looking for in the next generation? And it was all really, really well recognized manufacturing companies that were sitting at the at the table on the panel, and every one of them said, soft skills, soft skills, soft problem solving. And we want people to come to work and communication skills. It's like, no kidding, I know you want so we've been seeing that forever, right, right? And so I tell people, Look, yeah, I get it. If somebody can't come to work, if they can't stay off of drugs, if they can't take direction, if they can't communicate, if they can't function on a team. What have you that there's no place for them, not just in manufacturing, but anywhere, anywhere. We know that, and there's certainly opportunities for us to teach those soft skills to students while they're going through their their high school education. Here's the problem. I did. I went, I'm not going to mention the companies, but I went to their, their I went to zip recruiter, and I went to indeed, and I looked at their at their ads for who they were recruiting, yeah, and yes, it said important soft skills, and then a whole list of all these hard skills that they're looking for, right? So there's nobody that's running an ad that just says, Hey, we want good communicators who can solve problems. Come apply for a job. Here. They're all saying, you know, these are the skills that we need. And you're talking about advanced manufacturing, basic, you know, basic electrical systems, electrically control, motor control, motion control, programmable logic controllers, robotics, automation, conveyors, smart sensors, smart devices, data acquisition. I mean, that's what the jobs say, right, right? So the message to employers is, quit telling your educators that what you want is soft skills. Because what they are hearing and what I hear from I go to talk to a principal of a high school, and they're saying, our employees don't care about hard skills. They about hard skills. They don't care about any of those, that whole litany of things that I just mentioned, all they want are people with soft skills, and that's where their focus is going. And then employers are saying, Why you know? Why can't we find people that understand these manufacturing technologies? Why aren't students being inspired toward careers in advanced manufacturing? And it's like you're your own worst enemy. You are not asking your educators for what you tell us you need and what your want ads are telling us you need. So there's another element to that question. I just want to go back to it and make sure we hit the whole thing, because there was, there's question about what they're looking for, and then what was the second so,

Melissa Martin:

yeah, the question is, what we, you know, what's the biggest disconnect between how we're training students and then the skills manufacturers

Matt Kirchner:

actually need on the platform, and that's it, right? So, so we're not training them, those on those on those hard skills that are so important when they get to advanced manufacturing. And it doesn't mean that a high school student needs to be an expert in robot operation and programming. They don't need to be able to create really crazily diverse and complicated. At electric relay circuits. They don't need to be able to program a PLC and build ladder logic in a programmable logic controller in a way that's going to, you know, manage and oversee 20 different manufacturing operations on a production line. But we need to give them those base understandings and those so this is a message both to employers and to educators. Your employers don't want just soft skills, even though that's what they're telling you. Look at their ads and what they're recruiting for and to employers, just shut up with the soft skills we get it. I mean, fine, yes, we want problem solvers, but start with what happens on your shop floor. And if you could have somebody that not only came to work every day and had these soft skills that are important, but also understood your technology, what would that look like? That's the message your educators need to hear.

Melissa Martin:

100% Yeah. It's really, really good question, and really good point. And what you said was, you're talking to educators, and they say, Oh, our employers say they need so here's the thing, employers, educators are listening to you. Yeah, right. So start talking about the hard skills that you need, and it might take a while. What do you say seven times seven different ways. So start talking about how badly we need the technical skills, and tell them exactly which technical skills you need. You know, just show them your job ads. We'll get there. We'll get there eventually. And so we've got one more question, and maybe this is a perfect segue, but Tammy from Nevada says, What responsibility should manufacturers themselves take in solving the workforce shortage is the solution more about education reform or about companies getting more involved earlier with schools and training programs?

Matt Kirchner:

Yep, awesome. Certainly we're going to see tremendous education reform in the next five years, and it's and I don't even know that reform is the perfect word, but disruption and evolution is probably a better way of thinking about it. In the world of education in this age of AI is going to look really different five and 10 years from now, maybe even sooner than it does right now. So certainly wouldn't, wouldn't totally ignore that part of the question, on the other hand, in terms of, you know, how you build relationships with educators, what are we looking for from manufacturers? It's a few things, number one, and none of this is original. My friend Mike trimberger, the superintendent of random Lake School District, Mike told me one time, tell your employers when they come to visit the school district to check their agenda at the door. You know, we all have paradigms about education. Educators have paradigms about manufacturing and business. Blow those up. Forget about them. Check them at the door. Whatever your agenda is, whatever your preconceived motion is about the other side, just ignore it and start fresh. You know, the second thing is that recognize right out of the blocks that educators and manufacturers don't speak the same language. We talk about on the podcast. Often a PLC in education is not a PLC in manufacturing, manufacturing PLC, Programmable Logic Controller PLC in education, professional learning community. We don't speak the same language, recognize that, and don't try to use each other's words, just just, you know, have a have an open conversation. Those are the two biggest things. And once you get that, and you start having some dialog about what's happening on the shop floor, what's happening in education, and then looking outside of those relationships and recognizing to the earlier question that technical education looks a lot different than most manufacturers think it is. So rather than going into your employer, into your educator, I should say and saying, here's what you need to teach and how you need to teach it, say, here's what we're looking for in your students, and what, how can we work together to understand what might be available and how other districts and other schools and other programs are preparing students for those, for those really cool career opportunities.

Melissa Martin:

So check your agendas at the door and recognize you don't speak the same language and you're in a much better starting point to have those conversations moving forward, absolutely all for the benefit of your students, right? Sure. So we've got a couple of questions that are geared towards providing some advice for students. So I know this is something that you love to do. I do so whether they want to listen, yeah, well, you know, they'll remember it later on and wish they would have listened to the first time Jonah out in DC says, other than the obvious industrial revolution or digital age, what period of history should all TechEd students know by the time they finished their program, not through formal study necessarily, but as a key historical event that shaped today's landscape?

Matt Kirchner:

Yeah, that's awesome. And what I love about that question, just as a premise, is that we're huge advocates, especially in the stage of AI with morphing technologies and so on, of understanding the humanities side of education as well. So understanding history, understanding, in some cases, theology, ethics, English, English, language arts, right? Exactly as a former English major as Melissa Martin, really, really important, I believe it's not an and it's not an or it's an, and we have to include both of those so specific to this question, that's a really deep question, and there's a lot of different areas in history that you could point to, right? You could talk to, you know, the Jonah mentions the industrial revolution. So that would be the, you know, the original, you know, mechanization and steam power. You could think about electrification and mass production that happened in the 1920s we could talk about the move toward, you know, automation and computers in the 19 late 60s through the early 80s. You. Digital Age, certainly, I would say this and I and here's the here's the thought is that you think about, what would we want them to learn from that era of history? Right? So, you would want them to learn about innovation. You would want them to learn about moving fast and speed. You would want to learn them to learn about failing quickly. You would want them to learn about teamwork. You would want them to learn about the ethics of innovation and all of those things. I would say if, if I got to point a student to one era in history, it would be 1942 to 1945 and it would be the Manhattan Project, where we developed the US, developed the nuclear weapons that were ultimately dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and led to the end of the Second World War. And the reason isn't that we want to just teach students how to create, you know, weapons of mass destruction. That's not the goal, right? But everything that I mentioned is encompassed in that, in that story of the Manhattan Project. So you've got 130,000 people across the United States, the UK and Canada, primarily working on this project. Most of them didn't have any idea what they were working on. So you have these, all of these questions about, How do you really quickly innovate? We were creating technology that nobody even knew existed, in terms of, you know, in terms of the the nuclear fission that we were, that we were working on, we had all kinds of ethical questions about this, right? So for the people that really understood where all this intersected, you've got questions of, how do you create really amazing technology? Nuclear technology is awesome. It can be used for good or it can be used for evil, as can every single technology. So you have all the ethical questions. 130,000 people pulling in the same direction. You're talking about teamwork, certainly huge aspects on science, technology, engineering and math that were pulled into the Manhattan Project. And, you know, historians are still arguing, you know, what is it 8090 years later, I guess, 80 years later, about how and whether we should have innovated in that way, what the implications of that were? We're living through some of those implications now. You know, as we think about some of the geopolitical challenges that are happening here in the United States, so not because, you know, and certainly ending the Second World War, and thinking about the genocide that was happening in Germany, and all of the evil that was happening on, you know, that was happening on the axis power side of that war. And, you know, it's hard for me to argue that that the Allies weren't completely justified in ending that word that they did, although it does raise a lot of ethical questions. All of that aside, it is just an absolutely fascinating three year period in history that speaks to so many aspects of innovation and and technology. So I would, I would study that and learn lessons both good and bad from it in terms of what we should do more of and maybe less of. Now, it's fascinating.

Melissa Martin:

You know, when you started seeing that up, I was trying to figure out, well, where is he going with this, you know, like trying to trying to guess. And the first thing that came to mind is like, well, in times of war, there's more innovation than ever else, you know. And you see these stories about companies who, you know, they used to make toilet paper, and now they've transitioned to making something totally unrelated, because it's for the war effort. Or, you see, you know, even stories about the Enigma machine and the the advance of Computer Science from, you know, around that same period. But that specific, the Manhattan Project being, you know that one specific, everyone working towards this one thing, the ethical questions. Do you have any resources, books, movies, anything that like you. You like that. You would point to, you

Matt Kirchner:

know, since we're living in the age that we're living in, watch the movie Oppenheimer. Start there, yeah, and in that gives a really, really good understanding of that era in history. So I would start there, perfect. I would also add, you know, we talk about innovation happening during, you know, during times of war. I used to do a lot of business in Indiana, in the manufacturing space. And I, if you drive around Indiana, and we were in the paint powder coat and E coat business. And there were all these casket manufacturers in Indiana, right? So all these companies making caskets. And I asked somebody, I'm like, what is in the answer was, after the end of the Second World War, we had all this metal fabrication technology and equipment in Indiana that was used for the war effort needed to be repurposed towards something. And it just turned out that a lot of the companies in Indiana repurposed it toward casket manufacturing. So you had Aurora casket, Astro casket, Batesville casket, all companies in Indiana that flowed out of the out of the war effort. Interestingly, though, that's fun. Fact, yeah, not so fun. I don't know it. Didn't know we were gonna talk about caskets on the TechEd podcast. Yeah, exactly,

Melissa Martin:

caskets in the Manhattan Project. Yeah, it's really interesting. Always something fun to learn. The next question is, if a young and ambitious TechEd graduate has their first job and they have this great idea for a new product, but their boss is resistant or uninterested. Where should they turn? When should they maybe leave that company? And then, how can they seek the ears of potential investors, especially for those for whom venture capital and PE seem like the boogeyman, the Boogeyman.

Matt Kirchner:

Have we ever been visited by the boogeyman on the not.

Melissa Martin:

On the podcast. Now this might be a first, just for a lot of things.

Matt Kirchner:

So you're a young individual, presumably early in your career, your quote boss doesn't, you know, doesn't like an idea. You want to go off and kind of take it up on your own. You know the I guess there's a couple different questions. And finish that question off, is there a question about where to go for capital, or is it more about,

Melissa Martin:

well, there's a couple questions. So it's, I guess. The first is like, where should they go and when, at what point should they leave? So there's this assumption that they're gonna leave their job and kind of venture out into their own and then the other part is, you know, how do they find investors? Yeah, I will

Matt Kirchner:

for the when should where should you leave, or when should you leave? I would say there's two times that probably make the most sense. And the first one is that the age that this individual is, so, you know, one I'll just tell you from experience, once you have house, a spouse, children, you know, that time, and I did, I mean, I made some really significant took some really significant risks when I had two kids in the house, and I, you know, had had a mortgage payment and All those other kind of things. That's a really hard time to take risk, right? It doesn't mean you can't do it, but that's really hard to time to take risk. The easy times to take risk are early in your career, whether you recognize it or not, because the price of failure means that maybe you've got to move back into mom and dad's basement, or, you know, you got to downsize your apartment or whatever and start over. That's the outcome of that, as opposed to, you know, screwing the whole thing up for your family, or, you know, when you're when your family is grown up and on their own, and then you've got either the financial wherewithal or the flexibility to be able to take a little bit more risk in your life, deeper you get into careers, the kind of the it'll put a lot of cases and a lot of people, the less apt they are to take those risks. So perfect time for this person to be thinking about doing something. I love the idea that they went to their boss first in this particular idea. In this particular case, I'm a huge, huge believer in being loyal to prior employers, but you get to a point where the you know, it's the idea isn't right for the company, and you want to do something on your own, doing it as a young person, really, really good idea. Where do you find the capital? The first thing is to recognize that you can live on a lot less money than you think you can. Okay, and so, you know, taking whatever your personal expenses are and making that as small as possible, whether it's a car payment, transportation, going out to dinner, renting more apartment, bigger apartment than you need. I mean, whatever it is, there's a lot of ways to kind of mitigate the risk there by just lowering the your personal expenses, you live on not a lot of money, and then go after that opportunity in terms of where to get capital. You know, certainly, if you're a young entrepreneur with an idea, private equity is not going to be a good source for you, generally speaking, to go to get money. PE and I spend a lot of rabbit hole private equity world is, typically we're investing in established businesses that have established cash flow where that model works really, really well. Doesn't mean that there aren't turnaround PE firms or maybe some, you know, some early stage PE firms that would be a fit, but generally not a fit. A venture capital is another is something that would be a fit. So venture capitalists are, you know, people that are taking risk capital and putting it to work in emerging companies, and the goal is that you help that company grow and that there's a payout at the end. Lots and lots of VCs. And I spend time in the VC world as well. We look at a lot of deals, right? I mean, you know, I, in fact, I work with a VC investor here in Milwaukee. Literally, if you send them an email, you'll get an automatic response that says, if you're pitching a deal, you know, send it here, and we'll get to it when we get to it. Is kind is kind of the way that they look at it. So they just look at a lot of deals. It's a hard place to go. The best place is friends and family. And just if you don't have your own capital, to find some family member, some, you know, maybe it's a friend that's deeper into their career, friend of the family, what have you that is willing to back that project. Be honest with them about the risk. Be honest with them about what you're trying to do. Most of these projects don't end well. A lot of them do. A lot of them don't. And so just say, Look, we're going to do this, we're going to take the risk, we're going to give everything we can. This is risk capital. I'm not guaranteeing a return, not guaranteeing your money back, but if we are successful, here's where we could go with this. So be honest and so on with whoever that is, I would just tell you, in our own family and our kids know they can't come work in any of the businesses that we own for a whole bunch of reasons, and and there's company, there's families, I should say, that figure that out and do it really, really well. That was just something that, for a variety of reasons, I never wanted to do with our family. But I have told them and others, if you have an idea, if you have a company you want to buy, if you want to, you know, whatever, we'll help you do that. We'll show you how to do that. We'll provide capital if it's a good idea. So that's just in our family. There's a lot of people that would say, and I would say that to friends of to kids and my friends and so on, that. There's a lot of opportunities to get your hands on capital if it's if it's a really good idea and someplace you want to go with it.

Melissa Martin:

And I would also mention, too, if you don't have as large of a network, or don't have access to friends and family who have, you know, fluid cash flow, check out. You know, Kickstarter. I mean, there's, there's so many of these online things where the community, if they like your idea, they're willing to back it, and the risk is very low for them, because there may be kick. In 25 bucks or 50 bucks be get a couple 100,000 people to back your thing, and they might just go and then while you're while you're raising that funding, you're getting a lot of people invested in interesting and then they're all, you're gonna be your first buyers too. So depending on what it is, if it's a right fit, and you're young, and that's always a place you can look into as well. Good point. All right, so another advice question for students to net from New York says for TechEd students in industries where the use of white collar professional networking platforms like LinkedIn might not be as common, what are some tips for building a network early in one's career to get exposed to lots

Matt Kirchner:

of opportunities, awesome. So first of all, LinkedIn might not be common, but common, but common, but it's a great place to go. Yeah, right.

Melissa Martin:

So there's a surprising number of quote, unquote, blue collar people on there,

Matt Kirchner:

for sure, yeah, you'd be shocked. Yeah, I know there's no question about it, and they should be there. There's no question about that. The I would start with, you have a network, whether you realize it or not. So a lot of times people are like, Man, how do you build up this network? How do you meet all these people? Sit down and make a list, right? Let's think about your teachers, professors, maybe the president of the college you went to, the principal of your high school, the superintendent in your school district, somebody that headed up a club that you were involved in. Your parents, your parents, friends, your friends, your friend's parents. I mean, all of these people are part of your network. And so a lot of times when you say to somebody says, I just don't have a network, it's like, well, let's talk about who, you know. And then, like, 200 people later, they're like, oh, you know, I guess I do so, you know, I like, I like mind mapping. I mean, that's a good way to say just, you know, sit down and start writing down people and writing about how they're connected. And then I would say, and we've talked about this in the podcast, actually wrote a magazine column about it as well, for Gardner Business Media, I get so many requests from young people that say, can I have 15 minutes or 30 minutes of your time to answer a question, or what have you? And almost to a person, I will take that 15 or 30 minutes. If it's somebody that's trying to sell me something that's a different story, but if it's somebody that says, I just need you know, I want to ask you a question, I actually reserve several hours on Fridays, and the individual who manages my calendar knows that, all right, if we get these requests, they're going to go into the Friday basket and 1530 minutes at a time, I'll sit down and have conversations with folks. The reason I bring that up is that you may not realize it, young people may not realize it, but people in your network love to help you, and they love to get and they want to be helpful, right? So don't be afraid to you have you know, friends of your parents, that's a CEO a company or owns a company that you want to be involved in, or has a career that that you would like to have, reach out to that person and ask for 30 minutes. They will give it to you, almost equivocally, and frankly, shame on anybody who wouldn't. Don't be afraid to reach out and ask for a little bit of time. They'll give it to you, and you'll end up smarter for it. And I had so many people in my career early on that helped me in that way, that I think we have kind of an obligation to do the same thing for people that are coming behind

Melissa Martin:

us, as someone who spends the new avenue, but as someone who spends a lot of time on YouTube shorts and used to spend a lot of time on Tiktok. Do you feel like that could be a good place for students, maybe, maybe less on the networking side, but, you know, putting yourself out there to, you know, make a name for yourself. Here's the skills that I have,

Matt Kirchner:

yeah, for sure. And if nothing else, you're gonna get experience, kind of building content for social media. So there's nothing, nothing wrong with that, yeah, and it's also gonna narrow in your pitch, and really helps you think about what message, all right, so if I've got five minutes to tell somebody who I am, what I'm doing and how they can help me, what does that sound like, and what does that feel like, you know, and then being open to running into people, whether it's on the elevator at a networking event of some sort, or, for that matter, on social media when you're when you're putting your information out there. So certainly, yeah, YouTube, shorts, Tiktok, LinkedIn, I know people that people build networks on Facebook. They build networks on Instagram. I mean, there's, there's lots of different

Melissa Martin:

ways to do it, yeah, especially if you have hard have hard skills. That's, I mean, that's prime for being able to showcase some of that on, you know, a visual platform. So if you're not on LinkedIn, you might be you're probably somewhere else. And why not? And you people are everywhere you can get, you know, get exposure and get opportunities from almost anywhere. You got it all right. Final question, can't get through an episode without talking about, you know, artificial intelligence. So we saved this question for last so Lance in Idaho says, of course, I'm sure everybody else wants to know the same thing. How is your business? Matt, affected by AI, good or bad? Wow.

Matt Kirchner:

So, I mean, let's talk about and you know, first of all, when we say our business, TechEd Media Group, we'll start there. That's the company that owns the TechEd podcast, you can speak to that as well as I can. So you know, I'll ask you in a moment, Melissa to talk about how you're using AI for things like creating the show notes, for doing the editing, for understanding what should be in the episode and what shouldn't be in the episode, for the social media work that you're doing. I mean, starting with the media company. Where do you see AI and where are you leveraging it?

Melissa Martin:

Yeah, I mean, there's a ton of AI just on the back end. All the stuff that you don't really get to see happening behind the scenes that makes an episode, you know, polished and come to life. And it's interesting, even five years ago, when we started this podcast, from the hardware to the software, was so much different than it is now. Know, when you're starting a podcast for the very first time, and you're learning all of this, and you're, you're, you know, you want it to come across really polished, people always ask, how do you start a podcast? Can I can I get that advice? And when you start to tell them, Well, these are all the resources that you need access to, and this is what you need to invest in, and these are the personnel and the kind of skills you have to have, it looks a lot different now than it did when we started five years I'll just give you an example. We use this really awesome podcasting software that is totally built just for podcasting, and it's all sorts of AI built into it. And one of the most disruptive ways that has totally changed our lives is the ability to take the sound quality, no matter what the guests microphone might sound like, and just perfectly sync it up. Now, five years ago, you were using a third party audio editing tool where you're individually editing the the gain and the amplitude and the the reverb and like all these little adjustments to try to make it sound perfect. And it's you have to have a technical background in order to do that. And we actually had somebody in a part time position just added in the podcast for three years, and she's amazing. Grace caster. Shout out to grace, because she made our podcast amazing from, you know, the very first episode. But the podcaster, grace the podcaster, yes, but you know, she wanted to move into a different career, a completely different industry. She's doing awesome now, which is great. And so when that happens to you, it's like, Oh, shoot. Do we find somebody else to fill in her role? And fortunately, it was right around this time this technology was coming into fruition. So now it's literally, instead of, you know, someone spending 10 hours a week, it's one click, and it's like magic. And they literally call it like, they'll say magic clips, or magic videos, where it'll just create a fully polished episode for you, it'll say this three minutes of the video is probably going to perform really well on social media. And we'll score it a 99 out of 100 for being viral content, you know. And so it's, I mean, it's just it saves a ton of time on the back end, like you said, creating show notes, even doing research on the guest to help me come up with, like, a really good outline for the top six topics and questions to ask them so that we're coming into it really strong. So there's just a lot that happens, both on the production and that people don't even see, that's just really helped by AI, awesome.

Matt Kirchner:

So I think we will take another step on that topic and expand into some of the other businesses that we're involved in. I think the audience knows that we do quite a bit in the manufacturing space. So I'm on the board of several manufacturing companies. I do a lot in the PA PE space around advanced manufacturing. We're limited partners in a number of both funds and individual, syndicated manufacturing deals, where we own bits and pieces, or sometimes more manufacturing companies. I spent a lot of time around advanced manufacturing, and we're seeing more and more in that space, in terms of, you know, probably the biggest one is collating things like product manuals, troubleshooting manuals, information on our equipment, on our manufacturing floor, so on. You can use what we call vector databases. Pine Cone would be an example. We the eight would be another one. There's a number of them out there where you can create your own large language model using somebody else's platform, you're not building it from scratch, and create a queryable database that will answer questions for you. In other words, you're out on the shop floor and a particular piece of equipment fails. You know, here are the five things that the symptoms I'm seeing. Where do I go to look? And it will actually point you in the direction. In the same way, if you have a problem with your smartphone and you go to Google and say, This is it. And some Reddit, you know, some Reddit conversation comes up pointing you to where you need to go to fix your problem. Same thing for your own specific manufacturing equipment. It's specific to your own manufacturing company. That's that's true not just in manufacturing, but in a lot of spaces, but certainly seeing a lot of AI applications in that particular area. We can use it to write work instructions. We can use it to, you know, for ISO compliance, in a lot of cases, to look at where our sore spots might be in terms of our quality processes and programs. So, lots and lots of applications for AI and manufacturing, and then in our education technology companies, pointing to a couple things, business process automation so we put a lot of work into automating quotes, making customer quotations more, you know, more friendly for our business development teams to put quotes together. They're no longer using spreadsheets. They're using AI backed, you know, customer relationship management software that can help solve problems, find find issues. Alert us if we've got a concern about, you know, how we've structured a quote and so on market intelligence, you know, can't even go into all the details on on things that we're doing in those companies. Some of them, you know, we're comfortable talking about using, you know, using platforms like Ren. We had tonight, Denise on the on the podcast a number of years ago, talking about how we're using Ren for market intelligence, but then how we're pulling that into agentic AI and using it to really dial in our sales and marketing efforts in those businesses is a really good example of how we're using artificial intelligence. So you're on one side or the other. You're either figuring it out and innovating like you are at the TechEd podcast, or we are in manufacturing and in our ed tech companies, or you're. Kind of sitting there watching the world spin around and hoping you don't get gobbled up by what's happening around you and and what are the companies that are in the second basket?

Melissa Martin:

Yeah, I would agree. And since you know, you hear some negative news stories about how AI is negatively impacting workforces, or, you know, these fears, so let me ask you that, because Lance did ask, how is it affecting good or bad? I mean, have you seen any negative influences so far in the businesses that you're involved with?

Matt Kirchner:

I think the potential is there, right? So, you know, we start out with almost going back to, why do we study the Manhattan Project? Well, because all of these new technologies have huge ethical implications, and a technology on its own is not good or bad. It's a question of, you know, who's using it. And I'm a big believer that, you know, if people of conscience don't embrace these technologies and figure out how to use them, then the people, the only people that are using them, are the bad actors. And that's the last situation that we want to be in, which is why I'm a huge advocate. One of the reasons I'm a huge advocate for using artificial intelligence across the board is that I want people who you know are people of good conscience that are recognizing how these technologies are transforming their market space and owning them and understanding them so that we can stay focused on the on the good implications. You know, there's an article a couple weeks ago on the Wall Street Journal Jack Dorsey, a block laying off 40% of his workforce and pointing the finger at artificial intelligence. I'm sure that's had a an aspect of it that there's some discussion in circles about is that, is it really that AI replaced 40% of the workforce, or is AI a conceit convenient excuse to downsize your workforce by 40% if you've got some fundamental change in your business, or you're overstaffed, or what have you? Don't know. My suspicion is it's a combination of both of those, but, but there are some negative implications of artificial intelligence if you start thinking about start thinking about employees and team members being over reliant on AI to do their work for them, at what point is it, where is your competitive advantage? And that, is there an opportunity for us to get lazy? Is there an opportunity for us to let AI hallucinate and for us to assume that what it told us was exactly accurate, and in many cases, it may not have been and so there's certainly, there's certainly downsides to any technology. Those would be some that I would point to in the age of artificial intelligence, and then we have this whole aspect of data security and making sure that we're protecting our intellectual property, protecting our information, and not just throwing that up to some free version of chat GPT perplexity or Claude and becoming part of their LLM and training their AI on our data. So there's certainly aspects of data security that could be troublesome in the age of AI as well. Yeah.

Melissa Martin:

So sounds like lesson learned is you can't not do it just for the fears and the concerns. Be cognizant of those and put in safety measures and think about and make sure your team is informed. But you got

Matt Kirchner:

to go, yeah for sure, exactly. Yeah, like Todd wannik said when he was on the TechEd podcast, just start, yeah, right. You can't wait for this to be perfect. You're gonna make mistakes. There's gonna be things that go wrong. That's okay. That's true of any innovation, but the biggest mistake you can make is to stay, to sit still while the rest of the world is innovating

Melissa Martin:

around you. Yeah, exactly. 100% Well, that does it for this week's episode. Questions. So I'll let you wrap things up for us.

Matt Kirchner:

Matt, awesome. Well, thanks for being with us. I'm us on this episode of The TechEd podcast. Ask us anything. We certainly covered a lot of different topics. We talked a little bit about artificial intelligence. We talked about advice for young people who are thinking about entrepreneurship, building their networks, raising capital. Had some really good conversations around STEM and employers in general, building relationships with their educators. The importance of focusing on those hard skills and not just talking about, hey, we need soft skills because your educators are listening, as Melissa said, and if that's all they hear, that is what you're going to get lots and lots of really good conversations here. So thanks to you, Melissa, for asking those questions. Thanks to our audience for sending them in. We're going to do this episode Ask Us Anything four times a year. So keep the questions coming. We got some great questions this particular episode, and we are going to put the show notes. By the way, we have the best show notes in the business for this episode at TechEd podcast.com/ask us anything. Go there for the show notes for this episode. You can go there to submit your questions too for the next episode as well. Check us out on social media. We mentioned a lot of platforms today, Instagram, we talked about Facebook, we talked about YouTube, shorts and YouTube in general. We talked about Tiktok, LinkedIn. Guess what? You can find the TechEd podcast on every single one of those. Reach out, say hello, connect to us. Follow us. We'd love to hear from you. Love to see you again next week on the TechEd podcast. Until then, I'm Matt Kirkner, your host, thanks for being with us. You.

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Matt Kirchner

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