In this era of rapid technological change, “upskilling” and “reskilling” are key tasks on the front burner of a global economy engulfed by accelerating and transformative tumult.

The breaking news about massive shifts in expectations for jobseekers and businesses flows to us in a cacophonic cascade. At one moment, the federal government announces sweeping initiatives to clear the way for new data centers to power a growing demand for artificial intelligence (AI) capacity. Only a few days later, markets are roiled by news of an innovative DeepSeek platform that could simplify and shrink AI’s footprint and financing.

“The average half-life of skills is now less than five years, and in some tech fields it’s as low as two and a half years,” observed a 2023 Harvard Business Review report. And at job fairs and hiring interviews, both candidates and companies must wrestle with dizzying disruption.

“It’s changing fast. And, like, scary fast,” says Paul Fain, co-founder of Work Shift, an independent media newsroom that has become a go-to resource on higher education and the workplace. In mid-February, Work Shift reported that the threat that AI and automation pose to entry-level jobs has forced some of America’s leading nonprofit tech training organizations to expand their offerings to new areas including semiconductors and human resources.

Ann Fandozzi ’93 is the CEO of global systems integration firm Convergint. She says today’s upheavals remind her of the heady early boom days of the internet that she encountered as a Stevens undergraduate: “Winners at that time don’t even exist today. Think about AOL. Think about Yahoo, right? It feels like that again to me.”

As vice president of U.S. Defense Digital Strategy at Siemens Government Technologies, Norman Eng M.Eng. ’09 has woven professional education into a career that included more than 35 years at Northrop Grumman. Today’s employees, he says, must “continually upskill [their] knowledge and experience for what companies and nations need to develop in your particular industry.”

Jobseekers and employees now find enhancing their existing skills (“upskilling”) — or finding an entirely new set of tools (“reskilling”) — imperative. And companies are compelled to identify and retain talent necessary to compete amid vast shifts in technology and tempo. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 observes that “businesses are increasingly investing in reskilling and upskilling programs to align their workforce with evolving demands.”

Higher education’s role in meeting the burgeoning demands for upskilling and reskilling at all levels is clear. “There is both an urgency and an opportunity,” says Arshad Saiyed, who arrived last year from Northeastern University to become chief online learning officer and dean of Professional Education at Stevens.

Recent initiatives at Stevens Institute of Technology aim to meet the upskilling challenge head-on. Academic leaders with strong backgrounds in technology and professional learning have joined the team. A new College of Professional Education will unify successful programs and partnerships across the university — and fashion new ones. This new and independent academic unit will offer high-quality, technology-infused online programs that range from graduate degrees to focused shorter-term certificate programs.

Fain says that new graduates with “legitimate data science and computer science skills” still do have a leg up. Yet he adds that these students — and those in need of upskilling and reskilling further on in their career — must have something more: “The thing that these students need to do as well, which is hard to do, is serious experiential learning.”

Upskilling vs. Reskilling

“Upskilling” means enhancing or expanding an employee’s existing skill set to improve their performance in their current role, while “reskilling” involves learning entirely new skills to transition into a different job or career path, often due to changing industry needs.

Stevens’ new efforts aim to provide pathways that lead past a singular focus on hard technological skills — and into more intangible sorts of essential learning. “The top skills that companies are looking for are adaptability, resilience, learning how to learn,” says GJ de Vreede, dean of the Stevens School of Business. “All the skills that we have called ‘soft skills’ or ‘power skills.’ But, at the end of the day, they are all human-centered skills.”

Challenges faced by new graduates entering the job market always drive headlines. As automation and AI expand, Saiyed says that Stevens’ new College of Professional Education will help companies find answers within their own ranks as well. “They will see a lot of expertise and institutional knowledge lies in the existing talent,” he says. “Augmenting this talent with technology is where the future of work lies.”

Building on Firm Foundations

Saiyed says that the wider launch of the College of Professional Education at Stevens will align Stevens’ programs tightly with what business needs in this vexing moment: “It’s not about going to a company and saying, ‘Look, we have this catalog of courses. What do you want out of it?’ It is about saying, ‘What are you looking for right now? And how can we connect around your talent needs?’”

De Vreede agrees that being proactive in seeking new links and opportunities is essential. “It’s almost getting to a point where it is impossible [for universities] to be in a reactive mode, where you just wait and see what is happening in the workplace and in industry — and then quickly put something together to offer to alumni, current students or the general public,” he observes.

Meeting the challenges of a changing marketplace is not new for Stevens. Today’s initiatives build on work Stevens has long done to bring its programs into the workplace.

Anthony Barrese ’70 Ph.D. ’78 has been an essential player in previous ventures. He joined the Stevens faculty in 2005, bringing with him vast experience in the private sector at NCR, AT&T and Bell Telephone Laboratories. As director of Stevens Core Curriculum and director of the Office for Faculty Development, he says that Stevens has been innovating in this space for decades: “Corporations don’t want to see just theory. They want to see, ‘How do I apply it in the context of the world that I live in?’”

Saiyed cites Barrese and others as pioneers in blazing a path that allows Stevens’ new college “to act as a bridge between academia and companies and corporate partners to connect the skill sets that companies need for their talent right now — and tie it into our curriculum directly.”

Key questions already have snapped into focus, Saiyed adds: “How can we connect more industry practitioners with academic experts? How can we rapidly expand the bridge between industry and academia? And how do we ensure that cutting-edge knowledge flows seamlessly into our curriculum?”

Connecting Skillsets

“How can we connect more industry practitioners with academic experts? How can we rapidly expand the bridge between industry and academia?” - Arshad Saiyed, Dean of Professional Education at Stevens

As a prominent researcher in fields including artificial intelligence, entrepreneurship and technology, de Vreede has a keen understanding of this fast-changing landscape. He came to Stevens in 2024 from a position as interim dean of the University of South Florida’s (USF) Muma College of Business, and says Stevens’ reputation as “a very nimble and agile university” was part of his motivation to join the Business School.

De Vreede offers a rapid revamp of a university graduate program “to strengthen the focus on AI, the use of AI and the fundamentals of AI” that began in October 2024 as an example of how quickly Stevens can move to meet the moment. Revisions to the revamped Business Analytics & Artificial Intelligence program were approved in January 2025: “The word is out on [it], and students will start in the fall,” he says. Accomplishing the same task at a state university would require a much longer process. “Between starting the discussions on changing the curriculum and actually implementing it,” de Vreede explains, “you’re talking two years, if not more.”

This acceleration in AI curriculum expansion and revision is rooted in pervasive market urgency. Saiyed quips that “This quote has been circulating — and rightfully so — in professional circles: ‘AI may not take your job, but someone who knows how to use AI will.’”

Saiyed sees AI’s short-term influence on education as twofold. “It is both the subject of learning,” he says, “and it will also be the engine that powers new learning models.”

At present, Stevens boasts more than 30 courses in AI that touch upon disciplines including systems and software engineering, biology, data science, finance and many other disciplines. One particular focus is AI literacy education, including a partnership between the School of Business and Pfizer in which over 100 employees are learning how to manage the use of AI in their assignments.

“Our goal for education — and for learning — is not to be on autopilot,” says Saiyed, “but to make AI a copilot.”

Shorter and Stackable

Saiyed is working to bring 20-plus online programs and 25-plus corporate partnerships and relationships under a single umbrella at the new college. This consolidation will be accompanied by outreach to “connect with new enterprise partners, and identify new opportunities and new business models to engage with them.”

De Vreede adds that the new college has significant untapped potential for “portfolio partnerships” between companies and a constellation of university programs. “You do an inventory of the training and learning needs in that organization,” he says, “and then the university can put a portfolio together. You actively partner together. It’s not something that is just run from Stevens, or run from the company. You put people together in a team.”

Teamwork’s possibilities are on Saiyed’s mind as well. “As strategic partners, you’re helping companies manage their current workforce — and helping them transform for future workforce planning.”

The intensified energy and targeted initiatives broaden the pathways to help students and stakeholders navigate upskilling challenges. Yet Stevens and other institutions of higher education must balance competing interests with aplomb.

The challenge: maintaining the academic rigor of course offerings while providing the flexibility that employees with full-time jobs need to complete the coursework. At issue: What does healthy cross-traffic between research and the real-time imperatives look like?

As a corporate leader who has traveled the path to an advanced degree, Eng believes that “institutions such as Stevens need to build their ecosystem and their tactics around convenience and flexibility for their customers — and ensuring relevance in technologies such as AI, quantum, and digital engineering.”

Saiyed says one essential part of the equation is to expand the institute’s course offerings with a robust array of what are popularly called “microcredentials,” which offer students and companies targeted certificate programs. These microcredential courses measure achievement within the discrete and workable time frames of a semester or two that are often needed by full-time workers and their employers.

“Shorter credentials — ones that can stack — are a key pillar of our approach to lifelong learning,” says Saiyed. “They engage and meet learners where they are in their respective career journeys.”

Shorter and stackable credentials offer advantages of “time, cost and faster impact” to companies that need to develop “workforce agility,” but they can also provide valuable paths to obtaining a graduate degree. “A learner can start small and build,” says Saiyed, deploying the metaphor of Lego blocks that eventually stack into something larger. “Degrees open doors,” he says. “But microcredentials can keep these doors open.”

Businesses view direct access to the substantive insights and knowledge of Stevens’ faculty as a lure to partner with the university. De Vreede sees maintaining this strength as foundational to all the university’s initiatives.

“Faculty own the curriculum,” says de Vreede. “You have to make sure that they are professionals when it comes to content, and when it comes to certain pedagogies. You have to know how it is anchored and have organization, administration and technology support that you can centralize. Then you can accelerate things.”

Yet Stevens faculty also accrue tangible benefits as they bring their expertise to courses that tackle real-time challenges in the business world. Indeed, this process actually mirrors the upskilling dynamic experienced by students and companies.

“I cannot tell you how many times the faculty say: ‘I’m not only teaching, but I’m learning,’” says Saiyed.

Filling the ‘Dark Spaces’

Much of the discussion in the upskilling and reskilling conversation focuses on a rush to acquire technological skills. Yet a singular and narrow focus can obscure the big picture.

Merely keeping up with tech innovation is not the central skill that Fandozzi wants in her new hires at Convergint. Rather, she seeks out employees with “an aptitude for being able to connect a lot of disparate things and find a path forward. It’s kind of a different skill set. And I think that’s the winning skill set. And it is much more difficult to hire for.”

Fandozzi says her career trajectory at companies including Whirlpool and DaimlerChrysler has helped her navigate a landscape “that is less about specific skills and more about ability.” She began as “a super techie” Stevens undergraduate who landed a job at Lockheed Martin and completed an engineering master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania at night.

At Penn, Fandozzi met Patrick T. Harker, who is president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and former president of the University of Delaware. Harker encouraged her to strike out in pursuit of a broader intellectual agenda that eventually led her to take an MBA as well.

“I thought business was a complete waste of time,” she recalls. “But [Harker] said, ‘The class I teach is in operations management. It’s kind of engineering meets business. I think you would really enjoy it.’”

Finding Pathways

Fandozzi seeks out employees with “an aptitude for being able to connect a lot of disparate things and find a path forward.”

Fandozzi’s upskilling epiphany was that business was “this dark space in my brain that I just didn’t understand. So I decided to get my MBA to fill that space — and not to pivot my career.” That discovery has allowed her to be in the business of seeking new skills, deploying analytics in positions where she can “connect lots of dots” as she tackles new challenges.

Eng describes his Stevens master’s degree as “the most valuable of all the degrees I have. Every class within that program and every project was very relevant, and continues to be relevant to this very day.”

The proven value that Stevens can bring to today’s upskilling challenge is immense. “We’ve been in existence for more than 150 years,” observes Saiyed. “Tell me how many companies and businesses have been in operation for 150 years. Education — and the rigor and relevance of delivering that learning — is our core competency.”

Stevens’ current efforts seek not only to ensure that this institutional strength is brought to bear on present challenges: Leaders are committed to building infrastructure that is nimble enough to rise to future crises and demands, unimagined in the present moment.

“Who knows where we will be two years from now?” asks de Vreede. “The only thing we know is that it will be very different from where we are today.”

– Richard Byrne