Greg Hart, Coursera President and CEO
Coursera
As entry-level jobs decline as employers continue to implement AI, Coursera’s CEO shared top tips for graduates to stay competitive in the job market and stand out in interviews.
Greg Hart, a former technology advisor to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, became president and CEO of online learning platform Coursera in February 2025. He told CNBC Make It that in the age of AI, it is important for young people to pursue further learning while earning a degree.
“The advice I would give my sons is to enhance their college degrees with specific micro-credentials,” he said in an interview.
Microcredentials are short courses that provide certification of specific skills or knowledge and take less time to complete than traditional degrees or diplomas. Hart said supplementing degrees with additional certifications is becoming increasingly important as graduate students’ jobs are at risk of being replaced by AI.
Major companies are cutting jobs this year, citing AI as part of the reason. Amazon bet on AI, making 14,000 employees redundant, and Salesforce cutting 4,000 customer support roles, saying 40% of its jobs could be done with AI.
“Suppose you’re a college student right now. Typically, you’ll be hired for your first job based primarily on the characteristics they see in you.”
greg hart
President and CEO of Coursera
Meanwhile, a recent survey of 2,019 senior HR professionals and decision makers by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) found that 62% of UK employers expect junior, administrative, managerial and managerial roles to be most likely to be lost to AI.
Additionally, the UK Student Employers Association revealed in its annual Student Recruitment Survey that it received 1.2 million applications for just 17,000 postgraduate roles, highlighting intense competition and the limited number of positions available to young people.
“They (micro-credentials) prove to employers that you not only earned a degree from the university you’re studying, but also enhanced it with something generally more workforce-focused,” Coursera’s Hart added.
As AI becomes mainstream, LinkedIn’s Skills on the Rise report found that many workers are pursuing upskilling opportunities, with AI literacy being the most popular skill people are adding to their profiles earlier this year.
“We will hire you based on your characteristics.”
Hart explained that new graduates interviewing for jobs need to highlight their personality and character traits as well as their experience.
“Let’s say you’re a young person in college right now. Typically, the person you get hired for your first job will be based primarily on the characteristics they see in you,” Hart says.
“They’re going to evaluate your mindset and your characteristics as a person more than your experience. By definition, you don’t really have much experience. So they’re not actually hiring you for your experience, they’re actually hiring you for your…personality traits.”
Mr Hart outlined that “one of the most important traits” employers want to hire is “people who are proactive, hard-working, take initiative, are prepared and prove to be learners.”
The best way to demonstrate these characteristics is to present micro-credentials alongside your degree, especially those tailored to your field. For example, Hart encouraged her son, who is majoring in finance, to take additional courses on AI for finance.
In fact, experts previously told CNBC Make It that workers who are laid off because of AI should be trained in new skills, such as improving AI literacy, with short courses rather than earning new degrees, which are more expensive and time-consuming.
They told CNBC that their dedication to pursuing further learning shows they can transfer those traits to their jobs.
