Coursera CEO’s top tips for grads to stay competitive as AI takes jobs

With entry-level jobs declining as employers continue to deploy AI, Coursera’s CEO has shared his top tips for graduates to stay competitive in the job market and stand out in interviews.

Greg Hart, former technical advisor to Jeff Bezos at Amazon, became president and CEO of online learning platform Coursera in February 2025. He told CNBC Make It that in the age of AI, it’s important for young people to pursue additional learning alongside a degree.

“The advice that I give to my sons… is one of the best things that you can do is to augment your university degree with micro credentials specifically,” he said in the interview.

Micro credentials are short courses that provide a certification for a specific skill or knowledge and they take less time to complete than a traditional degree or diploma. It’s become increasingly important to supplement degrees with additional certifications, as graduate jobs are at risk of being replaced by AI, Hart said.

Major firms have been laying off staff this year and have cited AI as part of the reason, from Amazon making 14,000 workers redundant as it bets on AI to Salesforce slashing 4,000 customer support roles saying AI can do 40% of the tasks at the company.

Meanwhile, 62% of U.K. employers anticipate that junior, clerical, managerial and administrative roles will be the most likely be lost to AI, according to a recent survey of 2,019 senior HR professionals and decision makers by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD.)

Additionally, the U.K.’s Institute for Student Employers found in its annual Student Recruitment Survey that 1.2 million applications were submitted for just 17,000 graduate roles, highlighting the intense competition and the limited positions available to young people.

“They [micro credentials] demonstrate to employers that not only did you get whatever university degree you’re studying, but you augmented that with something that is generally much more workforce focused,” Coursera’s Hart added.

As AI dominates, many workers are pursuing upskilling opportunities with LinkedIn’s Skills on the Rise report, earlier this year finding that AI literacy was the most popular skill that people were adding to their profiles.

Hart explained that fresh graduates going into job interviews should highlight their personality and character traits alongside their experience.

“Say you’re a young person in university right now, you are generally going to get hired into your first job based primarily on the traits that they see in you,” Hart said.

“They’re going to be assessing your mindset and your traits as a human being more than your experience, because by definition, you really don’t have much experience and so they’re not really hiring you for your experience, they’re hiring you for your… personality traits.”

Hart outlined that “one of the most important traits” that employers want to hire for are “people who are proactive and hard working and take initiative, who prove to be ready, learners.”

The best way to show these traits is having micro credentials alongside your degree, especially ones that are tailored to your field. For example, Hart encouraged his son, who is a finance major, to take an additional course on AI for finance.

In fact, experts previously told CNBC Make It that workers who have been laid off as a result of AI should train themselves up on new skills including increasing AI literacy via short courses, rather than pursuing a new degree which would be more costly and time consuming.

Having the dedication to pursue additional learning demonstrates that you will also bring those traits to the job, they told CNBC.