Kseniia Trufanova, Employer Engagement Consultant at Global Banking School, on matching students to employers at a provider with more than 35,000 of them, why avoiding AI puts a business behind, and why the technology has to be built around people first.
Most of the argument about AI and work happens somewhere near the top of the labour market. The people with the most riding on how it lands are the ones trying to get in at the bottom, and they are rarely in the room when it is being discussed.
Kseniia Trufanova is an Employer Engagement Consultant at Global Banking School, which teaches more than 35,000 students across ten campuses in London, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester, and which built itself around widening access after moving into east London in 2016 on the view that traditional university was not an option for a lot of people there. Her job is the join between those students and the employers who might hire them: internships, part-time and full-time roles, an industry advisory board, and the events that get both sides in the same room.
She is also more relaxed about AI than you might expect from someone whose work depends on there being jobs at the other end of it. We asked her what the role involves, where she thinks the positive impact comes from, and what she would say to a business nervous about bringing the technology in.
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Original Transcript
Hi, my name is Kseniia and I’m an Employer Engagement Consultant for Global Banking School. My role is to bring people together, bring partnerships and find mutually beneficial collaborations. Be it supporting students, internships, part-time or full-time roles, or it could also be about creating industry connections, to work with an industry advisory board and the events that GBS usually organises.
I think that there will be positive impacts, 100%. What is happening is that you will be able, first of all, to stimulate the growth of other companies, and second of all, to start supporting people who are struggling from specific health issues, or are struggling to grow their business as well.
I view tech not like, oh, AI is going to overpower us. I view tech and AI and the use of it as an opportunity to grow faster, to be able to support people quicker in terms of the impact on creating a better future. I think it will be able to help people hire in higher numbers, quicker, and we will have a healthier society. Then from there, obviously, everything goes way better.
From my perspective, I think it would be good not to be scared by the technology and by innovations within the market. You cannot really run away from it. If you try to run away from it, you will just put yourself behind, and you need to be able to withstand the competition. It might be hurtful for the business at first to implement the technology, but at the same point, if you look from another perspective, you have an opportunity to move forward faster and usually with less cost for the long run. So sometimes you just need to embrace technology, but without forgetting about the human side of things. So when you do implement the technology within your business, make sure that it’s tailored to humans first, to be able to take it on board and then move forward within your company.
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Global Banking School teaches more than 35,000 students across ten campuses in London, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester. More at globalbanking.ac.uk.
Video by Nathan Taylor, Video Production Lead at Global Good, and Founder of NT91 Photography.
