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People ‘have to learn’ to keep up with the tech economy, says Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda

School’s never out for summer.

Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda speaks from the crowd at the Revolution town hall event
Photo of Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda speaking to the crowd at MSNBC and Recode’s Revolution town hall event taped in San Francisco on January 19
MSNBC
Shirin Ghaffary is a senior Vox correspondent covering the social media industry. Previously, Ghaffary worked at BuzzFeed News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and TechCrunch.

If you think school is done when you graduate, Jeff Maggioncalda has another view: People will have to learn for the rest of their lives to keep up with changing technology that will displace workers.

“The bad news is there will be a lot of jobs that go away. Traditional skills will be less valuable and people will be dislocated,” said Maggioncalda, the CEO of online learning company Coursera.

The good news, he said, is “there will be a lot of opportunities and technology is making it possible. And — with no hyperbole here — technology is making it possible for anyone to get the best education in the world.”

Maggioncalda’s comments were made as a special guest at the first Recode and MSNBC town hall event for the series “Revolution”; it aired Sunday night on the cable network, focused on examining tech’s impact on the future of work over the next year. The event with Google CEO Sundar Pichai and YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki was taped recently in San Francisco.

Since not everything discussed at the event got on the show, you can watch Maggioncalda’s comments here:

And watch the full conversation with the CEOs of YouTube and Google below:


This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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