Job uncertainty and overall anxiety among professionals is rising due to the unpredictable impact of AI on what it means to work.

At the same time,

is showing that the rapid nature of innovation in technology is creating a “rising tide,” where the increase in AI capabilities is more continuous and broad, impacting many job functions in incremental ways vs. a “crashing wave” that’s rapidly replacing certain tasks or jobs all at once.

Given how difficult actual implementation of automation tools is in companies with legacy systems and siloed data sources, for employees the good news is that real significant changes to your job description and way of work will take time.

However, as general AI capability knowledge quickly becomes a basic expectation of every role, and companies take time to develop their own AI learning and development strategies, many employees are left to find their own ways of learning how to actually apply these tools in their jobs.

In response to this, several companies have begun offering classes and content that go beyond prompting and into applied uses of automation and agentic tools that are role specific and can help people go beyond initial research use-cases.

A new program launched by School16 is offering live, online function specific classes for free starting in May, where you can see how other people in roles like sales, customer success, marketing, product and more are using AI tools in their jobs to significantly reduce manual work and grow professionally. The sessions are tool agnostic and instructors focus both on common workplace tools like Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini as well as the role specific tools are the best designed to get the job done.

Another company, Maven, launched 6 years ago by the former founder of Udemy focuses on live, cohort-based classes taught by professionals across disciplines. One recent area trending on the platform is, not surprisingly, AI. They offer a number of individual

across different topics from no-code tools to more technical applications of AI. They also list pre-recorded videos of past sessions if you can’t make it to one live.

Utah based Leland, mostly known for its career and MBA-prep coaching products, recently launched free events teaching

including applied learning with Claude CoWork, and applications in sales performance, product design, finance and more. There are several sessions listed in the coming month, and you can filter by focus area to find what’s most relevant for your job.

For readers who are founders and entrepreneurs, and who prefer watching videos to taking a live class, there are great content creators who offer applied AI learning on Youtube and other platforms. If you want to go deeper on sales and marketing automations specifically for Claude, you’ll find useful content on the

channel. The venture investor Jason Lemkin shares a lot of learnings of what actually works and what doesn’t when applying AI at his company

.

The rapid pace of change in how we use technology at work, and often equally rapid evolution of expectations of employees is making it difficult to sift through the noise and understand what’s really possible with AI and what’s just hype for now. When looking to self-learn or find education options for your team, a focus on applied learning from professionals who have been using these tools to solve real problems will help your organization get to building faster, and help you get confident that the skillset you’re building is going to help you compete in the long run.