Dean's Brief 6 · Monday, October 12, 2026
What Employers Are Actually Asking For
The decision: AI skills belong in the business, health, and public-service majors, not only in computer science. If your AI course lives in one department, most of your graduates will never take it.
What is happening
The job postings tell a clear story. A majority of postings that ask for AI skills are now outside IT occupations: marketing, operations, HR, finance, health administration. In Los Angeles County alone, California's Employment Development Department projects roughly 83,600 openings over the current ten-year cycle in the five occupations my own AI course maps to, and none of them is "software engineer." Employers are not hiring prompt engineers. They are hiring coordinators, analysts, and managers who can use AI to do the job faster and know when not to.
That changes what a dean should fund. One elective in computer science reaches a few hundred students. A no-prerequisite applied course that counts toward several majors reaches thousands, including adult learners coming in through credit for prior learning.
Three moves
- Build one applied AI course with no prerequisite. Three units, online, counts as an elective in three or more majors. At CSUDH we proposed exactly this (MGT 340, AI-Driven Entrepreneurship and Workforce Productivity) and anchored it to community partners through the Innovation Incubator, so students work on a real organization's problem.
- Interview employers before you design it. Ten conversations with regional employers, the same customer-discovery method the National Science Foundation uses in I-Corps. Ask what they need people to do with AI on day one. Build the course from the answers, not from a vendor's curriculum.
- Put the skill in the learning outcomes you already report. One column on the program matrix, discipline by discipline. That is how it survives the next dean.
What to say
To chairs: "Which of your graduates will be asked to use AI in their first job? That is who the course is for." To employers: "Tell us what you need done, and we will build the course around it."
Monday step
Pull your region's EDD or state labor projections for the five occupations your college feeds most. Put the numbers on one page. That page is the course proposal's first paragraph.
Source: MGT 340 course proposal, CSU Dominguez Hills, August 2026; California EDD occupational projections.