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A goal of the APRON Lab is to help students at community colleges and universities understand and prepare for the opportunities and challenges of automation and for careers likely to be affected or created by automation.

The Automation of Work and Work of Automation Learning Module

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. SES-1750731.

The future of work is uncertain. Students need knowledge and tools that help them navigate and inﬂuence their future. Most writing in the public sphere about automation focuses on fears of job loss, but previous research on automation suggests that the effects of automation are more complicated. Students should be less concerned about job loss and more concerned about how to navigate a changing future of work.

This learning module gives educators resources to help familiarize students with advances in technology and changes in organizing that may affect the future work. The goal of the module is to empower students to have more effective deliberations about the future of work and to think critically now about what the future of their work should be. As teachers, we hope this module will help students realize and use the agency they have in shaping the future of work. Dr. Tasha Davis—a collaborator on this project, co-creator of this module, and faculty member at Austin Community College—also created a slide deck that can be adapted for teaching about this topic (PPT PDF).

Our research team and students led by filmmaker Anya Swanson also created Career Profiles that can help introduce students to work in health automation and analytics. Watch the videos below to hear the wise words of Dr. Senem Guney, former Vice President of Language Analytics at Press Ganey and Founder of NarrativeDx; Lehua Gray, Senior UX Designer, and Anmol Abraham, Assistant Director of Health Information Systems at People's Community Clinic.

A key assignment in the module is the Career Profiles students create themselves. Take a look at the Profiles created by students enrolled in the Careers in Caregiving / Communicating with Patients course developed as a part of this research below too.

Career Profiles in Health Automation and Analytics

Dr. Senem Guney

Dr. Guney, Vice President of Language Analytics at Press Ganey and Founder of NarrativeDx, shares her story.

Dr. Guney offers advice for folks new to working in healthcare--especially those thinking of starting a business. Learn more here.

Lehua Gray

Lehua Gray, Senior UX Designer, shares her story and insights about why automation will augment but not replace her work.

Watch advice from Lehua Gray about starting out. Learn more here.

Anmol Abraham

Anmol Abraham, Assistant Director of Health Information Systems at People's Community Clinic, talks through her work supporting the electronic health record that helps the Clinic see their patients.

Watch advice for preparing for careers as a student and the importance of failure and learning from it. Learn more here.

Career Profiles for Students by Students

Health Consultant Simulator

In 2023, Zainab Haque, Yuliya IInitzkaya, Darius Kouevi-Gou, and Sammy Tumbali created this mock-up of a simulation game for Communication for Careers in Caregiving at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

A set of TikTok videos about primary care

Primary Care Practice

In 2022, Alyssa Daniell, Akhila Ravikumar, Alison Purcell, Sampreeti Bingi, Sahithi Kasa, and Sarah Tucker produced a series of tiktoks to profile practice in primary care. https://www.tiktok.com/@iheartdrhouse

Pediatric Nurse Practitioners

In 2022, Alyssa Estrada, Alyssa Wofford, Justin Luckey, Critica Srivastava, and Remi Greenwood created this profile focused on pediatric nurse practitioners.

Adolescent Medicine

In 2020, Angella Baby, Kelsey Joe, Delaney Lee, Efrata Mola, and Allison Olmedo created this profile focused on work in pediatrics focused on adolescents.

Music Therapist

In 2020, Danny Lopez, MaKayla Mireles, Tina Thi Nguyen, and Amanda Whatley created this profile focused on music therapists. It's a tour of the website they created to share this information.

Health Law and Policy

In 2020, Anna Votaw, Hira Asim, Alexis Norman, Salma Gonzalez (twitter: @salma_glz21), and Andrea Telles created this profile focused on work in Healthcare Law and Policy.

Speech-Language Pathologists

In 2022, Brooke Sandoval, Hattie Jacoby, Mica Alvarado, Mikayla Morgan, and Tyler Scott created this profile of speech-language pathologists.

Students in Communication for Careers in Caregiving (CMN 396 UIUC) and Communicating with Patients (CMS 330P UT Austin) created profiles of careers in health and healthcare and work that involves caregiving more broadly. These courses were developed based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. SES-1750731.

Communication for Careers in Caregiving is course at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign that focuses on developing skills involved in caregiving in context as a part of students life-long career development. The course is predicated on the idea that communication heals and that caregiving is central to many domains of work as well as being valuable in work that is not about caregiving per se.

Communicating with Patients is a foundational class in the UT Austin Patients, Practitioners & Cultures of Care, Bridging Disciplines Program. The Patients, Practitioners, and Cultures of Care program was developed with funding from a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (AK-255269-17). The program and the class aim to help the diverse communities of future health professionals at the University of Texas at Austin with leadership from across campus including Anthropology, Architecture, Communication, Nursing, Medicine, English, and and Social Work.