What you'll learn

Learn: Stop Doing The Nod

Learn the AI vocabulary and concepts you need to follow any conversation about transformers, context windows, or hallucinations without pretending you know what people are talking about. The gap between confused and competent is smaller than you think. 

Learn: Tools That Work This Week

You'll use ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Grammarly for actual job search tasks starting the day you enroll. Resume optimization that beats applicant tracking systems. Interview prep workflows. Company research that makes you sound informed. No theory. Just prompts and processes that produce results.

Learn: Talk About AI Without Faking It

Know who Sam Altman is and why it matters. Understand why DeepSeek crashed the market. Have real answers when interviewers ask about your AI experience. Stop nodding along and start positioning yourself as someone who actually gets where this technology is going and how to use it.

About the course

You know the nod. The one you do when someone mentions large language models in an interview and you pretend you're a person who thinks about large language models. It works until they ask a follow-up question. This course gets you from the nod to actual competence in a few hours. Six modules covering who's building AI, the vocabulary you need, how it actually works, tools for your job search, how to discuss it in interviews, and where opportunities are emerging. No computer science required. No theory. Just practical knowledge that helps you get hired. You'll optimize resumes to beat applicant tracking systems, build interview prep workflows, research companies efficiently, and stop pretending you understand AI. I built this while job hunting myself, so everything here works under pressure. The prompts work. The workflows save time. The vocabulary makes you sound informed because you actually are. A few hours. Self-paced. Free. Start today.

Kenneth Barnes

I'm a Duke alum (BS Geology '01, Executive MBA '25) who's spent the past year deep in AI: completing OpenAI's prompt engineering certification, working with large language models daily, and watching how this technology is reshaping hiring from both sides of the table. I've served as secretary of the Duke Black Alumni Board, reunion co-chair, and admissions interviewer, which means I've had hundreds of conversations with Duke grads this year about career transitions. The same anxiety kept coming up: everyone's expected to understand AI for job interviews, but nobody knows where to start learning it. So I built this course. It's the practical crash course in AI literacy that turns "I have no idea what they're talking about" into "I can actually discuss this confidently" in a few hours.

Curriculum

7 Chapters · 35 Lessons

  1. 1

    The Landscape (or: Who's Running This Show?)

    1. (Included in full purchase)

      1.1: The Cast of Characters

    2. (Included in full purchase)

      1.2: The Big Five (And Everyone Else)

    3. (Included in full purchase)

      1.3: The Infrastructure Kings

    4. (Included in full purchase)

      1.4: CPUs, GPUs, TPUs, NPUs (And Whatever Else)

    5. (Included in full purchase)

      1.5: The DeepSeek Moment

    6. (Included in full purchase)

      Quiz

  2. 2

    The Vocabulary (or: How to Not Sound Like an Idiot)

    1. (Included in full purchase)

      2.1: The Taxonomy (AI vs ML vs AGI vs ANI)

    2. (Included in full purchase)

      2.2: The Process (Pre-training, Training, Fine-tuning, Inference)

    3. (Included in full purchase)

      2.3: Emergent Properties (When AI Surprises Us)

    4. (Included in full purchase)

      2.4: Generative vs. Discriminative AI

    5. (Included in full purchase)

      2.5: The Jargon That Shows Up in Interviews

    6. (Included in full purchase)

      Quiz

  3. 3

    How This Stuff Actually Works (High-Level, Promise)

    1. (Included in full purchase)

      3.1: The Magic Trick Explained (How LLMs Work)

    2. (Included in full purchase)

      3.2: Multimodal AI (More Than Just Text)

    3. (Included in full purchase)

      3.3: Tool Use & Function Calling (When AI Takes Action)

    4. (Included in full purchase)

      3.4: The Tradeoffs Nobody Mentions (Latency, Cost, Quality)

    5. (Included in full purchase)

      3.5: Agents and Robots (AI in the Physical World)

    6. (Included in full purchase)

      Quiz

  4. 4

    Making AI Useful (Not Just Impressive)

    1. (Included in full purchase)

      4.1: Prompting That Actually Works

    2. (Included in full purchase)

      4.2: AI as Workflow, Not Chatbot

    3. (Included in full purchase)

      4.3: Limits & Failure Modes

    4. (Included in full purchase)

      4.4: Real Tools You Should Try This Week

    5. (Included in full purchase)

      Quiz

  5. 5

    The Job Hunt Application (or: Why You're Really Here)

    1. (Included in full purchase)

      5.1: Resume Building & Beating the Bots

    2. (Included in full purchase)

      5.2: Skills & Certifications That Matter

    3. (Included in full purchase)

      5.3: The Interview Prep Workflow

    4. (Included in full purchase)

      5.4: Talking About AI in Interviews

    5. (Included in full purchase)

      5.5: Current Events You Need to Track

    6. (Included in full purchase)

      Quiz

  6. 6

    Where This Is All Going (And Why It Matters to You)

    1. (Included in full purchase)

      6.1: The Jobs AI Will Change

    2. (Included in full purchase)

      6.2: The Skills That Compound

    3. (Included in full purchase)

      6.3: The Regulatory Landscape

    4. (Included in full purchase)

      6.4: Your Action Plan

    5. (Included in full purchase)

      Quiz

  7. 7

    COURSE CONCLUSION

    1. (Included in full purchase)

      Next Steps