The Failure of Credentials (part 2/2)

Arsenio Foreword: Jiun went through the same thing I went through.  While I was sitting outside one morning after USA’s basketball team got ripped apart by the greeks in the FIBA World Championships in 2006, I was talking to a friend (at the time) name Kristine and I told her that I wanted to be an orthodontist.

How ridiculous of an idea that was at the time? Well, it was all about the money, but with the amount of debt I would’ve racked up, I would have been screwed forever.

Sometimes we need these resets in life.  When I was telling another friend about making a career change on my couch in 2008, I told him, “maybe I should just do a minor dental assisting to see if I even like it, and it was the BESTTTTTTT decision I ever made in my life because the dental field — was NOT for me.

In terms of automated jobs and not acquiring skills that will ultimately prepare us for the next couple of decades (especially when AI is 100% going), Jiun is here to explain it again.

He went on to emphasize the 21st-century economy and that it is undergoing a transition from traditional jobs to an entrepreneurial economy because of technology democratising resources that allowed people to become entrepreneurs with a fraction of the cost. Taylor Pearson went on to prove his theory by coming up with case studies like lifestyle entrepreneurs that he networked with during his days as their employee before he ventured out on his own. Also, he emphasized the importance of apprenticeship was better than traditional Socratic and scholastic educational system of the traditional educational system by colleges or universities.

The tech titans in Silicon Valley like Apple, IBM and Google — even Facebook — started to hire people from the non-traditional routes like learning through MOOC and other micro-colleges or universities that emphasized on mastery learning and blended learning.  Also, they are beginning to recognise talents from high school dropouts or never being to college due to higher student debts. With higher student debts, it causes many students questioning their return on investment on their paper credential.

The flaw of the brick and mortar university education will be too rigid in a world of fast pace changes where some graduates finish their schooling would realise their skills are already outdated as being emphasised by a self-help book by a foreign student from Nigeria known as ‘The Tribute’. It was because getting good grades no longer guarantees you a well-paid job because of limited upgraded skills. The writer emphasised continuous learning or lifelong learning to keep your brain young as it was quoted by Albert Einstein — that learning will keep you young and you are old when you stop learning.

In an age of democratised information, educational credentialism has become increasingly irrelevant as many young people are enrolling in colleges or universities competing for better jobs. The competition, as we all know, is getting intense — and value for an educational credential will become extrinsic. Typical autodidacts like Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning could learn skills like coding and other technical skills for a typical geek that could learn and run their lifestyle business for free, and at the same time, at a fraction of a cost — even an expensive online course would be around $1000 to $2000 USD.

The major reason most tech titans will probably start hiring people from outside the traditional route is because the tolerance of diversity and being passionate is a skill that was overlooked. Based on Google Inc research, the greatest skill of all time that never has never been certified or been taught in school, will be having passion for a job.

Companies are hiring with or without degrees because they know we’re are going to soon live in a degreeless world.  When that happens, universities will switch and start charing obscene amounts of money for the skills that are being learned now in the younger generations.