How to think about Skills Future, educational courses and future proofing your lives

I was thinking about this question when someone on BIGSCRIBE decided to ask around on how to future proof ourselves and determine which Skill Future course to take.

This is a question I have been grappling with myself for decades. I entered the workforce when some people still believed in loyalty to the firm you work for. When I joined P&G, there was this rare moment in my life where I actually aspired to have a lifestyle like my managers and bosses, so I upskilled based on what I thought were tech skills a manager should have to look after an IT infrastructure properly.

As IT managers tend to look after an entire IT platform, I took every certification exam I could on Windows, UNIX, AS/400, Novell, Cisco, IT Security.

I wanted to rise, and I needed to rise really fast.

Taking two to three times the number of exams compared to an undergraduate did not accelerate my career progression, but it did accelerate my ability to take a lot of exams. This may seem sort of worthless at first, but I found that I could take the CFA, CAIA, and FRM almost simultaneously when I realized that my company is not that loyal to me as compared to my stock investments. So, inadvertently, I unlocked the most important future-proofing skill in my 20s - the ability to pick up deep technical skills almost real-time on my own, with negligible costs, without the need for instruction. 

I think doing what I did would be a waste of time for younger people today. Instead, I will provide a framework on how to think about investing in personal skills.

Here is what I think you should approach your education :

a) Being job-ready does not make you future proof

Being job-ready means you have something an employer wants. It can rapidly put food on the table. If you do not have a job right now, you better find a way to be job-ready. The constellation of courses on specific skills like how to be a security guard or a private investigator falls into this category. If you are jobless, you better rush towards one of these certifications.

Future-proofing courses are generally not as practical as job-ready courses. A course on statistics and linear programming will not land you a job immediately but it will pave the way for a deep learning programming course that will in turn land you a better job placement in the future. The goal of future-proofing is to download as many mental models into your head as possible, but you can only afford to do this when you are not hungry because developing mental models need patience.

The consequence of understanding this will change the way you look at education. As the government drives for more adoption of polytechnic diplomas, that's just trying to get Singaporeans to be job-ready. If you really want to future proof yourself, only a series of advanced degrees will give you the myriad of mental models to do that. But advanced degrees may not directly land you a job unless it also teaches job-ready skills.

b) There are some skills that make you job-ready and can future proof you.

In fact, these can be categorized into four categories.

• Interpersonal skills involve public speaking and selling.
• Creative skills involve writing and design. 
• Technical skills like programming, investment management, and marketing funnel design.
• Physical skills like personal hygiene, yoga, and organization consulting (Marie Kondo ?)

To monetize these skills, my experience is that focusing on one is not enough. I know folks in the Toastmasters for decades who hardly make money from their public speaking skills which win them trophies every year. My current job involves at least three skills: Selling, public speaking and investment management. 

I just need to hone each skill to the top 30% of the cohort and I should do ok.

c) You need a learning 'exoskeleton'

I'm still developing this new idea which I think has merit. As investors, we have no idea how much alpha has already been extracted from financial markets before the profits come trickling down to us. 

As a trainer, I can't simply present myself as a person people would pay money for, I see myself now as a combination of tools with my personality to do my job - sort of an Iron Man character. The exoskeleton places me quickly up the rankings in an interpersonal, creative or technical skill for a small investment on my part. Also, unlike the good old days of corporate loyalty, my tools ow travel with me from project to project. 

My exoskeleton looks like this :

• High-end laptop and presentation clicker. 
• Bloomberg terminal to backtest investment ideas and empirically make investment decisions.
• Mentimeter presentation tools to crowdsource insights in real-time from students.
• Pre-built graphics for slide and infographic creation.
• Grammarly subscription to proof-read all articles and generate a better style. 
• Books summary subscription sites to keep me at the edge of business fads in the corporate world.
• Online cloud storage to bring my lecture materials wherever I go.
• I'm not even done. I hope my Python programming skills will lead to a few customized modules to answer some hard questions investors cannot answer even with current skills.

To keep above the crowd, I pay a fee every month to maintain my tools so that my tools will always be slightly more sophisticated than someone who gets the tools for free. My dividends and fees make paying for these tools a piece of cake ( except the Bloomberg terminal, that I wish I can afford one day ). 

For a complete treatment to answer this question go read The Last Safe Investment by Michael Ellsberg and Bryan Franklin. I will be integrating the concepts of the book to the local context and likely presenting part of it in the Seedly festival in June.