Don't hide behind your degree !

 

Sometimes this blog can still get a longer article if I succeed in connecting the dots between what I hear and what I do, and hopefully, it can result in some insights about what it's like to survive in Singapore today.

A few weeks ago, my buddy was saying on The Financial Coconuts that folks should not hide behind their degrees. I did not listen to the video, but this is a potentially memeable proclamation for all the wrong reasons. If this were said by a non-degree holder to a degree holder, it would invite more scorn than self-reflection, as it does sound like a challenge. I can just say "Sour grapes", then move on in my life. 

But if I do that, it's also mean-spirited on my part.

But I suspect in this AI-obsessed economy, this statement is not a challenge, but just a reflection that, actually, no one can hide behind a degree these days, as the depreciation of knowledge is now very steep. GPT-5 already assists me greatly in my shallow dive videos on local company stocks. 

And now there is actually a book on how learning can take place in the future. Lean Learning by Pat Flynn is not particularly revolutionary, but it offers an alternative to academic learning. In Lean Learning, learning becomes "just-in-time". People engage in small projects and learn enough just to reach the next critical milestone. So if I'm trying to build a business and I'm writing a copy, I check out a short article on how to write copy, write a bare bones copy, get ChatGPT to refine it, then launch it to observe results and prepare my next copy. 

I'm not convinced that Pat Flynn is totally correct, as we may need a degree to cover multiple domains at a high strategic level, so that we will know how to intelligently engage with AI in the future to solve actual problems. I also do not believe that capitalist living is all about information products and building up marketing funnels.  

Future degrees will also reform similarly to the AIAP or the 42 program from SUTD, which is asynchronous, problem-based, with a ridiculously high drop-out rate to maintain its value. 

Finally, I have to address some of the things I am learning as part of my ACLP program. In this program, our job is to facilitate learning among working adults, in fact, non-PMET adults. If we play by the rules, we can teach based on frameworks like Gagne's Nine Events. In such a case, training slides become very inefficient, and it takes three hours to cover 4 slides of materials because we're trying to engage students with stories, fun and games. Engagement guarantees that students will fall asleep, but learning in Singapore needs to result in employment, which is a higher bar that facilitation can never address. 

So I'm going to make a prediction.

ACLP is like a Grab license. You get enough to give you a basic employment teaching non-PMET skills that may or may not result in employment, so the ACLP credential holder is, in essence, the welfare recipient. 

The serious qualifications will be taught asynchronously, so only the most focused and conscientious students will be able to complete the assignments for marking. The fewer humans who lead these courses, the more valuable it will be because of how mind-numbing it is to write code, put it on GitHub, and have an AI review it. 

In the end, the human is just there to interview candidates for job roles.