Thoughts on Unretirement

 

Recently, the word "unretire" has been gaining some traction in the mainstream press. So I'd like to talk further about my own personal struggles to unretire. For the past 12 years, I have protected my weekday 9-5 hours, but I've always felt that if I found something meaningful, I would gladly trade them off for good money and some valuable experiences in my life. 

However, I was never successful in doing it.

My first attempt was to start my legal practice as an associate, but it was quickly upended when my Graves' disease came back after 14 years, and I lost so much weight I thought I had cancer. The following April, I ceased renewing the license. Even today, I have another law firm willing to offer me a seat if I paid for my insurance, but I prefer to hold back until I can find a meaningful file to work on. 

My second attempt was some kind of Technology training attachment with financial institutions. I took multiple technical and aptitude exams, and DBS found my results interesting enough to ask me to apply to their teams. However, I was bummed out after the personality test rounds. So technically, I failed the personality tests. 

My most recent attempt was the AIAP, where I submitted an entire machine learning solution to qualify for the final rounds. However, the finals were tough, and I had to compete against professional developers, so I did not manage to be eligible in the end. 

The AIAP will serve as the template for companies to determine how to hire new candidates in the future. Technical assignments are challenging; you have to present and defend your solution, and finally, work in a team under high pressure. Even the rejection from the program felt really good because it explained what went wrong with my solution and how it could have been improved. Over the short term, my ready-made code base can be used to crunch any data. Still, in the long term, my lack of proper software development skills, such as basic Git use, and my incessant use of ChatGPT to debug code probably lost me the traineeship, as there are younger professional developers who want deep-skilling in AI. 

At this juncture, I want to compare my positive experience of being rejected by the AIAP with the negative experience of scraping through my ACLP training. ACLP training is highly contrived. I always have to be forced to teach something in a particular way, then I would parrot a few moves to ensure that I meet the bare minimum non-negotiable objectives to pass. Even a pass feels very inauthentic because I know none of my paying customers would pay me to behave this way in a real course. 

( Does passing the CMFAS papers feel the same way? )

Anyway, I look forward to seeing what will happen to all the Ah Beng ACTA and ACLP trainers next year after the reforms. SkillsFuture can only pay for a narrow range of courses that are mapped to employment outcomes. This means I no longer need to obtain an ACLP as a defensive manoeuvre in case another investment trainer finds a way to secure government support for teaching an investment course. My preferred scenario is that all investment training receives no government funding, allowing us to compete in a fair arena. 

Where trainers need to prepare individuals to qualify for government support, many trainers will become jobless after the changes next year. 

Anyway, I can't dwell on all my failed attempts to unretire, because my gigs pipeline is healthy with a new semester in Poly coming up. Also, unlike most folks trying to unretire, personal finances are not my key motivation. I am sad that I cannot try for the AIAP again in the next round because the tech scene is changing faster than we can learn about it. The old Machine Learning algorithms are great, but the world has moved on to LLMs and Agentic AI.  I really need to find a way to break down my investment lab sessions into an interaction between different AI agents. If you know of a good course for that, please let me know.

There are no new videos as I've completely lost my voice after a nasty bout of flu. But at least one set of slides for my next video is already done. 

My channel will release one YouTube short a day until I can make videos again.