Why do you want a qualification?

The education systems throughout the world appear geared up to produce people with qualifications that suit or more often these days suited the needs of industry in the past rather than the needs of the learner today.

Even industry complains about the mismatch of qualifications to their needs.

And how useful is a qualification? It will help you get your first job and even then it might not be that useful.

There are too many vested interests, gatekeepers, who will try to convince you that you need their qualification and charge you a substantial fee, in some cases in excess of £30,000 ($50,000)  for the privilege of working yourself to the bone and passing their exams. They convince you that their degree or whatever has more status than some other institution’s.

The system and common accepted views all support this perception BUT how true is it in an objective way?

Are you getting value for money?

Are the days of conventional credentials coming to an end?

Credentials versus ability. Some one can have credentials but have no ability and someone can have high ability and no credentials.

Which one do you want?

It seems like every one in the world has something to say, but…

Every one has something to say but how many want to hear or read those words. Reading can seem like so much hard work.

So much noise and it can swamp the great as effectively as the insignificant. A lucky few (relatively) rise above the background noise and generate an audience. The rest exercise their typing skills to no avail.

If only we could automatically detect the gold from the dross. Google, you think, might help but it does not do sophisticated semantical searches where meaning rather than character strings are matched. Too bad.