In my quest to become a superstar in the tech and AI world I feel like I stagnated at times, especially at learning in my early career (as evidenced in my posts regarding how Canada belongs at the top, which chronicled my ascent to leading startups and helping founders). Luckily (for me and for the startups I’ve been a key part in), once I got going, I never looked back. I am not one to make excuses or to not have “next steps” for myself, I’m very goal and mission driven and on a lifelong path to learning anything and everything that I can.
That made the majority of my employers very happy; I never used the excuse of not knowing how to do something and for a very long time, I believed this should be the norm among knowledge workers. Unfortunately, that is not the case for the vast majority of staff that I’ve had.
In the spirit of being an ongoing continuous learner (and sponge), let’s examine how and where the system might fail the type of staff that I (and other tech companies) may want to hire.
Overall, as we get busier and busier, children seem to be the benefactors of poor education and this generally starts at the high school level (where it starts to matter). Here are some ways that we fail miserably at educating our teens.
Unfortunately, not only in the United States, but also in Canada, there is an epidemic of bad education in our high schools and poor focus on education by parents. I am very opinionated on this subject because my parents, being immigrants to Canada, really held me to account and kept me focused on education. In today’s society of participation awards, parents are lackadaisical about their children’s educations and discipline.
The buck doesn’t stop at High School either, and some of the worst culprits are actually the (massively) for-profit University system that we, as North Americans, have agreed to use.
Not only do professors frequently contrive to lower their teaching loads, but administrators and academic departments encourage them. Just 44% of faculty spend nine hours or more per week teaching, down from 63% twenty years ago. Teaching assistants tend to replace the absentees in the classroom; the professors themselves have cranked up the volume of their research output. However, up to half of published articles are never read by anyone (save editors, and sometimes not even then), and up to 90% never receive a single citation.
So what do you do when all signs point to having to go to University to gain any sort of advantage? Unfortunately it’s the current state of affairs that most employers will not hire you unless you have a degree for even junior or starting jobs. Once you have that degree, coming to my Mentor Program, with 1000ml with our Patent Pending training system, the only such system in the world; is the only way to gain the practical knowledge and experience that will jump start your career.
Check out our next dates below for our upcoming seminars, labs and programs, we’d love to have you there.