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The Crisis in Education and Workforce Development
Picture this: you’re a learner—a dreamer, a doer, someone who wants to get shit done. Maybe you’re a student staring at yet another worksheet on the volume of a cone, an aspiring artist stuck in a soul-sucking office job, or a seasoned worker blindsided by automation. You have goals, ambitions, and a burning need to learn what actually matters. But instead of a direct path, you face a labyrinthine gauntlet of outdated processes, intermediaries, and a system that seems determined to bore you into submission.
Welcome to the 19th-century Assembly line world… in the 21st century.
How Did We Get Here?
The systems we use today to prepare for the world were designed for the industrial era. Back then, the goal was to churn out disciplined factory workers who could follow orders, memorize instructions, and perform repetitive tasks with precision. Standardized curriculums? Great for training factory hands. Credentialing systems? Perfect for sorting who’d operate machines versus who’d manage them. But here’s the catch: the factories are mostly gone, and we’re still using the same playbook.
Now, over 150 years later, the world has changed, but the system hasn’t. And instead of evolving, it’s built layer upon layer of intermediaries: curriculum designers, textbook publishers, credentialing bodies, recruitment organizations, HR departments, and more. Each claims to help you reach your goals, yet they often act like tollbooths on the road to your future—adding cost, complexity, and bureaucracy. It’s as if the system was designed by a villainous bureaucratic machine that thrives on inefficiency, thrives on red tape, and absolutely hates change. In other words, this system, once intended for Beneficial Learning Opportunities And Training has morphed into the very acronym it stood for B.L.O.A.T. a bloated, obstructive mess.
Enter the Protagonists
Let’s meet three heroes navigating this maddening maze:
STUDENT: Alice Miles, the Aspiring Astronaut: A 14-year-old dreamer in suburban South Carolina whose passion for space is being smothered by irrelevant worksheets and uninspiring lessons. B.L.O.A.T wants her to memorize random facts instead of orbital mechanics. Why? Because, some long dead guy once put it into the curriculum and no-one has questioned it since.
DREAMER: Bob Graham, the Bored Employee: A 35-year-old London office worker trapped in spreadsheet purgatory, dreaming of turning his comic book sketches into a real career. B.L.O.A.T labels his creativity as “a distraction” and redirects him to essential professional development courses like “Understanding the Employee Handbook”
REBUILDER: Lola Ramirez, the Retrenched Worker: A 30-year-old operations manager, laid off by automation. B.L.O.A.T declares her skills obsolete and offers her a 3-year retraining program. When she protests, it hands her a stack of applications for jobs that no longer exist.
All three are stuck in a system that doesn’t meet their needs, doesn’t understand their goals, and doesn’t care. The system’s primary focus isn’t the learner. It’s the system itself.
The Real Question: What Do We Really Need?
Here’s the thing: if we had a blank slate—if we could forget everything we’ve been taught about how education and workforce systems “should” work—what would we build instead? Would we create a system designed to improve the efficiency of the intermediary middle-men that lie between us and our goal, or would we create one designed for OUR needs?
Currently, there are over a dozen layers of intermediary Middle-men standing between you and your goals, including curriculum designers, government education departments, recruitment companies, HR department and more. These layers don’t just slow you down; they often distract from the only question that matters: What do you actually need to succeed?
The answer, based on insights from over 2,000 learners and educators worldwide, is surprisingly simple:
Help me find things I want to learn, tapping into my intrinsic motivation.
Help me achieve mastery in what I want to learn.
Help me use my mastery to unlock real-world opportunities.
But instead of delivering on these needs, the system prioritizes standardized testing, rigid curriculums, and credentialing processes that seem designed to perpetuate themselves rather than us.
Why are These needs ^ important.
How did I identify these needs? Let’s start with how I didn’t do it, because that’s just as important. Most EdTech and workforce development companies claiming to use “User-Centered Design” rely on focus groups, pulling in users to ask them what they want, what they need, what they like, and how things could improve. But if your goal is radical innovation—getting to a first-principles solution—why is this the last approach you’d take? It’s the same reason Henry Ford didn’t survey staff at horse-drawn carriage companies to ask what they needed. They’d have told him, “We need faster horses.” Similarly, if you ask users entrenched in the education and workforce systems you’re trying to revolutionize, their answers will be shaped—and limited—by that very system. They’re conditioned to think within its boundaries, offering ideas tethered to how things already work. To get unbiased, honest insights, you need to step outside the status quo entirely. That’s why I turned to learners with no access to traditional education—no schools, no higher ed, no teachers, no workforce support, nothing tied to the current systems. What do they need? That’s where true innovation begins. Forget all the Bullshit, What do YOU need?
We don’t need faster horses. We need something entirely new!
A World Without B.L.O.A.T?
Imagine a world where learners like Alice, Bob, and Lola don’t have to navigate this byzantine mess. A world where intermediaries aren’t gatekeepers but optional allies.
What I’m sharing here in this blogpost series promises exactly that: a way to streamline the learning and workforce pipeline, remove unnecessary layers, and optimize the journey between learners and their goals. It doesn’t destroy intermediaries; but makes them optional and empowers those that want to change to become more efficient, more valuable, and less intrusive. And for the 600 million underserved learners worldwide, it offers an alternative to the status quo.
Breaking Free
This is just the beginning. In the posts to come, I’ll dive deeper into the solutions, exploring how ingenious “engines” could dismantle B.L.O.A.T piece by piece and replace it with something better: a system that’s elegant, learner-focused, and built for the realities of today’s world.
So buckle up. We’re about to leave the 19th-century Assembly line behind—for good.
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