I was browsing through Cointelegraph today and I found a project which may not be absolute horseshit.
www.bitdegree.org aims to fill the gap between education providers, students and recruiters.
As someone who technically is a student (1 paper a semester counts, right?) and has spent a lot of time dealing with recruiters as a client and an applicant, I am aware of the mismatch between supply and demand on each side of the student recruitment triangle.
See, it goes like this.
- Students take degrees and diplomas with the ultimate goal of getting jobs. Ideally, instead of getting a degree, they'd just go to an employer and ask them to train them directly so they can earn while learning. However, employers often can't afford the time needed to train someone in every aspect of a job, so they rely on tertiary education providers to do this for them.
- Student assume that tertiary education providers are providing degrees and diplomas which will give them relevant skills, making them potentially valuable to employers. However there is no guarantee that this is the case.
- Education providers have to turn a profit. They would ideally like to perfectly cater their course offerings to industry demand, but there is no constant feedback from industry as to what is needed. Also, they make good money from offering courses which may be more generalist and not necessarily provide help with a specific skill area.
Bitdegree seems to want to provide an ecosystem whereby students, education providers and recruiters are able to trade demand, profit and skills between each other for tokens.
I personally have no financial interest in this project. My interest is personal. I am always keen to see innovation in terms of marketable skills going where they are needed. Also, with the advent of automation, specific skills will be in higher demand, while other more "industrial age" skills are slowly no longer needed.
What are your thoughts around a project like Bitdegree? I personally think it's a good idea, but will probably not get hit critical mass, without piggybacking onto one of the bigger providers like Cisco, CompTIA or Udemy.
I do however think that freelance companies like Upwork.com and Guru.com could tie quite nicely into this ecosystem, linking skills to freelancers, allowing freelancers to learn skills using a portion of their earnings, or allowing clients to pay to upskill their freelancers.
It will be an interesting test case.