Employer Bias

Your passion is what you want to spend your time doing and not some random vision written on a blackboard in the sky that you somehow need to “discover”.  

Ask yourself what you love doing day in day out, because ultimately this is your passion.

If you pick your industry based only on how much money you think you can make, then you can expect to always be chasing the money.

If you take the time to align your day-to-day passion and your skills, you will flat out make the rest of the process much easier.

Subjects like maths and physics provide you with an appropriate base for lifelong learning. 

Another major component of this process refers to the high importance of learning through projects, which eventually enables students to gather up practical skills, that can easily be kept and improved throughout their life.

While resorting to lifelong learning may provide some advantages, such as enabling individuals of different ages and professional experience levels to share their knowledge, it also has certain disadvantages like the fact that the time the learners are supposed to devote to learning is decreasing the moments spent with their family.

Considering the K-12 system, we see that the emphasis on skills over content has changed the curriculum. Students increasingly focus on learning skills, but they may not learn too much history or science.

Critical thinking is not enough on its own. It needs to be used to gain insight from studying meaningful subject matter, like history or economics or physics or chemistry.

Critical thinking is a disciplined activity. It is not something we can acquire without intensive study and practice, nor can we isolate it from knowledge. Knowledge is foundational to provide the structure to do deep thinking.

Only with some background knowledge, can we apply the skills of critical thinking to problems and texts, understand the strengths and weaknesses of arguments, and offer creative solutions.

Old-school learning techniques that involve huge investments of time and money are getting increasingly unfeasible.

New ways to learn, using various online tools, allows people to upgrade and refresh their skills. There are peer-to-peer learning platforms where experts are teaching how to attain mastery at specific skill-sets.

Spending years in the classroom to learn a subject is keeping the individual unproductive.

Shortening the educational time commitment, and providing more hands-on work experience can make mastering skills easier and provide the young workforce with tangible, real-world skill-sets like confidence, adaptability, computational thinking and a design mindset.

Until two decades ago, the general goal of colleges was for academic pursuits and teaching individuals to become more well-rounded. The general thought was that colleges were not vocational institutions.

Now, and possibly in the future, colleges will have to focus more on training and change their curriculum to meet the demands of employers.

A four-year college education remains the best choice for those who can get admitted to a selective university. But for everyone else, an alternative path might be the best way to go.

In the future, one training path will be company-sponsored apprenticeship programs to cover the skills missing between the secondary system and what employers are looking for.

Read once and then quiz yourself. Retrieving that information is what actually produces more robust learning and memory.

Even if you get the answers wrong, you'll still have an idea of what you don't know. This helps guide your studying more effectively.

Relate new information to prior information for better learning.

During a second reading, try to connect new information to something you already know.

While the evidence on the economic and happiness benefits is mixed, attending college depends on the particulars of each person.

A child's gifts, circumstances, and career ambitions all affect whether college is the right choice. But, the parents are often more excited that their child will get into college while the child does not want to be there in the first place. While college is the right choice for many, it is good to remember that there is not just one path to success.