@ErikJonker hey Erik, I'm a bit concerned for the future of quality academia. I mean a PhD is validation of knowledge you could accumulate for free from a library or the internet. That's what people want out of other people, trust that they know what their doing, and will do that. So trust me when I say I greatly value and respect people with a PhD. I'm concerned what will happen when that process is also automated. Validation is not that tricky to automate. It seems like in the future it would collapse the financial stability of good academic institutions for the sake of efficiency. But that doesn't replace the hands on engagement of a quality academic institution. The value of quality collaboration.

My sister is a doctor of medicine, and it baffles her that I built a company as a college drop out, and I employ well tenured scholars, and also college drop outs, well that's not really what bothers her. What bothers the both of us, is that I have partnerships with universities that couldn't facilitate the curriculum faster than the evolution of the tools developed. Most people I interview who are academic veterans, (I call them vets cause they're burned out already), their knowledge is already obsolete. I've even started it this practice of giving fresh graduates I've hired no concrete job desk for a few months. Like a workation if you will. Not like an internship, but give them a chance to decompress and acclimate. This one guy I immediately sent him on paid holiday just as an experiment, on his first day he didn't question it at all, he just literally thanked me for my understanding. Also a lot of my fresh graduates seem to have developed bias from their institutions, and that's horrible. When I investigated that, it's not even the institutions fault, they do it to themselves and the institutions not aware. Yet they used the institution to do it. I'm really at a loss here. Please forgive me, I'm not trying to rant, merely trying to paint a picture. My organization is multinational, and I'm observing this globally at all levels of life. You have any advice? I'm even considering retirement, getting my diploma, and becoming a professor of something and draw no salary. But that's a bit extreme. So far the problem is manageable, but the growth is constant over the past 10 years. I'm also not the only one experiencing this, my contacts at IBM, Google, and Lockheed have asked me about it over the years and I can only contribute, "I don't know". :-) anyways I apologize again for the long windedness of this. I would greatly appreciate some solid thoughts or ideas. I've got plenty of resources to dump into this. There must be a way to achieve a symmetry between academia and the evolving state of workforce demand. How do I go about getting the ball rolling here? What do I need to do to incentive the academia side? I've hosted lectures, given grants. People show up, take notes, nod heads, agree. Even conglomerates like Sinarmas and Samsung have gone as far as building there own Universities. I've kicked that ball around my board room, and while it's easy to green light, we're all pretty sure we'd wind up contributing to the problem after studying the analytics 😂.

Again sorry about the long windedness of my toots but I think clarity drives quality.

Thanks and I hope you have a lovely weekend.

#STEM #academia