Jozef Alexi


Career development 21h
I'm a student looking for a part-time job as a waiter in a cafe. On my first day they told me to work for free so they could see if I was good enough for the job. I worked 10 hours.
The next day the same thing happened. I worked another shift and still didn't get paid.
Now it's the third day in a row. They want me to work another free shift and say that if everything goes well, they'll... officially hire me on Monday.
But I don't really trust them. Maybe this is their trick - they keep bringing in new people, make them work for free for a few days, and then replace them with someone else without paying. What do you think?

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2   

  • Chris

    3h

    As a former state investigator with the labor department and a federal mediator with the equal opportunity commission I would ask to be paid and go... somewhere else to work. more

  • Jim Nicholson

    3h

    It appears you are being used. They certainly can evaluate your skills after 2-3 hours. DO NOT continue in this scheme.

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Charlotte Baker


Career development 2d
I work at a small company where everyone goes to the pub on Friday evenings with their husbands or wives. I don't go very often, and I never bring my boyfriend because I don't really want to be part of that whole family-style group. Lately, though, my coworkers have been asking if I even have a boyfriend and seem annoyed that I don't join them. How can I get them to stop asking and leave me alone... about these Friday pub outings?

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2   

  • Jim Nicholson

    3h

    Simply tell them you have other plans. (Work-out, shopping, meeting OTHER friends, family obligations, etc.)

  • Thuso LUTHAGA

    13h

    You can literally tell them that you are not much of an after-hours socializer but you appreciate being included and let them know you do have a... boyfriend but you just keeping your social life separate from work more

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Career development

 12h

Dubai founder schedules 4 job interviews, only 1 candidate shows up: 'It's a shame'


Despite the disappointing turnout, the fourth candidate made a strong impression during the interview process.

She added that one of the candidates who had failed to attend later reached out seeking another opportunity.

"The one who didn't show up asked for a second chance. Others just disappeared." Reflecting on the experience, she concluded: "It's a shame really."

"That why is email... confirmation, calendar invite accept, whatsapp follow-up and phone call follow up confirmation is very important. I learned it from my previous experience as HR assistant," wrote one user.

"As a candidate searching for jobs as well it's been a shame," another wrote. "Three different people hiring in Dubai, got in touch with me over the past week, said they will send a google invite and didn't show up. Some don't even reply with a rejected message."

"Same experience as a job seeker, 800 applications in a month and not even a single revert," a third person added. more

Career development

 12h

I'm Max Levchin, CEO of Affirm and Co-Founder of PayPal, and This Is How I Work


Credit: Ian Moore / Lifehacker Composite; ismagilov / iStock / Getty

It would be a point of pride for any entrepreneur to start a single company and achieve profitability, but Max Levchin has done a bit more than that. He's had a hand in creating an entire string of notable and influential startups.

Levchin co-founded PayPal, the now-ubiquitous online payment service and served as its CTO until... they were acquired by eBay in 2002. (Which indeed earned his place in the facetiously nicknamed 'PayPal Mafia', a prodigious group of entrepreneurs that includes Elon Musk and others.)

But that's just one of the many companies Levchin has had a hand in creating, advising, or influencing in their nascent stages. He started a media-sharing service called Slide that was acquired by Google, provided some of the initial funding for Yelp, invested in Evernote where he also served on the board, and now is the CEO of Affirm, a financial company making consumer credit more accessible and transparent. And that's not even the full résumé. We caught up with Levchin to learn a little about how he works.

Location: San Francisco, CA

Current Gig: CEO & co-founder of Affirm; Founder & President of HVF; co-founder & Chairman of Glow

One word that best describes how you work: Relentlessly

Current mobile device: iPhone 7

Current computer: MacBook Pro

First of all, tell me a little about your background and how you got to where you are today.

I foremost see myself and approach problems as a computer scientist and mathematician. My view of life is built from first principles. I was born in Kiev, Ukraine. Pretty much every person in my family was a scientist. I've co-founded and invested in hundreds of companies (primarily through my innovation and investment lab, HVF), most notably PayPal, Yelp, Slide, Glow and Affirm.

What apps, software, or tools can't you live without?

My bikes. Even if I am traveling, if I go somewhere for more than a week, I usually take my bike with me. My backpack typically holds my laptop, really nice headphones, a nice, high-quality notebook (I still like writing things down on paper), and a good pair of sneakers. If I can't ride my bike, I can run.

What's your workspace setup like?

At work, I have a standing desk with a big monitor, and headphones are essential. If I don't have headphones, I'd rather have earplugs than nothing. At home, my kids have taken over my nook, so now I just work from my laptop.

What's your best time-saving shortcut or life hack?

I tend to come up with precise routines and repeat them obsessively every day. In perfect detail, every morning at home looks the same. By cutting out the contemplation of what to do next, I achieve extreme efficiencies. For example, I know it takes precisely 90 minutes between waking up and getting onto my bike. I know how to cut that to 75 minutes if needed. I have a very specific set of steps, and once I find a routine that works, I codify until it's perfected, minute-by-minute. This works with well with anything that doesn't require creativity.

What's your favorite to-do list manager?

I use Evernote a lot. It has a good checkbox mode to it. I don't use it for everything, however. I typically start my day by flushing out my inbox, then I create a to-do list for the day, typically in Evernote. I start by copying yesterday's list and then add and adjust. During the workday, I will sometimes make notes on paper or email myself, then at the end of the day, I go back to Evernote.

Besides your phone and computer, what gadget can't you live without and why?

Bluetooth headphones. I also wear a heart-rate monitor every day and often a bike power meter for my workouts. They help me to not only get the workout I want, but I also know if my body is under stress. If at the start of my ride, my heart rate is over 50, I know I didn't get enough sleep.

What everyday thing are you better at than everyone else? What's your secret?

I can execute almost any recipe with extreme precision. I have zero creativity when it comes to cooking, but a recipe -- even with 30 ingredients and 50 steps -- I can execute pretty well. I'm also pretty good at making coffee.

What do you listen to while you work?

It depends on what I'm trying to accomplish. If I need to think through something, I match the beat of the music to the rough pace that I expect my brain to work. I listen to a lot of classical music, and if I'm not working, something more somber like Chopin or Bach. If I am trying to rip through a hundred emails, and it's not as much about analyzing, rather just responding, I seek out high beats-per-minute, and I may listen to music that does not have languages that I understand or is fully instrumental. French techno/house, Spanish ska, Argentinian or Brazilian ska or rock, Japanese techno, etc.

What are you currently reading?

I just finished A Gambler's Anatomy and I read a lot of books like that. Double Your Profits: In Six Months or Less. Paper Menagerie, which I discovered because I thought Ken Liu did a great job translating The Three-Body Problem, then I found that he writes his own science fiction, too. I typically read a lot of non-fiction business books, and I also read one science-fiction or spy novel per month. I read four to six books a month.

How do you recharge? What do you do when you want to forget about work?

Cook. As I mentioned before, I try to make sure my days follow a pattern. I try to get home in time to cook or help prepare dinner for the kids. I'm hopelessly uncreative in the kitchen, but I take instruction well.

What's your sleep routine like?

I'm fortunate that about 10 seconds pass between my head hitting the pillow and falling asleep. I can fall asleep under any circumstances and have insomnia maybe once every two years. I often miss takeoff when on airplanes. I usually get to bed by 10:30 or 11pm. My goal is to get 7 hours of sleep, but I only need 5.

Fill in the blank: I'd love to see _________ answer these same questions.

Hmmm, I've actually asked a lot of people these types of questions already. Such as professional cyclists.

What's the best advice you've ever received?

I don't know, but I think all of it came from my wife.

The How I Work series asks heroes, experts, and flat-out productive people to share their shortcuts, workspaces, routines, and more. Have someone you want to see featured, or questions you think we should ask? Email Andy. more

Eliot Feldman
Career development 3d
How do you proactively manage your career development to ensure you are consistently moving toward your goals?

  • Samuel Obina

    13h

    By being constructively conscious of the level you are in, regularly building on your knowledge base trough research and extensive reading

  • jimmy boutsikakis

    1d

    Evaluation. Take the time to understand where you are and where you want to be. Envision the path that gets you there - including all the steps you’ll... need to take. Try to be content with where you are now, don’t let the idea that “I’m not where I want to be” become an obstacle in itself - instead try to use that feeling, or thought, as inspiration to motivate you. Bless you. more

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Career development

 14h

The Death Of The Cover Letter: Why Recruiters No Longer Trust It, And What Works Now


As AI tools make it easier to generate polished cover letters, employers are increasingly focusing on skills, portfolios, referrals, case studies and proof of work instead

When a person applies for a job, they usually build a strong résumé, write a compelling cover letter and tailor it to the role. The idea was that the application could help a candidate stand out from hundreds of competitors.... But recruiters increasingly believe that playbook may no longer work.

The rise of generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) has fundamentally changed how people apply for jobs and, increasingly, how companies hire. Candidates now use ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude to generate polished cover letters, customised résumés and even interview responses within seconds.

While this initially helped candidates submit stronger applications, employers are increasingly placing less value on cover letters and more emphasis on what candidates can actually demonstrate -- portfolios, skill assessments, referrals, GitHub profiles, work samples and live problem-solving exercises.

Why The Cover Letter Is Losing Relevance

The cover letter was once considered a useful hiring signal. It allowed employers to assess communication skills, motivation and cultural fit. Candidates who invested time in researching a company and writing a thoughtful application could distinguish themselves from hundreds of competitors. Generative AI has changed that.

According to research cited by Knowledge at Wharton, AI-generated cover letters initially improved application quality and increased candidates' chances of securing interviews. However, once AI tools became widely available, the value of cover letters as a hiring signal declined sharply.

The reason is when nearly every candidate can generate a polished, professional-looking cover letter within minutes, employers can no longer use it to distinguish exceptional candidates from average ones.

According to Business Insider, firms including Google, Amazon, Cisco and McKinsey have moved away from treating cover letters as a central part of the hiring process.

Tech giants rely heavily on a "Tell me vs. Show me" philosophy. Candidates are vetted through concrete metrics: targeted resume keywords, targeted technical online assessments, case studies, and structured behavioural interviews

How AI Changed The Recruitment Game

The AI revolution has made applying for jobs easier than ever. A candidate can now use AI tools to rewrite a résumé for a specific role, generate a customised cover letter, optimise keywords for applicant-tracking systems and even prepare interview answers. What previously took several hours can now be completed in minutes.

For recruiters, however, this has created an avalanche of applications.

Hiring managers increasingly report receiving hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of applications for a single opening. Many of these applications are polished, professionally written and highly customised. Yet recruiters often discover during interviews that the candidate's actual skills do not match the sophistication of the application.

LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky recently gave cover letters a "D" grade, arguing that employers increasingly want candidates to "show their work" rather than describe themselves.

Recruiters are no longer asking, "Can this person write a convincing application?" They are increasingly asking, "Can this person actually do the job?"

What Employers Are Looking At Instead

As traditional application documents lose credibility, employers are searching for alternative ways to evaluate talent.

In technology, recruiters increasingly examine GitHub repositories, coding portfolios and real-world projects. A candidate who has built an application, contributed to open-source software or developed a working product often has a stronger advantage than someone with a perfectly written cover letter.

Consulting firms and corporate employers are placing greater emphasis on case studies, simulations and problem-solving exercises. Many companies now conduct behavioural assessments and practical tests early in the hiring process to evaluate skills directly.

Referrals are also becoming more valuable. Recommendations from trusted employees provide a signal that is far harder to generate artificially than a cover letter.

Video portfolios are emerging in some industries as well. Candidates increasingly use personal websites, LinkedIn content, project showcases and recorded presentations to demonstrate expertise and communication skills.

The hiring process is gradually shifting from self-description to proof of work.

What Should Indian Graduates Focus On?

According to government estimates, India has more than 1.5 million engineering graduates entering the workforce annually, in addition to thousands of MBA graduates, data analysts, software developers and finance professionals. Thus, adding a stiff competition for entry-level jobs each year.

Technology companies have slowed hiring compared with the post-pandemic boom years, while consulting firms, start-ups and financial institutions continue to receive overwhelming numbers of applications for graduate roles.

Many Indian students have embraced AI tools to improve résumés and cover letters. However, if recruiters increasingly ignore those documents, graduates may need to rethink how they present themselves.

Engineering students may need stronger project portfolios. MBA candidates may have to demonstrate practical business experience through internships and case competitions. Freshers entering IT and consulting may find that technical assessments and live interviews matter more than written applications.

The traditional strategy of submitting hundreds of applications may become less effective if recruiters rely increasingly on demonstrated skills rather than written documents.

The New Hiring Divide

The emerging divide in the labour market may not be between people who use AI and people who do not. Instead, it could be between those who can demonstrate skills and those who can only describe them.

AI can help a candidate write a convincing cover letter. It cannot easily fake a strong portfolio, a successful project, a coding repository or a candidate's ability to solve problems in a live interview.

This shift could create challenges for students from tier-2 and tier-3 colleges who may have fewer networking opportunities and industry connections. If referrals become more important, access to professional networks could become an even bigger factor in hiring outcomes.

At the same time, digital platforms may create new opportunities. Candidates can now showcase projects online, build public portfolios and demonstrate expertise to employers across the world without relying solely on formal credentials.

Thus, the age of "apply and wait" may be fading. The age of "show me what you've done" may already have begun. more

Tom Seliga


Career development 1d
At our company we go away for a weekend once a month. The boss buys everyone barbecue and beer as a thank-you for our work. But we have to pay for our own hotel rooms. I know I'm bringing my wife, so we'd need a double room anyway, but if it's a company event, shouldn't the company pay for the hotel too? I'm thinking about stopping these trips because they end up costing quite a lot.

  • Sheila Milburn

    18h

    They should pay IF its mandatory. If not required, stay home. If you still feel obligated go less frequently, like once a qtr. Or rent a Airbnb... with another couple. Ask your tax preparer, you may be able to claim on your taxes.  more

  • _Miss_ Barbosa

    1d

    The thing is the activity is optional, and you stay if you wants. You should let your boss that and express you like and you will like more if could... be more close. more

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Career development

 19h

Most people have a job. Few people have a career strategy.


Many professionals spend years working hard, learning new skills, and taking on new responsibilities.

Yet when asked a simple question: "What do you want for your career?", many struggle to answer.

Not because they lack ambition.

But because they have never stopped to design their careers intentionally.

Instead, they react to opportunities as they appear:

- a promotion

- a new manager

- a... new company

- a new project

- an unexpected opportunity

Sometimes this works.

Often it doesn't.

That's why I believe one of the most valuable professional tools is the Individual Development Plan (IDP), known in many organizations as a Personal Development Plan (PDP).

Not because it predicts the future.

But because it helps us become active participants in our careers rather than passive observers.

Your career is a design problem

One of the reasons I like development plans is that they follow a mindset very similar to design.

Good designers rarely start by asking:

" What should I build today? "

Instead, they ask:

" What outcome am I trying to achieve? "

Career development works the same way.

Before choosing:

- courses

- certifications

- books

- jobs

- mentors

We should first define where we want to go.

Without a destination, almost any path seems reasonable.

The problem is that progress becomes difficult to measure.

The 70-20-10 framework

One of the most influential models for career development is the 70-20-10 framework.

It suggests that professional growth typically comes from three sources.

70%: On-the-job experience

Most learning happens while doing the work itself.

This includes:

- projects

- challenges

- mistakes

- problem-solving

- leadership experiences

- day-to-day responsibilities

This is why stretching assignments are often more valuable than additional training.

Experience creates context.

And context accelerates learning.

20%: Feedback and relationships

The second source of growth comes from other people.

This includes:

- coaching

- mentoring

- feedback

- peer learning

- networking

- leadership guidance

Sometimes a single piece of feedback can create more growth than months of formal training.

The challenge is being open enough to hear it.

10%: Formal education

Courses, certifications, books, workshops, and training programs still matter.

But they usually play a supporting role.

Knowledge is important.

Application is what transforms knowledge into capability.

Building your own development plan

There are countless templates available.

But most effective development plans answer five simple questions.

1. Where do I want to go?

What is your long-term objective?

What role are you trying to reach?

What type of work do you want to do?

What kind of impact do you want to have?

Without clarity, development becomes random.

2. What are my strengths?

What skills, experiences, and capabilities already support that journey?

This is often overlooked.

People focus so much on weaknesses that they forget to leverage what already works.

3. What gaps need to be closed?

What capabilities are still missing?

These might include:

- technical skills

- leadership abilities

- communication

- strategic thinking

- business knowledge

- stakeholder management

The goal is not perfection.

The goal is identifying the few capabilities that matter most.

4. What actions will move me forward?

Once the gaps are clear, create a roadmap.

Think in terms of:

- short-term goals

- medium-term goals

- long-term goals

Career growth rarely happens overnight.

But it becomes much more likely when actions are intentional.

5. How will I learn?

This is where the 70-20-10 model becomes useful.

For every development objective, ask:

- what experiences can help me learn?

- who can help me grow?

- what formal education would be useful?

This creates a more balanced approach to development.

Why leaders should care about development plans

Career development is personal.

No manager can own someone else's career.

But leadership can play an important role.

The best leaders help people:

- gain perspective

- identify blind spots

- explore opportunities

- understand their potential

One useful framework for this conversation is the 9-Box Grid.

The purpose of the 9-Box Grid

The 9-Box Grid is often used by organizations to evaluate talent based on two dimensions:

Performance

Performance reflects past results.

It answers questions such as:

- what has this person delivered?

- how consistently do they perform?

- what impact have they created?

Performance looks backward.

Potential

Potential reflects future capability.

It explores questions such as:

- can this person handle greater complexity?

- can they grow into larger responsibilities?

- can they create value in new contexts?

Potential looks forward.

When combined, these two dimensions create nine possible talent profiles.

The goal is not labeling people.

The goal is creating better development conversations.

Why the 9-Box is useful

One of the biggest mistakes organizations make is assuming performance and potential are the same thing.

They are not.

Some professionals consistently deliver excellent results but prefer to deepen expertise rather than move into larger leadership roles.

Others have significant growth potential but have not yet reached their full performance level.

Understanding the difference allows leaders to provide more meaningful support.

And it helps professionals make more informed career decisions.

The real purpose of development tools

The most important thing to remember is that neither the Individual Development Plan nor the 9-Box Grid exists to judge people.

They exist to support growth.

Used correctly, they help answer questions like:

- what should I learn next?

- what experiences should I seek?

- what strengths should I leverage?

- what opportunities should I pursue?

Those questions matter far more than the templates themselves.

Plan the direction nor the certainty

Many people wait for their company to manage their career.

Some wait for a manager.

Others wait for an opportunity.

But careers rarely improve through waiting.

They improve through intentional action.

The purpose of an Individual Development Plan is not creating certainty.

It's creating direction.

And in a world where work changes constantly, having direction may be one of the most valuable advantages a professional can have.

References

Marcelo Nóbrega. Retrieved from

Marcelo Nóbrega LinkedIn profile

Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, & James Noel. (2018). The Leadership Pipeline: Developing Leaders as a Competitive Advantage. GMT Editores. more

Career development

 21h

The Emersonian Lawyer: The Compass And The Resume - Above the Law


Auth. note: This is the first essay in The Emersonian Lawyer, a series about what Ralph Waldo Emerson's philosophy has to say about the specific pressures, compromises, and possibilities of a legal career. The series draws on Emerson's core essays, Self-Reliance, Compensation, Circles, The Over-Soul, The Poet, and Nature, and applies them to the actual mechanics of practicing law. It is not a... self-help series. It is a philosophical one, written in a practitioner's register.

There is a question most lawyers never ask, not because it is unanswerable, but because the credential machine never stops long enough to let them.

Are you following your compass, or your résumé?

These are not the same direction. They may not even point toward the same hemisphere. The résumé follows what is legible: the clerkship that looks right, the firm with the correct name, the practice group that is growing. The compass follows something harder to name: the sense, when you are doing a particular kind of work with a particular kind of problem, that you are doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing. Not performing. Not executing. Being.

Most lawyers can remember the last time they felt that. The number of years between that memory and today is worth noting.

The Scene

It is late on a Tuesday. A partner at a large firm is reviewing a junior associate's memo. The work is excellent: thorough, technically sound, impeccably structured. The partner edits it the way she always edits it: tightening the analysis, softening the conclusion, adjusting the register so the client hears what it needs to hear rather than what the law actually says. She is very good at this. She has been very good at this for eleven years.

She sends the memo back with tracked changes. She closes her laptop. She sits for a moment in a quiet office.

The moment passes. She opens her laptop. There are fourteen more emails.

This scene is not a tragedy. It is not even unusual. By every external measure, this lawyer is successful. She is a partner at a major firm, which means she survived a selection process with brutal attrition. She makes more than her parents earned in their lifetimes. She is, on the credential machine's ledger, a clear success.

What the ledger does not record is the thing she felt, and didn't quite feel, in that moment of quiet.

The Machine

The legal profession has built one of the most elaborate credentialing architectures in any professional field. Law school rankings, which sort applicants by LSAT scores and undergraduate GPA into numerical hierarchies. Law review membership, granted by a competition administered by the students who won the prior year's competition. Federal clerkships, which confer prestige in inverse proportion to the court's distance from Washington. Lateral market signals, which communicate your value in basis points of book of business. The partnership track, which sorts again, and then again, until the survivors emerge at the other end with the title and the equity stake, and sometimes discover, at that moment, that the thing they had been pursuing is not quite what they imagined.

Each of these credentials is real. Each one communicates something true about the person who holds it. The LSAT measures something. Law review membership demonstrates something. A federal clerkship is genuinely formative. None of this is fiction.

But what the credential machine communicates, taken as a system, is not who you are. It is how legible you are to institutions that need to sort people quickly. Those are different things, and confusing them has consequences that accumulate slowly and arrive suddenly.

The machine is not malicious. It is not a conspiracy. It is a sorting mechanism that does exactly what sorting mechanisms do: it optimizes for the characteristics it can measure, and it renders invisible the characteristics it cannot. The credential machine can measure your LSAT score. It cannot measure whether contract litigation is the problem you were built to solve. It can measure your law school GPA. It cannot measure whether the clients you serve are the ones whose problems feel, to you, like problems worth the years of your life you are spending on them.

The sorting function is useful. It is just not a compass.

What Emerson Saw

Ralph Waldo Emerson was not writing about lawyers. He was writing about poets. But what he observed in 1844, in an essay called The Poet, applies to every professional who has chosen a credential over a calling, or who has discovered, partway through a career, that they may have done so without quite realizing it.

Emerson distinguished between two kinds of people: those who are shaped by their circumstances (who become what the institution needs them to become) and those who are compelled by a vocation they did not entirely choose. The first group, he argued, becomes legible. The second group becomes present. These are not the same achievement.

His argument in Self-Reliance goes further. The person who leads with credentials, Emerson suggests, is confessing something: that they trust the institution's judgment about their value more than their own. That they have outsourced the question of who they are to the bodies authorized to certify it. This is not vanity or weakness. It is the rational response to a system that rewards legibility and punishes ambiguity. But it is also, Emerson insists, a form of self-abandonment so gradual that most people never notice when it happened.

The résumé answers a question: What have you done that institutions will recognize?

The compass answers a different question: What are you here to do?

These two questions can, in fortunate cases, produce the same answer. But the credential machine is not designed to produce that fortune. It is designed to produce lawyers. Legible, credentialed, institutionally sorted lawyers, not this particular lawyer, with this particular nature and this particular set of problems they were built to solve. The machine does not know who you are. It knows what you scored.

But there is something the machine is missing that is prior to the score, and Emerson named it in his first book, published in 1836, eight years before The Poet, before Self-Reliance had found its famous formulations.

Nature is Emerson's foundational claim: there is a reality prior to institutional construction. The credential machine did not create it. The rankings did not measure it. The clerkship did not confer it. What it is: the actual constitution of what a person is, their specific quality of attention, the problems that genuinely absorb them, the work that activates the deepest current of what they are. Emerson called this a person's nature, and he meant the word literally. Not temperament. Not personality. The actual ground of what you are and what you are for, which exists beneath everything the machine has layered on top of it.

In Nature, Emerson describes a moment he called the "transparent eyeball": the experience of genuine perception when the ego steps aside and what remains is direct contact with reality as it actually is. The machine forces the lawyer to serve the ego and the institution. The compass does the opposite: it strips the ego away so the lawyer can serve the law itself. This is closer to seeing the forest for the trees than to any flow state, closer to apprehending the whole than to any feeling of comfortable fit. The lawyer who has been there knows. Not because it was comfortable. Because it was real.

The compass, in other words, is not a preference. It is a response to something that was always there. The machine did not create it. It can only obscure it.

A compass is a crude instrument. It tells you nothing about the destination. But it was enough to let the ancient mariners leave familiar coastlines and discover the world.

The Man Who Didn't Use the Machine

Robert Houghton Jackson was born in 1892 in Spring Creek, Pennsylvania. He attended Albany Law School for one year, then left. He apprenticed under a country lawyer named Frank Mott in Jamestown, New York, reading cases in Mott's office, accompanying him to court, learning the practice of law by practicing it. He was admitted to the bar in 1913 without a law degree. By the credential machine's logic, he was not quite legible.

He went on to become Solicitor General of the United States, then Attorney General, then Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. In 1945, Harry Truman appointed him Chief American Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal, where Jackson had to construct the legal architecture for trying crimes that had no precedent in international law: inventing categories, drafting charges, making arguments before a court that had never existed for conduct that had never been prosecuted.

Jackson did not accomplish this because he had the right credentials. He accomplished it because he had followed, his entire career, a compass that pointed consistently at a single question: what is the relationship between law and political power, and what does it mean for a civilization when that relationship breaks down? That question led him from a country law office in upstate New York through the New Deal to the Supreme Court to a courtroom in Bavaria where it mattered more than any credential could have prepared him for.

He was also, by his own account and by the account of everyone who knew him, an Emersonian. He had read Emerson deeply and returned to him throughout his life. He modeled his professional conduct (his insistence on independent judgment, his resistance to capture by any single client or institution, his commitment to articulating the law rather than merely winning cases) on principles he found in Emerson's essays.

Jackson appears here not as a model to emulate. Very few lawyers will construct international tribunals. He appears here as something more useful: proof that the compass route exists. That following your actual nature rather than the credential sequence is not naive. That the lawyers history occasionally requires are not the ones most legible to the machine.

He is also a provocation. Jackson worked with what was in front of him: the cases available in Jamestown, the clients who walked through Mott's door, the government positions that opened during the New Deal. He did not wait for the right credential to arrive before beginning. He oriented himself by compass and moved.

One more thing needs to be said about Jackson, honestly. He is not offered here as a spotless figure. His record on race (including his role in legal decisions that now stand as among the profession's most consequential failures) belongs to the full account of who he was and what he did. The direction he followed is what matters for this argument. And that direction is not his alone.

If the compass points toward a reality prior to institutional construction (toward a nature that existed before any ranking system sorted for it), then it is available to everyone the machine has excluded as surely as it was available to Jackson. The machine has historically denied the compass route to lawyers who did not look like him: through bar exam barriers, through clerkship networks that ran on personal connection, through the entire architecture of the credentialing system that this series examines. The Emersonian argument is a critique of that denial, not a celebration of the one person who navigated around it in one historical moment. The direction is universal. The machine is what distributes access to it unequally. That is part of the indictment.

What This Series Is

The Emersonian Lawyer is a series of essays about what Ralph Waldo Emerson's philosophy has to say to the practicing lawyer, the law student, and the legal professional who has begun to suspect that the credential machine and the compass are pointing in different directions.

It is not a wellness series. It will not offer you balance, or resilience strategies, or advice about billing fewer hours. The legal profession already has those books, and they are not wrong so much as insufficient. They treat the symptoms without touching the diagnosis.

The diagnosis, stated plainly, is this: the legal profession has built a system that produces competent lawyers who are estranged from their vocation, and it has done so systematically, at scale, for decades. The ABA's own data (which shows sustained rates of anxiety, depression, and professional dissatisfaction that are among the highest of any credentialed profession) is not an anomaly. It is the system's output.

Emerson has something to say about this. Not because he was writing about lawyers, but because he was writing about exactly this: what happens to a person who has built a career around institutional legibility rather than genuine vocation, and what it looks like to navigate back toward the compass.

This series has been shaped by an ongoing conversation with Professor Kevin Lee, a legal philosopher whose work in civic personalism offers both a challenge and a complement to the Emersonian framework. His challenge, which this series will engage directly: does the compass route lead somewhere genuinely universal, or has it historically been available only to lawyers who already had standing, who looked like Jackson, who moved in the networks that the machine was built to serve? That challenge sharpens the argument. The answer this series offers: the compass points toward something prior to institutional sorting, available to everyone the machine has excluded. The machine is what restricts access. Naming that restriction is part of what Emerson was doing, and part of what this series does.

This series will work through five of Emerson's core essays (Self-Reliance, Compensation, Circles, The Poet, and The Over-Soul) and the foundational Nature, which grounds all of them. Each essay will apply one of these texts to a specific friction in legal professional life. Along the way, Jackson will serve as the series' biographical protagonist: not a saint, not a simplified hero, but a lawyer who made the Emersonian moves in real institutional conditions and left a documented record of how he did it, with an honest accounting of where he fell short.

The essays that follow will be specific. They will name the credential machine by its parts. They will apply Emersonian philosophy to the billable hour, the lateral market, the partnership track, the in-house role, the captured judgment of the associate who softens the memo because softening memos is what the institution requires.

They will not tell you what to do. Emerson does not tell you what to do. What he does (what this series will attempt) is to give you vocabulary for something you may already sense but have not quite found the language to name.

The compass is always there. The machine is very loud. But the compass is always there. more

Career development

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'Dying on the Inside' podcast highlights stories of women lifers


A new project by the Logan Center for Urban Investigative Reporting at Temple University looks at aging under a life sentence in Pennsylvania state prisons

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In Episode 2 of "Dying on the Inside," a new podcast... produced by the Logan Center for Urban Investigative Reporting at Temple University, Terri Harper recites a list of ailments and surgeries -- seven over just the last 15 years -- that have deteriorated her body.

At 57 years old, Harper has served 35 years of a life sentence at State Correctional Institution (SCI) Muncy, a medium to maximum security women's prison in Pennsylvania. In addition to two back surgeries, both of Harper's hands have been surgically repaired for carpal tunnel syndrome, and, like many incarcerated women nationwide, she's had a hysterectomy. Long waits between diagnoses and surgical operations became a routine feature of her medical journey -- one that is shared by many other aging lifers.

"For women lifers, there's too much 'wait and see,' as a theory and as a practice [in healthcare]," Harper said. "Too much pushing it off and not taking the problem seriously right off the top."

Each of the five episodes in the series, hosted and co-executive produced by Cherri Gregg of Studio 2, offers a window into the lives of the roughly 150 aging women serving life sentences at Muncy. On May 13, at a launch event for the podcast, Gregg shared that one of the goals of the series is to open up the "layers" of incarceration that are rarely discussed.

"This conversation is not about excusing harm," Gregg said. "It is a conversation about understanding people fully, and what growth, redemption, and public safety really mean over time."

Women Lifers Resume Project

According to 2022 data from decarceration-focused nonprofit The Sentencing Project, roughly 7,000 women nationwide are serving life sentences or virtual life sentences (a sentence of 50 years or more). The "Dying On the Inside" podcast is one of a few sustained efforts to highlight the stories of women lifers. Since 2015, the Women Lifers Resume Project of PA (WLRP) has amplified the experiences and, notably, the accomplishments and aspirations of women lifers across Pennsylvania.

The project site hosts the "résumés" of over 70 women lifers incarcerated at Muncy and SCI Cambridge Springs. Each profile includes how long the woman has been incarcerated, her age at entry, her future objectives should she be released, and information about activities and educational and vocational programs she's been involved in while inside. The résumés end with a personal statement titled "The Woman I Am Now."

"When we received their written résumés, we did not go in to say, 'Oh, we're going to make this more professional.' We let them be who they are and express themselves as who they are," said WLRP co-developer Darlene Williams, who became involved with the project through her daughter, who is serving a life sentence at Muncy.

Williams and fellow co-developer Ellen Melchiondo say these résumés are useful tools for women applying for compassionate release, for lawyers taking up their cases, and grassroots organizations advocating for the release of women lifers or improved prison conditions. The résumés also serve to counteract the stereotypes and misconceptions that pervade public perception of women lifers.

Williams told Prism about a movie she saw about women in a New York prison after her daughter was sentenced.

"They didn't show the camaraderie, they didn't show the friendships. They showed them fighting in the cells, and they just showed them as animals," Williams said. "If you don't know anyone in prison, [then] you don't know that there are families inside these facilities. My daughter belongs to a family. They're close buddies; they're like sisters."

Melchiondo echoed these sentiments and connected them to arguments and misconceptions around women lifers, their behavior inside prison, and their likelihood of returning should they be released.

"They're not monsters, and because they are there so long, they invest a lot of time and energy to maintain the highest quality of life for themselves," said Melchiondo. "People say, 'Oh, they're lifers, they've got nothing to lose. They're just going to commit crimes and mess with the system and everything.' But no, they want everything predictable. Everybody pitches in and makes that day the best they can."

Harper is among the over 70 women featured on the WLRP.

"In order to expect to be seen and treated outside of the stereotype of my sentence, I must demonstrate my understanding of the difference between right and wrong," Harper wrote in her 2023 résumé. "I do. Then, someone must give me the opportunity to actually physically demonstrate what I know and have learned because what is on paper is only a fraction of that knowledge. The proof is in the action. I'm asking you to be that person to give me that opportunity through your legislative power."

This year, that opportunity is fast approaching as her most recent application for clemency is up for merit review in July. The review represents one step in Pennsylvania's winding clemency process.

Clemency in Pennsylvania

Over the past half-decade, the process of releasing individuals from life sentences has grown increasingly complicated, limiting the prospects of those seeking to return home and dramatically increasing how many people are aging inside. According to The Appeal, 12% of Pennsylvania's prison population is serving life without parole; one-third of those are ages 55 or older.

After applying for clemency, Pennsylvania lifers may have to wait up to a year and a half before their petition is even acknowledged. The first stage is an institutional review involving an interview with the prison superintendent. If the review is successful, the application advances to a merit review.

Four merit reviews are scheduled this year, during which hundreds of applications are considered. At these reviews, the Board of Pardons, consisting of a victim advocate, a corrections expert, a medical expert, the state's lieutenant governor, and the attorney general considers the applicants' institutional record, the activities and programs they have participated in, their personal statement, and letters submitted by the public either in support of or in opposition to their release.

If at least three of the five members approve, the application advances to a public hearing after which the board must unanimously vote in support of sending the petition to the governor. Pennsylvania's process is unlike that of other states, such as New York, which grants the governor unilateral clemency power. In Pennsylvania, only 17 women serving life sentences have been granted clemency in the past 50 years.

Despite this labyrinthine process -- and the fact that this is Terri Harper's second attempt to receive clemency -- her younger sister, Cashmere Harper, is hopeful that her petition will be successful. The sisters have maintained their relationship over the past three decades through visits and phone calls.

"When she first got arrested, I was 6. [But] before that, everybody thought that Terri was actually my mom -- that's how close we were," Cashmere said. "We're 17 years apart, but we're as close as Siamese twins, is what I like to say to people."

As detailed on her résumé, Terri has been involved in a host of organizations at Muncy, pursued higher education, and continued athletic training before medical complications started impacting her body. Cashmere said that she is particularly proud of her sister's most recent achievement: earning an associate's degree to become a paralegal, a step toward her larger goal of practicing family law.

Cashmere said she hopes that members of the public who learn about her sister's story will support her clemency petition by penning letters of support to the Board of Pardons in advance of her upcoming merit review. She also hopes the public will assess her sister based on the woman she is now and not her past choices.

"Even back then, [she] was just an amazing person. She wanted to help people. She was a police officer, and so she automatically was in a place where she wanted to help people and wanted to make a difference," Cashmere said. "She just made one bad decision, and she's been paying for it ever since. No matter what people believe, at the end of the day, she's still human, and that alone should get her a little respect, a little sympathy."

Editorial Team:

Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor

Lara Witt, Top Editor

Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor more

Career development

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Prime Bank hosts career development event for Daffodil University's students


Prime Bank PLC yesterday organised an interactive career development and financial literacy programme, titled "PrimeAcademia Empowering Youth Season 2.0", in collaboration with the Career Development Centre of Daffodil International University (DIU) and the DIU Finance Club, at the university's Ashulia campus in Savar, Dhaka.

The programme brought together students, academicians and banking... professionals for an engaging day focused on career readiness, leadership development, financial literacy and industry-academia collaboration.

Shaila Abedin, senior executive vice-president and head of liability and women banking at the bank, inaugurated the event as the chief guest, according to a press release.

During the interactive sessions, students gained practical insights into modern banking, financial inclusion, leadership, employability skills and career development opportunities in the financial sector.

A special mock interview session allowed participants to experience real-life recruitment processes and receive career guidance directly from industry experts.

Participants also received certificates, gift kits and networking opportunities, making the event both educational and impactful.

Through initiatives like "Empowering Youth Season 2.0," Prime Bank PLC continues its commitment to nurturing future leaders and strengthening youth employability by bridging the gap between academia and industry, the release added.

Prof Mohammed Masum Iqbal, pro-vice chancellor of DIU; Mohammed Nadir Bin Ali, registrar; Hamidul Haque Khan, treasurer; MM Mahbub Hasan, senior vice-president and head of financial inclusion and school banking at the bank; and Monoara Khatoon, vice-president and head of talent acquisition and organisational development, along with other officials, students, teachers and guardians, were also present at the event. more

Career development

 1d

Why People Are Learning Skills Outside School In 2026: The Rise Of Real-World Education


In the year 2026, a significant transformation is underway in how individuals approach learning and career development. This article explores the compelling reasons behind the growing trend of people acquiring skills outside traditional educational institutions.

The Shift From Traditional Education to Real-World Learning

The traditional education system is undergoing a profound shift, with more... individuals seeking real-world learning experiences. This introduction delves into the driving forces behind this change.

Why School Alone Is No Longer Enough in 2026

In 2026, the rapidly evolving job market demands more than a traditional school curriculum can offer, making it imperative for learners to acquire practical skills to truly future-proof their careers.

The conventional school system, while foundational, often struggles to keep pace with the swift changes occurring in various industries, leaving a significant gap between education and workforce readiness.

Learners in 2026 are realizing that solely relying on academic learning might not equip them with the competency and practical skills necessary for immediate employment and sustained career development. This reality fuels the drive to seek additional learning experiences that are directly applicable to real-world scenarios, fostering a more robust and adaptable skillset for the modern professional landscape.

The Rise of Self-Directed and Skill-Based Education

The emergence of self-directed and skill-based education highlights a growing preference for personalized learning journeys focused on acquiring specific, in-demand competencies.

Individuals are increasingly taking charge of their learning journey, moving towards self-directed and skill-based education models that prioritize practical learning and hands-on experience. This shift allows learners to focus on developing specific competencies that are highly valued in the contemporary job market, rather than following a rigid, generalized curriculum.

The emphasis is on gaining the skills they need, fostering adaptability and a continuous learning-how-to-learn mindset, which is crucial for thriving in the dynamic work environments of 2026 and beyond.

How Technology Is Changing the Way People Learn

Technology is revolutionizing education by offering innovative tools and platforms that enhance accessibility, personalization, and the effectiveness of learning experiences for everyone.

Technological advancements, particularly in AI, are fundamentally transforming the landscape of education in 2026, making skill development more accessible and engaging than ever before. AI tools and sophisticated online learning platforms provide personalized learning programs, enabling learners to acquire new skills at their own pace and according to their individual needs.

This digital evolution is bridging the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application, allowing individuals to engage in project-based learning and receive real-time feedback, thus creating a more dynamic and effective learning ecosystem that prepares them for the demands of the modern workforce.

What Is Real-World Education?

Real-world education encompasses learning experiences directly applicable to practical situations, emphasizing skills and knowledge relevant to professional and personal life.

Definition of Skill-Based vs. Academic Learning

Skill-based learning prioritizes practical, hands-on competencies, contrasting with academic learning's focus on theoretical knowledge and traditional subject matter mastery.

Skill-based learning, often synonymous with real-world education, centers on developing tangible practical skills and competencies that are directly applicable to specific tasks and industries. This contrasts sharply with academic learning, which traditionally emphasizes theoretical knowledge, critical thinking, and a broad understanding of various subjects, often within a structured curriculum.

In 2026, the distinction highlights why many individuals are choosing to upskill or reskill through practical learning programs that promise immediate readiness for the job market, prioritizing demonstrable skills over purely academic achievements.

Why Practical Knowledge Matters More Than Ever

Practical knowledge is crucial in 2026, as it directly translates into job-ready skills and problem-solving abilities, which are highly valued by employers across all sectors.

In the rapidly evolving global job market of 2026, practical knowledge has become an indispensable asset, often outweighing purely theoretical understanding. Employers are increasingly seeking individuals who possess not just academic credentials but also hands-on experience and the ability to apply their learning to real-world challenges.

This demand for practical skills underscores the importance of learning experiences that offer direct application, fostering adaptability and ensuring learners are equipped to contribute effectively from day one. It highlights why many are pursuing skill development outside traditional pathways to future-proof their careers.

The Role of Lifelong Learning in Modern Life

Lifelong learning is essential in modern life, enabling continuous adaptation to new challenges and opportunities, fostering personal growth, and ensuring career longevity in a dynamic world.

Lifelong learning is not merely an advantage but a necessity in the fast-paced world of 2026, where continuous upskilling and reskilling are vital for sustained career development and personal growth. The constant evolution of technology and job roles means that individuals must consistently learn new skills and adapt their competencies to remain relevant and competitive in the workforce.

This commitment to ongoing education, embracing various learning experiences beyond formal schooling, empowers individuals to navigate career transitions, explore new opportunities, and maintain a high level of adaptability throughout their professional lives.

Why People Are Moving Away From Traditional School Learning

Many individuals are departing from traditional school learning due to its perceived irrelevance to modern job markets, seeking more direct and practical routes to career readiness.

Fast-Changing Job Markets and Outdated Curriculums

Fast-changing job markets often render traditional school curriculums outdated, failing to equip students with the modern, real-world skills demanded by employers in 2026.

The primary reason many individuals are moving away from traditional school learning in 2026 stems from the dramatic speed at which job markets are transforming, often leaving conventional academic curriculums several steps behind.

The skills and knowledge taught in many established educational programs can quickly become obsolete, creating a significant gap between what is learned in school and what is actually required by employers.

This disconnect means that learners emerge from these systems without the most current and relevant competencies, prompting them to seek alternative avenues for skill development that are more responsive to industry demands and technological advancements.

Lack of Practical, Job-Ready Skills in Schools

Traditional schools often fail to provide practical, job-ready skills, leading many learners to seek real-world education elsewhere to gain the competencies needed for immediate employment.

A critical factor driving people away from traditional schooling is the pervasive lack of emphasis on practical, job-ready skills within their curriculum. While academic institutions excel at imparting theoretical knowledge, they often fall short in providing hands-on experience, project-based learning, or real-world problem-solving opportunities that are essential for immediate workforce integration.

This deficiency means that graduates frequently lack the specific competencies that employers in 2026 are actively seeking, pushing individuals to pursue alternative education pathways that prioritize skill development and practical application, thereby bridging the gap between education and employment readiness.

Rising Education Costs and Return on Investment Concerns

Rising education costs and growing concerns about return on investment are prompting many to reconsider traditional schooling, opting for more affordable and skill-focused learning alternatives.

The escalating costs associated with traditional higher education, coupled with increasing concerns about the return on investment, are significant deterrents for many potential learners in 2026. As tuition fees continue to climb, students and their families are questioning whether the financial outlay genuinely translates into better job prospects and higher earning potential, especially when compared to more affordable and skill-focused learning alternatives.

This economic pressure encourages individuals to explore self-directed and skill-based education options that offer a clearer, more immediate pathway to gaining relevant competencies without incurring substantial debt, prioritizing practical learning over a costly, prolonged academic journey.

The Rise of Online Learning and Digital Education Platforms

Online learning and digital education platforms are experiencing unprecedented growth, offering flexible, accessible, and often more affordable pathways to skill development for millions worldwide.

YouTube, Courses, and Free Learning Ecosystems

YouTube, alongside various online courses and free learning ecosystems, has democratized education, providing accessible and diverse opportunities for skill development to a global audience.

The year 2026 has witnessed an unprecedented explosion in the popularity of online learning through platforms like YouTube, dedicated course websites, and a myriad of free learning ecosystems. These resources have collectively revolutionized skill development by making a vast array of knowledge and practical skills accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

Learners can engage in self-paced education, exploring everything from coding to creative arts, often at no cost. This digital revolution empowers individuals to take control of their learning journey, allowing them to acquire new skills, upskill, or reskill efficiently and effectively, independent of geographical or financial barriers.

AI Tutors and Personalized Learning Tools

AI tutors and personalized learning tools are transforming education by adapting content to individual needs, offering customized feedback, and optimizing the learning journey for every learner.

The integration of AI tools, particularly AI tutors and personalized learning instruments, is profoundly reshaping the online learning landscape in 2026. These advanced systems utilize artificial intelligence to analyze a learner's progress, identify areas of strength and weakness, and then dynamically adapt the learning content and pace to suit individual needs.

This highly customized approach ensures that each learner receives targeted support and resources, optimizing their skill development process. By providing instant feedback and adaptive challenges, AI tutors create highly effective and engaging learning experiences, making skill acquisition more efficient and tailored than ever before, fostering a truly individualized education system.

Flexibility and Self-Paced Education Advantages

Flexibility and self-paced education advantages mean learners can tailor their schedules and progress at their own speed, making skill development accessible amidst other life commitments.

One of the most compelling advantages of online learning and digital education platforms in 2026 is the unparalleled flexibility and the opportunity for self-paced education they offer. Learners are no longer constrained by rigid class schedules or geographical locations; they can access course materials and engage in skill development at any time, from anywhere.

This adaptability is crucial for individuals balancing work, family, or other commitments, enabling them to fit learning into their busy lives seamlessly. The ability to control their learning journey and progress at their own speed significantly enhances engagement and retention, making the pursuit of new skills both convenient and highly effective.

Why Employers Value Skills Over Degrees in 2026

In 2026, employers are increasingly prioritizing practical skills and demonstrable competencies over traditional academic degrees, reflecting a significant shift in hiring paradigms and valuing real-world readiness.

Shift Toward Portfolio-Based Hiring

In 2026, the hiring landscape has significantly evolved, with a pronounced shift towards portfolio-based hiring, where candidates demonstrate their practical skills and competencies through tangible projects rather than solely relying on academic degrees.

This approach allows employers to directly assess a learner's ability to apply their knowledge and engage in project-based learning, showcasing real-world problem-solving abilities and a genuine understanding of the job market's demands.

This emphasis on a robust portfolio ensures that the individuals being considered possess the hands-on experience and skill development necessary to contribute immediately to the workforce, bridging the gap between education and practical application.

Demand for Real-World Problem Solvers

The contemporary job market in 2026 exhibits an insatiable demand for real-world problem solvers -- individuals who possess not just theoretical knowledge but also the practical skills and adaptability to tackle complex challenges head-on.

Employers are actively seeking candidates who have engaged in practical learning and can demonstrate a track record of applying their competencies to solve genuine issues, often through project-based learning or internships.

This focus on problem-solving ability underscores the importance of a skill-based education, where learners acquire the agility and critical thinking necessary to future-proof their careers and effectively navigate the rapidly evolving professional landscape, highlighting why skills matter more than ever.

Freelancing, Remote Work, and Skill Economy Growth

The rise of freelancing, the widespread adoption of remote work models, and the overall growth of the skill economy in 2026 have fundamentally reshaped employer expectations and opportunities for career development.

These trends heavily favor individuals who possess specialized practical skills and can offer specific competencies, often learned through self-directed or online learning, rather than those with only traditional academic qualifications. This environment encourages individuals to continuously upskill and learn new skills, bolstering their adaptability and readiness for diverse work arrangements.

The flexibility of remote work, coupled with the demand for specific, demonstrable skills, reinforces the value of practical learning experiences and strong skill development, allowing individuals to thrive in a dynamic workforce.

Most Popular Skills People Are Learning Outside School

In 2026, individuals are actively pursuing a diverse array of high-demand skills outside traditional schooling, driven by the need to future-proof careers and meet evolving job market demands.

Digital Skills: Coding, AI, and Data Literacy

The imperative for digital fluency in 2026 has propelled coding, AI literacy, and data literacy to the forefront of popular skills people are learning outside traditional education systems.

Learners are recognizing that a deep understanding of AI tools, data analysis, and programming languages is crucial for navigating an increasingly automated workforce and securing promising career development paths.

These practical skills, often acquired through online learning platforms and self-directed programs, equip individuals with the competency to engage with cutting-edge technologies and contribute meaningfully to innovation, effectively bridging the gap between traditional education and the demands of the modern, data-driven job market.

Creative Skills: Design, Content Creation, and Branding

In the visually-driven digital landscape of 2026, creative skills such as design, content creation, and branding have become immensely popular, offering significant opportunities for individuals learning outside school.

These competencies are vital for effective communication and engagement across various platforms, from social media to digital marketing. Learners are honing their abilities in graphic design, video production, copywriting, and personal branding, often through hands-on, project-based learning experiences and readily available online resources.

This focus on creative skill development allows individuals to cultivate unique voices and visual identities, future-proofing their careers by meeting the ever-growing demand for compelling digital narratives and impactful brand presence in the modern workforce.

Financial Skills: Investing, Business, and Side Hustles

Beyond traditional employment, financial skills -- including investing, business acumen, and the development of side hustles -- are increasingly sought after by learners in 2026 seeking greater autonomy and income opportunities.

Individuals are actively engaging in practical learning to understand market dynamics, manage personal finances, and even launch their own ventures, often fueled by the desire for financial independence and robust career development.

This emphasis on financial literacy and entrepreneurial skills allows learners to diversify their income streams and build long-term wealth, demonstrating a proactive approach to economic stability. The accessibility of online learning and resources makes acquiring these vital life skills more feasible than ever, empowering individuals to confidently navigate the complexities of the modern economy.

How Technology Is Accelerating Self-Learning

Technology, particularly AI, is dramatically accelerating self-learning by providing personalized tools, interactive platforms, and bite-sized content, making skill development more efficient and engaging.

AI-Powered Learning Assistants and Smart Tools

AI-powered learning assistants and smart tools are revolutionizing self-learning in 2026, acting as invaluable partners in skill development by offering personalized guidance and instant feedback.

These AI tools leverage sophisticated algorithms to understand a learner's progress, identify areas for improvement, and then recommend tailored content or practice exercises, optimizing the learning journey. By simulating real-world scenarios and providing immediate correction, these assistants enhance practical learning and accelerate the acquisition of complex competencies.

This technological advancement significantly reduces the gap between education and real-world application, empowering individuals to master new skills with unprecedented efficiency and support, fundamentally reshaping the experience of learning how to learn.

Interactive Apps and Real-Time Feedback Systems

Interactive apps and real-time feedback systems are pivotal in accelerating self-learning, transforming passive consumption into active engagement and significantly enhancing skill development. These applications, widely used in 2026, provide immersive learning experiences that simulate hands-on scenarios, allowing learners to apply their knowledge instantly and receive immediate constructive criticism.

This continuous feedback loop is crucial for refining practical skills, correcting misconceptions, and solidifying understanding, making the learning process highly effective and dynamic. Such systems cultivate a responsive learning environment that mirrors real-world challenges, helping individuals gain the skills they need more rapidly and building confidence in their competencies, bridging the gap between theory and practical application.

Microlearning and Bite-Sized Education Trends

Microlearning and bite-sized education trends are fundamentally changing how people acquire new skills in 2026, accelerating self-learning by breaking down complex topics into manageable, easily digestible modules.

This approach caters to busy schedules and shorter attention spans, making skill development accessible and sustainable for lifelong learning. Learners can engage with targeted content for brief periods, fitting education seamlessly into their daily routines, which is particularly beneficial for upskilling or reskilling without overwhelming commitments.

This method, often facilitated by online learning platforms, enhances retention and allows for rapid acquisition of specific competencies, proving that effective practical learning doesn't always require lengthy, traditional study sessions, and truly empowers individuals to learn how to learn efficiently.

The Psychology Behind Self-Learning Motivation

The motivation for self-learning stems from deep psychological drives, including autonomy, passion, and the desire for immediate gratification through real-life application and skill acquisition.

Autonomy and Control Over Learning Paths

A core psychological driver behind the surge in self-learning in 2026 is the profound sense of autonomy and control individuals gain over their own learning paths. Unlike traditional education systems with rigid curriculums, self-directed learning empowers individuals to choose what, when, and how they learn, aligning their skill development with personal interests and career aspirations.

This control fosters intrinsic motivation, as learners invest in subjects they genuinely care about, leading to more effective and sustainable learning experiences. This freedom to navigate their learning journey, explore diverse practical learning opportunities, and acquire specific competencies without external pressure significantly enhances commitment and engagement, making skill acquisition a truly personal and rewarding endeavor.

Learning Based on Passion Instead of Pressure

Learning based on passion rather than external pressure is a significant psychological motivator for self-learning in 2026, fostering deeper engagement and more effective skill development. When individuals pursue knowledge and practical skills that genuinely interest them, the learning journey becomes inherently rewarding, leading to sustained effort and superior competency acquisition.

This contrasts sharply with traditional schooling, where curriculum requirements often dictate what is learned, potentially stifling enthusiasm. By allowing learners to follow their curiosity and develop skills they are passionate about, self-directed education cultivates a lifelong learning mindset, ensuring that the process of acquiring new skills is both enjoyable and highly productive, directly contributing to real-world expertise.

Faster Reward Cycles and Real-Life Application

The psychological appeal of self-learning in 2026 is significantly amplified by faster reward cycles and the immediate gratification derived from real-life application of newly acquired skills. Unlike the delayed outcomes of traditional academic pathways, self-directed learners often experience tangible results quickly, whether it's completing a project, solving a real-world problem, or contributing to a team.

This rapid feedback and practical learning reinforce motivation, demonstrating the direct value of skill development and boosting confidence. The ability to see immediate impact from their efforts, bridging the gap between education and practical outcomes, encourages individuals to continuously learn new skills and adapt, making the learning journey more engaging and profoundly satisfying, thus future-proofing their careers.

Benefits of Learning Skills Outside School

Career Flexibility and Income Opportunities

Learning skills outside traditional schooling in 2026 offers unparalleled career flexibility and a wealth of income opportunities, directly contributing to robust career development. By focusing on practical skills and competency acquisition, individuals can quickly adapt to the evolving demands of the job market, making themselves highly adaptable and valuable across various industries.

This emphasis on skill development allows for the pursuit of diverse roles, freelancing gigs, or even entrepreneurial ventures, effectively future-proofing one's career and providing the freedom to explore multiple pathways, thus expanding financial prospects beyond conventional employment and creating new learning experiences.

Faster Skill Acquisition and Practical Application

One of the primary advantages of learning outside the traditional education system in 2026 is the significantly faster skill acquisition and more immediate practical application. Self-directed and online learning programs often focus on hands-on experiences and project-based learning, allowing learners to gain the skills they need efficiently and directly apply them to real-world scenarios.

This accelerated approach to competency building means individuals can quickly upskill or reskill, bridging the gap between education and workforce readiness. The ability to promptly implement newly acquired practical skills not only enhances learning but also provides a tangible return on investment, reinforcing the value of learning how to learn effectively.

Personal Growth and Confidence Building

Beyond professional advantages, learning skills outside school profoundly impacts personal growth and confidence building in 2026. Taking charge of one's learning journey and successfully acquiring new practical skills fosters a deep sense of accomplishment and self-efficacy.

This autonomy in skill development empowers learners to explore their passions, overcome challenges, and adapt to new situations, leading to increased self-esteem and resilience. The continuous process of upskilling and mastering new competencies builds a strong foundation for lifelong learning, cultivating a growth mindset that extends beyond career development, enhancing overall well-being and readiness for all aspects of life.

Challenges of Self-Directed Learning

Lack of Structure and Discipline Issues

Despite its many benefits, self-directed learning in 2026 presents significant challenges, particularly concerning a lack of structure and potential discipline issues. Without the rigid framework of a traditional education system, learners must possess strong self-motivation and organizational skills to maintain consistent progress in their skill development.

The absence of external deadlines, regular assessments, and a prescribed curriculum can lead to procrastination or an inability to prioritize learning tasks, potentially hindering the acquisition of practical skills. Overcoming these hurdles requires a high degree of personal accountability and the development of effective strategies for managing one's own learning journey to ensure sustained competency growth.

Information Overload and Conflicting Resources

The vast landscape of online learning and digital education platforms in 2026, while offering immense opportunities for skill development, also poses the challenge of information overload and conflicting resources. Learners embarking on a self-directed journey can easily become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of available content, making it difficult to discern reliable, high-quality practical learning materials from less credible sources.

Navigating conflicting advice or outdated information can impede effective skill acquisition and competency building. Developing critical evaluation skills and seeking trusted mentors or curated programs becomes essential for learners to efficiently gain the skills they need and avoid getting lost in a sea of data, ensuring a clear path for career development.

Need for Guidance and Mentorship

A notable challenge in self-directed learning for 2026 is the inherent need for guidance and mentorship, which is often missing outside traditional educational structures. While online learning platforms provide ample resources, the personalized support and expert feedback offered by teachers or mentors are crucial for effective skill development and problem-solving.

Learners, especially when tackling complex practical skills or embarking on project-based learning, can benefit immensely from the wisdom and direction of an experienced individual who can clarify concepts, offer insights, and provide accountability. Bridging the gap between self-study and expert interaction is vital for ensuring comprehensive competency and successful career development, highlighting the value of a trusted partner in the learning journey.

How to Successfully Learn Skills Outside School

Choosing High-Value Skills for the Future

Successfully learning skills outside school in 2026 begins with strategically choosing high-value skills that are poised to future-proof one's career and meet the evolving demands of the job market. This involves researching current industry trends, identifying emerging technologies, and understanding which practical skills will be most sought after by employers.

Focusing on competencies like AI literacy, data analysis, advanced digital skills, or specific creative and financial skills ensures that the investment in skill development translates into tangible career opportunities and increased adaptability within the workforce. A thoughtful selection of learning experiences is the cornerstone of effective self-directed education, guiding the entire learning journey towards meaningful outcomes.

Creating a Consistent Learning Routine

To successfully acquire new skills outside the traditional education system in 2026, creating a consistent learning routine is paramount. Self-directed learners, free from external schedules, must establish their own discipline and structure to ensure continuous progress in skill development.

This involves dedicating specific times each day or week for practical learning, treating these sessions with the same importance as other commitments. A regular routine, whether it's for hands-on practice, online learning modules, or project-based learning, builds momentum and reinforces learning habits, enhancing competency acquisition and making the journey to gain the skills they need more manageable and sustainable. Consistency is key to unlocking the full potential of independent skill-based education.

Combining Theory, Practice, and Real Projects

The most effective way to successfully learn skills outside school in 2026 is by strategically combining theoretical knowledge, hands-on practice, and engagement with real projects. While online learning offers abundant theoretical resources, true skill development and competency are forged through practical application and project-based learning.

Learners should actively seek opportunities to implement what they've learned, whether through personal projects, internships, or volunteer work, thereby bridging the gap between education and real-world challenges.

This integrated approach ensures that practical skills are not only understood but also mastered and confidently applied, making individuals more adaptable and job-ready for the demands of the modern workforce, truly future-proofing their careers.

The Future of Education in a Skill-Based World

Hybrid Learning Models (School + Online Skills)

The future of education in 2026 is increasingly moving towards hybrid learning models, seamlessly integrating traditional schooling with online skill development. This approach acknowledges the strengths of both systems: the foundational knowledge and structured environment of traditional education combined with the flexibility and practical skills focus of online learning.

Learners will benefit from a comprehensive education system that not only imparts academic understanding but also ensures direct career development through hands-on competency acquisition. These hybrid programs will equip individuals with diverse learning experiences, preparing them with the adaptability and real-world skills needed to thrive in a rapidly evolving job market and future-proof their careers by leveraging the best of both worlds.

AI-Driven Personalized Education Systems

AI-driven personalized education systems are set to revolutionize the future of learning in 2026, offering unprecedented levels of customization and efficiency for skill development. These advanced AI tools will analyze individual learner progress, preferences, and learning styles to create dynamic, adaptive curricula that cater precisely to their needs.

This personalized approach to competency acquisition will ensure that every learner receives targeted practical learning opportunities, real-time feedback, and resources that optimize their journey to gain the skills they need. Such an education system promises to make learning how to learn more engaging, effective, and tailored, accelerating career development and fostering a more adaptable, skilled workforce prepared for automation and the demands of 21st-century skills.

The Decline of Degree-Only Career Paths

In the skill-based world of 2026, a significant shift will be the continued decline of degree-only career paths, as employers increasingly prioritize demonstrable practical skills and competency over traditional academic qualifications.

This evolution in the job market means that while degrees may still hold value, they will no longer be the sole determinant of career success or even entry into many professions. Individuals who invest in continuous skill development through online learning, hands-on experiences, and project-based learning will have a distinct advantage, showcasing their adaptability and readiness for the workforce.

This trend underscores the importance of a skill-based education, bridging the gap between education and employment, and enabling learners to future-proof their careers in a dynamic global economy where skills matter more than ever.

Conclusion: Why Real-World Education Is the New Standard

In 2026, real-world education has emerged as the new standard, fundamentally reshaping how individuals approach skill development and career readiness. The convergence of rapidly changing job markets, the accessibility of online learning and AI tools, and a growing emphasis on practical skills has propelled competency-based learning to the forefront.

This article has explored the compelling reasons why learners are seeking education outside traditional structures, demonstrating how real-world experiences, hands-on application, and continuous upskilling are not just advantages, but necessities for thriving in the modern workforce. As the education system continues to evolve, prioritizing adaptable, job-ready skills will be paramount for both individual career development and global economic advancement, truly future-proofing the workforce of the year 2026. more

Career development

 1d

Dress for Success Worldwide Appoints Molly Fletcher to Board of Directors


Dress for Success Worldwide has appointed leadership expert, author and former sports agent Molly Fletcher to its Worldwide Board of Directors, adding a prominent advocate for women's leadership and professional development as the organization advances its global economic mobility initiatives.

Fletcher joins the board at a time when Dress for Success is expanding programs designed to help women... navigate a rapidly evolving workforce. Her experience in leadership development, negotiation, strategic growth and women's advancement is expected to support the nonprofit's efforts to broaden its reach and strengthen career development opportunities for women worldwide.

"Molly's track record of helping individuals and organizations unlock their full potential makes her an exceptional addition to our Board," said Joanie Bily, chief executive officer of Dress for Success Worldwide. "As the future of work continues to evolve, her expertise in leadership, communication, and personal growth will be invaluable as we advance our Project North Star goal of reaching 2 million women by 2030."

Founded to help women achieve economic independence through career development and professional support, Dress for Success has expanded its mission beyond workplace attire to include workforce training, financial literacy, entrepreneurship programs and career readiness resources. The organization now operates through a global network of 130 affiliates across 16 countries.

Fletcher brings a unique background that spans professional sports, business leadership and executive coaching. Widely recognized as one of the first female sports agents, she negotiated more than $500 million in contracts during her career and built a reputation as a leading negotiator in a traditionally male-dominated industry.

Since transitioning from sports representation, Fletcher has become a bestselling author, keynote speaker and advisor to Fortune 500 companies, professional sports organizations and executive leadership teams. Her work focuses on leadership effectiveness, communication, relationship-building and personal development.

"Dress for Success has long stood for something I care deeply about: meeting women at a pivotal moment and helping them step into who they're becoming," Fletcher said. "I can't wait to roll up my sleeves and collaborate in partnership with an amazing Board and organization."

Her appointment aligns with Dress for Success Worldwide's broader strategic efforts to address changing workforce dynamics and equip women with the skills needed to succeed in an increasingly digital and technology-driven economy. The organization has placed a growing emphasis on areas such as entrepreneurship, health and wellness, financial education, workforce development and emerging career pathways.

As part of its long-term growth strategy, Dress for Success is also exploring new initiatives focused on workplace innovation, artificial intelligence, career mobility and organizational capacity-building. Board members play a key role in helping guide those efforts through strategic oversight, governance and external engagement.

The organization's Project North Star initiative aims to reach 2 million women globally by 2030, reflecting an ambitious effort to expand access to career resources and economic opportunity. Leaders say partnerships, program innovation and increased awareness will be critical to achieving that goal.

Fletcher's addition comes several months after the nonprofit launched its Success Starts Now brand campaign and unveiled a new visual identity in February 2026. The initiative was designed to reflect the organization's evolving mission and expanded focus on helping women navigate the future of work through modern workforce development programs and strategic partnerships.

Dress for Success Worldwide has become one of the most recognized organizations focused on women's economic advancement, providing career coaching, professional development resources and support networks designed to help women secure employment, build careers and achieve long-term financial stability.

By bringing Fletcher onto its board, the organization gains a nationally recognized leadership voice with deep experience helping individuals and organizations achieve growth and transformation. As workforce expectations continue to shift and demand for career development resources grows, Dress for Success is positioning itself to expand its impact while helping more women access the tools, networks and opportunities needed to achieve sustainable economic mobility. more

Career development

 1d

Informal mentorships may be the most effective, HR leader says


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HR professionals tend to speak highly of mentorship's role in career development. In 2024, one chief transformation officer interviewed by HR Dive went so far as to say that having a mentor is a "priceless" component of learning and achieving future goals.

At the same time, it's not always necessary for mentorships to be... highly structured programs, said Michelle Kilroy, chief people and communications officer at The Weather Co. The organization offers both formal and informal programs, but it's often the latter that allow employees to take advantage of opportunities to meet with other employees who pique their curiosity or who are doing interesting work.

"I personally think the most impactful ones are the organic, informal mentoring opportunities," Kilroy said. "We foster a lot of opportunities for people to meet individuals like that, whether it is organically in their own departments or leaders across the organization."

Additionally, informal mentorships provide flexibility that allows each relationship to meet different employees' needs, she continued. That said, putting structure in place around the time frame of the relationship can help to bolster accountability and commitment to keep the arrangement from fizzling out.

It also may help for mentors to have certain qualities that are conducive to building trust with mentees. Looking back on her own career, Kilroy highlighted vulnerability as a key trait, particularly when her mentors relayed their experiences with impostor syndrome or situations in which they had reservations about a decision or mistake they had made.

"Vulnerability is a huge requirement in order to be considered authentic, and I think authenticity is what leads to trust," Kilroy said. "Authenticity is really required for that trust building. You can't have a good mentoring relationship without that trust."

In order for mentorships to be beneficial, they need to be relevant and actionable, she noted. Both parties in a mentor relationship also have to agree on what the goal of the partnership is, whether that is advancement or the development of certain skills. The programs are especially valued for upskilling, according to a 2023 survey of hiring managers and job seekers by Express Employment Professionals.

Regardless of the goal, HR teams should keep employee experience front of mind when developing mentorship programs, according to Kilroy. That means having conversations about the kinds of experiences employees want and need to receive from both formal and informal programs rather than solely working backwards from the end goal of the mentorship.

"We might just jump straight to the results or outcomes, and I think we need to look at experience as being a foundation for whatever that desired outcome or result is," Kilroy said. more

Career development

 1d

Transport Manager training at your own pace


Gaining a Transport Manager CPC is a vital qualification for anyone wanting to work as a professional Transport Manager - because it's a requirement of the company's O Licence. The Transport Manager CPC (TMCPC) qualification opens the doors to new opportunities, further career development and increased salary expectations.

It is, of course, demanding, helping logistics professionals further... develop their skills.

Driver Hire Training's tutor-led learning package is highly regarded within the industry.

For those looking to achieve TMCPC status but need a bit more flexibility to complete their studies, Driver Hire Training also offers self-study courses too.

"Every little detail about the course, teacher, support staff, and then to the exam, there was support and assistance every step of the way. My teacher has a wealth of knowledge as well as being a former Transport Manager, I felt as though we were friends" Steve B

Offering great value, a basic Driver Hire Training self-study package has the essentials needed to pass the exam. 'Self-study Plus' includes interactive online modules, case studies and progress reports, so drivers can check how they're doing. The 'Premium Package' has all those features plus extras such as a one-day interactive exam preparation course to sharpen skills.

To find out more about TMCPC training with Driver Hire visit the dedicated training website, where you'll also find a contact request form to complete. If you'd prefer to speak to someone, call 0808 178 9977 or you can email: training@driverhire.co.uk more

Career development

 1d

Attracting, recruiting, and retaining registered nurses and care workers in care homes: the REACH realist review


This award was funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Health and Social Care Delivery Research programme (NIHR award ref: NIHR131016) and is published in full in Health and Social Care Delivery Research; Vol. 14, No. 21. See the NIHR Funding and Awards website for further award information.

We worked on understanding strategies which can help with attracting,... recruiting, and retaining registered nurses and care workers in care homes.

In the first step we interviewed registered nurses and care workers, talked to stakeholders (e.g. care home managers), and took insights from relevant research papers. The information was used to identify 22 practical strategies, and develop rough ideas around why the strategies work, for which staff, the conditions needed, and the costs involved. Registered nurses, care workers and wider sector stakeholders prioritised 10 strategies focused on staff recruitment and retention (and not on attracting new staff): staff recognition, flexible working, career development, salary package, early investment, induction, continuous feedback, caring community, effective interviewing and listening to all staff. These were taken forward for further testing and developing. In steps 2-4, we searched online library databases and social care websites for relevant papers (n = 153) and information from these papers was used to build on the rough ideas developed during step 1. Stakeholders helped with refining the final findings.

The 10 prioritised strategies were combined into 5: effective job interviews, providing opportunities for career development, rewarding and recognising staff, promoting work-life balance, and caring conversations. The strategies interact and work together. The way staff are recruited is important for retaining staff. Setting accurate expectations during the job interview stage avoids creating false impressions, and this helps with developing staff commitment. Providing staff with career development opportunities, rewards and recognition, flexible working options, and caring conversations helps staff feel listened to, respected, and valued, and this creates job satisfaction. Giving staff opportunities for career development and supporting staff with caring conversations also helps with building staff confidence. Overall, providing staff with positive experiences means staff will also respond positively in return in terms of being committed and loyal to the employer. Supportive leaders and a sense of inclusion and fairness are needed for these strategies to work well. This research has described ways of improving staff recruitment and retention, understanding how to attract new staff remains an important research gap. more

Career development

 1d

AI interviews are here. Here's how IT contractors can ace them


Treating an AI interview as something you can wing because no prep is needed to talk to a robot is, in our experience, the most reliable way to fail it -- Primis Talent.

It's all very well to advise that professional job-seekers with niche technical expertise, strong personal branding, and "the ability to navigate AI-assisted recruitment processes" are the best-placed IT contractors of... 2026/27.

But without any practical guidance on how to pass what's increasingly at the heart of those processes - the AI interview -- the advice may be easier said than followed.

Is AI changing how IT contractors are being assessed for work?

We agree that something is definitely shifting in how temporary IT job-seekers and other professional candidates are being assessed. And it seems significant, because the use of AI in recruitment is moving faster than most people in the UK's professional labour market have caught up with.

We'd go so far as to say that AI-assisted hiring processes (including the AI interview) are no longer an experiment being run by a handful of large enterprises -- they are now mainstream, writes Ben Broughton, the founder-owner of Primis Talent, a specialist technology recruitment agency placing permanent and contract professionals across several markets globally.

Key Takeaways

* Almost half of UK job-seekers have sat an AI interview, which 66% of recruiters are set to scale up, but candidate dislike of AI interviews may be why 8 in 10 were not told they face one

* IT contractors harm their prospects if they reject any of the four main types of AI interviews, of which Asynchronous Video Interviews are the most common for temporary jobs

* Structure, spacing, specificity, keyword use, verbal content and pacing are key AI interview considerations for candidates, who must prioritise giving results-based answers with specifics

* Your chosen environment for an AI job interview is vital, as is recording an AI practice interview, despite 'no interview prep required' claims by some employers using AI to screen candidates

* ATS is still the critical first stage of the AI-assisted recruitment process, with CV applicants needing to realise that AI matching is literal, and keyword-led, if they want to make it to the AI interview stage

What's a common IT contractor reaction to AI interviews?

Firstly, an acknowledgement.

For any contractor who has spent years relying on their strong CV, solid references, and good face-to-face conversations to win their next contract, the rules of engagement quietly shifting in this AI-led way can feel disconcerting.

But the data is blunt about where we are.

AI-conducted interviews have more than tripled in two years, from 10% of hiring processes to 34%, according to CoverSentry citing Q4 2024 data by ResumeBuilder.

Are AI interviews set to grow?

Meanwhile, two-thirds of recruiters plan to expand their use of AI pre-screening interviews ("candidate assessments") in 2026.

As a specialist staffing company that places IT contractors every week, we are seeing some downstream effects of the algorithm taking over a bigger chunk of the hiring process.

And those effects are adverse, because 'strong' professional job candidates are being filtered out -- not because of what they can or can't do, but because they did not understand the Artificial Intelligence-facilitated process that they were in.

Is suspicion of AI interviews understandable?

We understand why contractors might be wary of AI interviews.

The mistrust is well-founded and well-documented.

Research published in April 2026 by Greenhouse (in what appears to be the most comprehensive study of candidate attitudes to AI hiring to date) found that 30% of UK candidates have already withdrawn from a hiring process after discovering it involved an AI-led interview.

Are employers being transparent about AI interviews?

The same study (covering 2,950 job seekers across five countries) found that 47% of UK job-seekers have now been interviewed by AI, and out of those, 82% were not told beforehand.

In addition:

* Nearly a quarter only realised AI was involved once the interview had already started.

* Only one in ten candidates reported that employers had clear AI disclosure policies.

Are AI interviews worth it for IT contractors?

But here's the practical reality. Withdrawing from the hiring process because it includes AI screening is becoming increasingly untenable in the UK's IT contractor job market.

With two-thirds of recruiters planning to expand their use of AI pre-screening in 2026, the contractor who refuses to engage with AI hiring processes is narrowing their options significantly.

The right response to an AI interview is not avoidance. It is preparation.

Which type of 'AI interview' is this?

The phrase "AI interview" covers several distinct formats, and knowing which one you are facing changes how you prepare.

Broadly, at the time of writing, there are four main types of AI interview:

This is the most common type of AI interview standing between you and the job.

Platforms (like HireVue and Spark Hire) present questions on screen, giving the interviewee 30 to 60 seconds to prepare, and they record your answers, typically for two to three minutes.

There is no live interviewer. And as this AI Interview Guide by shortlist.io correctly observes, the AI analyses verbal content,keyword use, response structure, and pacing.

These are phone or voice-based interviews, whereby AI assesses what you say without video. They're often used as a 'first-pass' filter before any human contact.

Here, you'll face text-based question-and-answer formats. This third type of AI job interview is typically used for high-volume roles or initial application stages.

These AI interviews centre on cognitive and behavioural tools, whereby AI infers capability from how you solve problems or navigate simulations.

Game-based assessments are less common in tech contractor hiring circles, but increasingly the AI job interview of choice at large organisations (you can read more about game-based assessments here, via the HireVue Interview Guide and Tips).

What AI job interviews do tech/IT contractors typically face?

Currently, for IT contractors, the AVI format is the most commonly encountered AI Interview.

Understanding how the AI scores your responses is not gaming the system. It is basic preparation.

AVI Interview: How to prepare and perform?

The single most important thing that we tell contractors facing an Asynchronous Video Interview (AVI) is this -- the AI is not assessing whether you are likeable. Instead, it is assessing structure, specificity, and relevance.

Therefore, unstructured, rambling responses score poorly even when the underlying answer is good!

Here are our five additional top tips for how to prepare for an AI interview as an IT contractor:

STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result.

For every behavioural question, and the majority of AVI questions are behavioural, it's shrewd to structure your answer in the 'STAR' format.

The AI keyword analysis is sensitive to structured, relevant responses.

AI picks up on phrases that signal clear thinking, with a focus on achievements, such as:

* "The outcome was..."

* "As a result of..."

* "The stakeholders needed..."

Use such phrases deliberately to make clear your actions lead to 'quantifiable outcomes' and, (perhaps ironically, given that you're in an AI interview), that 'real people depended on your output,' as advocated by HireVue's Free AI Practice tool.

So, quantify everything you can with specifics.

For example, "Reduced deployment time by 40%" will score higher in an AI interview than "significantly improved the process."

As an IT contractor, you likely have results and strong quantifiable outcomes across your engagements, so check back to gather details relating to the following and then tell the bot:

* delivery timelines

* performance improvements

* project values.

Attending an AI interview? Build a bank of outcomes and results around this trio, before the bot starts firing its questions.

Talking to a robot, with nothing coming back at you apart from the next question, might feel a bit odd the first time around. To banish algorithm awkwardness, IT contractors should practice their responses on camera, alone, before the actual AI interview.

Record yourself answering common interview questions with a three-minute timer.

Watch the playback. Look for, and then weed out, filler words.

Train yourself to make eye contact with the lens, rather than the screen, and check to see whether your answers have a clear structure.

Research reportedly indicates that candidates who practise in a simulated AI interview environment achieve a 67% success rate, compared to 23% for those using general preparation tools.

To optimise their chances of passing an AI interview, IT contractors should treat their technical environment as part of the interview itself.

Lighting, background, audio quality, and internet stability are all within your control.

For IT contractors (those professionals who work in technology environments), a poorly configured video setup is a particularly damaging first impression.

Is preparation required for an AI interview?

So-called 'No Preparation Required' AI interviews are a bit misleading. We see this framing regularly. What employers mean by 'no prep required' is that no specific prior reading is required.

What they do not mean is that general interview preparation is unnecessary!

Treating an AI interview as something you can wing because no prep was specified is, in our experience, the most reliable way to fail it.

Are AI interviews just the tip of the iceberg?

There's a wider AI hiring picture contractors should know about in 2026/27. In fact, while AI interviews are arguably now the most visible part of automated hiring, they are not the only part.

AI-powered Applicant Tracking Systems now screen CVs before a human ever sees them, parsing keywords, experience patterns, and formatting.

An IT contractor whose CV is not structured to pass ATS (Applicant Tracking System) screening may never reach the AI interview stage.

With ATS, what's the key practical takeaway for IT contractors?

To pass ATS, your CV should contain the exact terminology used in the job description, not synonyms, not paraphrases.

If the job advert or contract brief says "Kubernetes", your CV should say "Kubernetes".

AI matching is literal.

The bottom line

The IT contractor jobs market in the UK is recovering. Demand for specialist technology skills is rising, and the contractor who is positioned to move fast and perform well at each stage of the hiring process will win the best engagements. However, AI hiring processes are now a permanent feature of that landscape, not a passing experiment.

The tech contractors who treat AI interviews with the same rigour they would apply to a technical test or a client presentation will consistently outperform those who walk in unprepared or, worse, walk out because of the format. The scepticism is understandable. The preparation is non-negotiable. more

Ralph Lee


Career development 5d
At our company we never get raises or bonuses. Instead, the boss gives us company mugs, bags and notebooks. After a successful deal or project he buys us pizza. I know I'm getting paid what we agreed on, but it would be nice to get some kind of reward once in a while. That never happens.
What do you think? Should I hint that money would be more appreciated than getting a fifth mug with the... company logo on it?

 more
4   

  • Sheila Milburn

    1d

    Truth is you shouldn't get rewarded for performing the job they pay you to do. Monetary awards should come from going above and beyond. Ex., saving... the company a large amount of money or bringing in new clients.  more

  • Mayibongwe Bayana

    1d

    I think being grateful definitely is a starting point, but importantly realise that he is putting his needs first, and you also have to do so and look... for a place which would lead to your growth financially too. more

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Anonymous member


Career development 4d
I recently started working at a bank branch and I'm surprised that everyone knows everyone else's salary. People talk about it openly, even before a new employee starts.
On my first day, at least two coworkers told me that I was too young to be earning that much and that I didn't deserve it.
Now we're getting a new employee, and everyone is talking about how much she'll be paid. The branch... manager is actually the one sharing this information. Is this normal or professional? Should I report it to head office or the compliance/security department? It doesn't seem right that employees' salary information is being shared so openly. Thanks

 more
2   

  • PETER TUMUSIIME

    2d

    Think of Government employees whose salary is put on the openly on the notice boards for everyone to see, study and evaluate

  • jasper mutiso

    2d

    Many human resources experts and labor advocates argue that pay transparency is right because it closes gender pay gaps, promotes meritocracy, and... stops employers from taking advantage of job seekers. However, openly disclosing specific pay figures can also lead to resentment, hostility, and privacy concerns if peers doing similar roles are paid differently based on experience or negotiation more

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Career development

 1d

Job interview scams rise as layoffs increase: Desperate job seekers need to stay alert - India TV News


As layoffs continue across various industries, cybercriminals have figured out how to tap the job seekers with fake interview and recruitment scams. Experts warn desperate candidates against being tricked into sharing personal information, paying fraudulent fees, or downloading malicious software.

Tech, finance and startup layoffs have turned job hunting into a tough game lately, and scammers are... pulling out their tricks to catch desperate job seekers off guard. Security systems are again sounding the alarm: there has been a sharp jump in job interview scams. These scammers are pretending to be recruiters or hiring managers and luring job seekers to spill private information or pay fake fees for big-profile jobs.

With more people exploring and finding new roles for an upgrade or a new job in case someone does, fraudsters are getting smarter and using this concern as an opportunity. They make the fake job offers so tempting that people usually get convinced and share their details and then fall into the trap.

How do scammers play with their victim job seekers?

Usually, it starts with a message via email, text, LinkedIn ping, or even a phone call.

The scammer pretends to be representing a popular company and offers perks like the following:

* High salaries

* Remote work

* Fast hiring

* Urgent basis requirement

Candidates (the desperate and tempted jobseekers) get invited to 'interview' online, often through messaging apps instead of secure company platforms.

Once the trust is built, they will ask for personal data, like the following:

* Your Aadhaar

* Bank info

* Passport scans

* Tax documents

Sometimes they might push the jobseeker to pay for training and background checks before they get started with the job.

How layoffs make things worse for innocent jobseekers

* Mass layoffs have made job seekers more anxious and willing to jump at new openings.

* Cybercriminals love that urgency. Experts say folks who just lost their jobs are more likely to respond to strange job offers, especially the ones promising instant hiring or bigger pay cheques.

* Scammers usually pose as recruiters from well-known companies, making it even harder to spot the fakes.

* Remote hiring will help the scammers to find a perfect-fitting job. With less face-to-face contact, it's easier for them to fake the whole process.

* Spot the red flags

Watch out for these warning signs:

* Anyone asking for payments as part of the hiring process.

* Interviews happening only via chat apps.

* Job offers are skipping formal interviews altogether.

* Recruiters are contacting you from Gmail or Yahoo instead of company emails.

* Pressure to hand over private or financial details.

* Insanely high salaries for jobs that barely need qualifications.

How to stay safe during job interviews?

* When you get the call or an email, make sure that you double-check everything before handing over your personal details.

* Go straight to the company's website and look for the list of recruiters (check if the said person's name is there). Prefer to stick to the official communication channels.

* Never pay anyone who claims to get you a job; they are usually a scam

* Avoid downloading files which are being shared by unknown sources or any software which was sent by any unknown recruiters.

* Trust the reliable platforms only, like LinkedIn or other leading job websites, as this will cut your risk of being scammed.

Do not be desperate, as save you from cyber fraud

Remember that with massive layoffs going around and scaring people, companies are still hiring. But the flood of layoffs has made it open season for job fraud.

One must verify every new opportunity and know the signs of a scam. That will be the simple and basic way to protect your money and your personal data while hunting for your next role.

Job scams are only getting more sophisticated, but your best defence is simple: stay aware and sceptical. more