Gary's Address

Gary's Appeal to Educaship prospects

Hi, I'm Gary. I am deeply committed to revolutionizing work-alike practice and enhancing its role in education. For decades, I have been actively supporting this mission through both donations and volunteer work.

Throughout my career, I've been involved in various projects, both for-profit and non-profit, providing hands-on training and career opportunities to young people and adults.

Today, I'd like to share my personal story to showcase the problems work-alike practice can solve and illustrate how the concept of using it as a learning backbone developed and evolved over time.

Reflection 1: Education Meets Career

It's common for career paths to differ from what one studies in school. That was my experience, and it's a journey many people take.

In high school, I was passionate about physical science, inspired by a thought-provoking teacher and enthusiastic classmates. This led me to pursue mechanical engineering in college. However, after graduation and starting my first job, I realized it wasn't the right fit for me.

Looking back, I wish the concept of a gap year had been available. It could have provided valuable time to explore different fields and gain practical experience before committing to a specific degree. This option, while not common then, can be beneficial for some students today.

Driven by a desire to create, I eventually started a desktop publishing company in the early 1990s, when the field was still emerging. We had to train our employees ourselves due to the industry's novelty. There was simply no formal computer training available at that time. As technology advanced, we continually innovated, even developing our own customer management and business operation systems.

While I value my college education, I now recognize that my degree didn't directly apply to my eventual career. The most important lesson I learned is this: The sooner one tries something, the quicker they can determine if it's right for them.

Exploring different paths through various experiences - whether it's a summer job, an internship, or a school project - can teach valuable lessons about personal preferences and strengths. These opportunities, even if they seem unrelated to current interests, can provide insights and skills for future careers.

If I had discovered my true interests earlier or had the chance to experience different fields before college, I might have chosen a different specialty or first job. I would state that it's never too early to start exploring options and discovering what truly excites a person, whether that's through traditional education, work experience, or alternative paths like gap years.

Reflection 2: Career as a Journey

Career development is a lifelong journey involving exploration, skill-building, gaining qualifications, and finding jobs. Professional life isn't set in stone – it changes and grows over time. Here's why:

1. Personal changes: People's interests, skills, and life situations evolve. What someone wants at 16 might differ from their desires at 40. New experiences can open up exciting career paths never considered before.
2. Job changes: Consider mechanical engineering as an example. In the 1980s, engineers used paper and pencils. By the 1990s, they were using computers. Now, they use 3D printers. In the future, they might use AI and advanced robots. The tools of the trade keep evolving.
3. World changes: New technologies, economic shifts, and cultural trends create new jobs while making others outdated. For example, the rise of AI and robots is changing how many jobs are done. This makes continuous learning throughout one's career more important than ever.

Careers are best viewed as adventures with many twists and turns, not straight paths to final destinations. That's why a single college degree isn't sufficient for an entire working life – ongoing learning and adaptation are essential.

Reflection 3: Practice Aids Education

Aligning education with career goals and gaining practical experience are crucial in shaping one's professional journey. In the early 2000s, realizing a mismatch between my initial education and career needs, I enrolled in another university. This second graduate degree in business proved far more effective than my first.

My practical experience significantly enhanced my academic performance. I could apply theoretical concepts to real-world scenarios, which increased my motivation as I saw a clearer purpose in my education.

This second degree has been pivotal in shaping my professional trajectory. It significantly enhanced my publishing venture, contributing to its profitable sale in the mid-2000s, and continues to yield benefits in my current career pursuits. Moreover, it has opened doors for me to teach business part-time, drawing on nearly all subjects I studied during this program.

Another factor in its effectiveness was my personal investment. Unlike my state-funded first degree, I financed this one myself. This personal stake likely intensified my commitment and appreciation for the education, as people often place higher value on things they've personally sacrificed for.

The interplay between education and experience reflects the dual nature of learning, involving both deductive and inductive reasoning:

1. Education often mirrors deductive reasoning. It typically involves learning general principles, theories, and rules, then applying them to specific situations. However, case studies and experiments can provide inductive learning experiences within educational settings.
2. Practice, on the other hand, tends to be more inductive. Through hands-on experience and repeated trials, we build up knowledge from specific instances to form general skills and understanding. Yet, we also apply our general knowledge deductively to new situations in practical contexts.

The synergy between these approaches in both learning contexts helps develop well-rounded competency. Indeed, education cannot be complete without practice, just as practice is enhanced by formal education. This continuous interplay between theory and application, between deduction and induction, is what truly shapes our professional growth and effectiveness.

Reflection 4: Guidance Meets Career

In the mid-2000s, I relocated from Belarus to the United States. I was determined to find my ideal career path in that new to me country. Initially, I faced setbacks due to limited English proficiency and a lack of American work experience. Nevertheless, I had no choice, but to try.

I enrolled in various colleges and universities, focusing primarily on English classes. Despite my efforts, uncertainty about my future career persisted. By the 2010s, I was one class short of completing my Bachelor's degree in the US, but still hadn't found a meaningful job to pursue.

In search of direction, I sought guidance from career counselors, government agencies, private companies, and non-profits. Yet, despite their advice, I struggled to establish a meaningful career path.

I explored assessment tools like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and John Holland's career choice theory. While these tools offered some insights, they oversimplified my characteristics and failed to provide practical results.

As a recruiter and volunteer career counselor, I later gained deeper insights into the field. I remember working with an administrative assistant who was unhappy in their role. After consulting with a career counselor, they were advised to pursue a career in technical writing, which aligned better with their skills and interests. Despite their best efforts, they spent a year trying to secure a technical writing position without success and ultimately had to return to the workforce as an administrative assistant.

Eventually, I identified three major issues with traditional career guidance resources:

a) Oversimplification: Questionnaires and assessment tools attempt to match personality, interests, skills, and values to specific occupations, overlooking the complexity of job roles and employer cultures. I also found that generalizations of occupation classifications made them misleading and difficult to use.

b) Lack of Industry Insights: Career counselors often prioritize aspirations over real-world industry needs, with their industry knowledge with very few exceptions being outdated and limited. They function more as social workers, ensuring clients leave the office satisfied, rather than as job market insiders.

c) One-Size-Fits-All Approach: Assessment tools fail to account for the evolving nature of interests, skills, values, and personalities, and they don't consider individual credentials and experiences.

In retrospect, my search for a career path in a new environment was a valuable learning experience that I used to design WiseNxt products.

Reflection 5: Inside of Career Prep

After relocating to the United States, I worked various entry-level jobs, including washing cars, cleaning stores, and serving drinks. Recognizing the need to build a meaningful resume, I incorporated a business and appointed myself as its director. This experience enabled me to start teaching business courses at a community college two years later.

This initial teaching position in the late 2000s led to a significant period of my life dedicated to academia. Without a doctoral degree, I couldn't teach full-time. So, I taught at American colleges and universities in Belarus, China, and Russia part-time.

For some period of time, I aspired to secure an innovative role in educational administration. Through organizing student and academic exchange programs, I connected with high-ranking university officials, visited hundreds of universities, and reviewed their educational programs.

I would like to share my insights on how the educational system prepares students for careers. My focus won't be on specific counselors, curricula, or teachers, but rather on the systemic challenges in equipping students with the competencies necessary for career success and workforce contribution.

These competencies can be divided into three categories: (a) knowledge and understanding of a specific domain, (b) practical skills to apply that knowledge, and (c) abilities to perform tasks and responsibilities required by the job.

Educational institutions often operate under limited budgets and scarce resources. This creates a challenge:

a) Knowledge transfer is the least expensive. It’s cheaper to hire a teacher and provide basic teaching materials like a blackboard and chalk than to invest in simulators. For example, a competitive bicyclist needs explanations for how to use a bicycle and strategies to win a competition in a theory.

b) Skill development is more costly, requiring practical tools and environments. Using the same example, the bicyclist should use simulators for practical training.

c) Ability development is the most expensive, needing workplace-like environments, personalized assignments, and mentor feedback. At this level, the bicyclist should actually compete and have a chance to win.

Due to these financial constraints, educational institutions tend to focus heavily on knowledge transfer, minimize skill-building activities, and either eliminate or outsource opportunities for actual professional experience. As educational institutions prioritize knowledge transfer due to its lower cost, the development of practical skills and real-world abilities often suffers.

Reflection 6: Insightful Mentors Matter

In the early 2010s, I unexpectedly secured a position with the US Marine Corps. I say 'unexpectedly' because I had no apparent qualifications for the role at the outset. My previous experience, however, may have contributed to landing this job.

I led the Russian component of a cultural program, given considerable freedom to innovate. The project had substantial resources but minimal oversight and bureaucracy. We extensively utilized technology and various methodologies.

Russian language proficiency was a key objective. Initially, we used standard textbooks and conversational resources. However, when the first cohort took the Defense Language Proficiency Test, they were surprised by its practical nature, being tested on real-world scenarios rather than textbook greetings.

For the second iteration, I collaborated with Professor Soboleva from the Defense Language Institute to develop a new curriculum, which we rapidly implemented and tested.

As a result, my students matched the listening skills of their peers at the Defense Language Institute. I believe continued curriculum development would have led to even better outcomes. While I consider my role successful, the project ended after a year due to budget constraints.

Afterwards, I stood at a crossroads between continuing as a language instructor or transitioning to information technology. Based on past experiences, I sought advice from industry insiders.

On the linguistic side, I consulted a high-ranking recruiter from a top language training provider. This knowledgeable insider said, "There aren't many jobs available, but there are lots of people trying to get them. Most of these people have better degrees and more work experience than you. Let's assume that you did well in your first job. However, it's hard for me to hire you. In my job, I need to play it safe. I don't want to get in trouble if something goes wrong. For instance, someone complains about why I chose you over other candidates."

This insider also admitted that the field generally lacked the innovative roles I was seeking. Later, other sources and experiences confirmed the insider's insights independently.

Basically, I had only one real opportunity. Professor Soboleva offered me to join the Defense Language Institute. Nevertheless, the compensation was low and the expenses high, given the institute's location in an expensive area of California.

On the IT side, finding quality consultants proved more difficult. Some had narrow expertise or conflicting objectives. However, IT was evolving rapidly and offered more diverse roles than language training at least at the time. IT recruiters seemed more prone to burnout than their counterparts in more stable fields.

It's worth noting that finding my linguistic consultant was largely luck. While there's no shortage of advisers offering ideas without accountability, finding an honest, caring industry insider is rare but invaluable.

Reflection 7: Practice as a Career Tool

By the mid-2010s, I had established substantial credentials in technology training. Seeking to expand my expertise, I decided to focus on IT training specifically.

I founded a meetup group called "Hands-On Training," organizing free IT workshops across various disciplines. To facilitate these sessions, I recruited volunteers.

It's often said that real-world project collaboration reveals team compatibility. This principle was put into practice when two hiring managers approached me to host hands-on training for SharePoint administrators. From what I gathered, they were facing a shortage of qualified administrators and were willing to train candidates on the job, but needed to identify those they'd be comfortable working with.

This experience, coupled with my background in apprenticeship development in Belarus, proved invaluable when I began recruiting, onboarding, and upskilling for a startup-focused investment group. Startups require versatile team members, and while interviews can help shortlist candidates, their actual performance is the true determining factor.

My recruitment strategy targeted 1,000 initial candidates. Through a funnel process, this pool narrowed to 100 who began training, 10 who progressed to work trials, and ultimately one successful hire.

One realization struck me: while I needed a narrow scope of candidates and had to reach out to many, the outcome wasn't simply finding "gold nuggets" among pieces of sand. Each candidate had potential value, if not for my startup clients, but definitely for other opportunities.

Practical experience is essential for clarifying career preferences. However, I faced limitations in delivering comprehensive assessment results, and candidates weren't actively seeking my career assessments. This revealed a gap between the wealth of talent discovered and the ability to effectively channel it to fitting opportunities.

Reflection 8: Experience Rocks

I am 60 years old, and over half my life has been dedicated to selecting employment candidates and putting them to work. I have performed as both a dedicated and contingency recruiter. Throughout my career, I've had the privilege of serving various organizations. I've observed that employers typically focus on three key areas when evaluating candidates:

• Job Performance: Can the candidate perform the job requirements?
• Cultural Fit: Does the candidate align with the organization's culture and team dynamics?
• Motivation: Is the candidate motivated by the compensation package offered?

When it comes to competencies, experience in the relevant field is the most critical factor. Logically, those who have succeeded in a job before have higher chances of succeeding in it again. Many job descriptions highlight this, stating "Experience may be substituted for education." Practical experience often trumps formal education in many cases. From that point of view, if education costs something, professional experience should cost more.

This emphasis on experience contributes to the struggle many recent college graduates face in landing their first job. I'm not saying that formal training is obsolete, but something is missing in the pure education package.

Back to my first college learning in the United States, one professor really helped me integrate into the American society. However, when I needed a professional recommendation to start applying for jobs, this professor said that they couldn't do anything like that because we hadn't worked together. They gave me a letter that I was an excellent student, which could be somewhat helpful if I were 18. However, such a letter sounded disastrous for a 40+ years old man.

On the other hand, I know someone with a Bachelor of Arts degree who started a recruiting business, which failed, but they leveraged that experience to secure a recruiter job.

If any recruiter argues against the importance of experience, ask about their own educational background. I've yet to meet a recruiter with a degree specifically in Recruiting or even in Human Resources generally. If you do find one, ask if their degree alone landed them a recruiter job. And, if they say "Yes", they probably recruit students for a college.

Reflection 9: Need in Career Support

Indeed, career exploration, competency building, and professional growth are lifelong endeavors. However, to be truly effective, they require support and guidance from others.

First, the modern job market is highly complex and dynamic. Rapidly evolving industries and technologies demand ongoing learning and adaptation. As new career paths emerge and others become obsolete, continuous exploration becomes necessary.

Second, individual perspective is inherently limited. Personal biases and blind spots can hinder accurate self-assessment. External viewpoints provide valuable insights into one's strengths and weaknesses, offering a more comprehensive understanding of one's professional potential.

Third, industry-based mentorship and networking are crucial for career development. These relationships provide insider information, opportunities for skill development, and accountability. However, building and maintaining these professional connections requires significant time and effort.

Attempting to navigate one's career independently is akin to simultaneously being a job market analyst, career counselor, and relationship manager. Each of these roles demands years of specialized experience and knowledge. Therefore, seeking guidance and support from others is not just beneficial, but often essential for effective career development.

Reflection 10: The Finite Resource

Our practice-to-job projects have yielded diverse outcomes across age groups. While we've seen notable success with youth, we've also achieved significant results with career-transitioning adults, indicating potential impact among specific mature learner categories.

Career projects typically span several months and require both financial and time investments. Our experience shows that securing funding is often easier than finding available time.

During my startup recruitment experience, only one hire emerged from 1,000 initial candidates. This doesn't necessarily mean the successful candidate was inherently superior. Beyond cultural fit, the primary challenge was finding candidates willing to complete the onboarding process, particularly the time-intensive practice-based training.

Most adults juggle family responsibilities and prioritize steady income to meet financial obligations. Engaging with startups, skill development, or career exploration often involves considerable uncertainty.

Our practice-based training proved efficient, requiring only a few months compared to traditional degree programs. However, many adults can't forgo income even briefly, limiting their participation in such opportunities.

These insights continue to shape our approach to new initiatives, primarily focusing on younger audiences for vocational discovery.

From Reflections to Intentions

Let's summarize. College education is time-intensive, but learning is most effective when paired with practical experience. In professional development, time is a crucial, limited resource. While younger individuals typically have more available time, the current system often postpones their opportunities for hands-on practice. This delay can hinder the efficient integration of education and real-world application.

Based on my reflections, I believe that education, mentoring from people in the industry, and real-world professional experience should all happen together from the start, not years apart.

That is why I envision hands-on experience as a baseline for learning. Traditional schools often treat practical experience as extra, but I think it's crucial for happy workspace.

These ideas made me want to create programs I wish I had when I was starting my career.

From Problems to Solutions

My work to combine personalized education and practical experience began with a project called WorldOpp. The aim was to support entrepreneurs in underserved areas by providing them with education and funding for their businesses. However, when our main financial backer changed their priorities, we needed to rethink our approach.

That's when Educaship was born. It's all about mixing education, career guidance, and real-world experience. We want to team up with schools to make their classes more practical through things like simulations, internships, and apprenticeships. It's a cool idea, but it'll take one or two more years to get it up and running. The tricky part is finding schools to work with and figuring out how to fit our hands-on stuff into their programs.

While we're working on Educaship, we realized we could start with something simpler right away. That's where WiseNxt comes in. It's part of Educaship, but it focuses on helping students figure out what they're good at before they choose a career path. Think of it like a big sandbox where you can try out different jobs. You might analyze products, build websites, plan events, manage computer systems, or lead projects in all sorts of fields.

We first thought about launching WiseNxt in Ukraine with a name that means "and experience" in Ukrainian. But plans change, and now we're getting ready to introduce it in Kenya in the next few weeks. It'll be part of something called the "KenyaX" program.

With WiseNxt, you may discover your talents and passions through hands-on experiences. This way, you can make better choices about your future career and find something you really love doing.

Join the Educaship Revolution

Our approach is revolutionary because it goes beyond simply delivering standardized curriculum or even replicating job situations. We're creating a comprehensive ecosystem where:

• Learners explore diverse roles to discover their vocations and strengths.
• When asked, "What do you want to do when you grow up?", our graduates have a clearer understanding of their options.
• We collaborate with educational institutions to secure internships or apprenticeships in students' chosen specialties.
• Graduates enter the job market with formal training, practical work experience, and a range of career opportunities.

This vision began as a personal mission, initially developed with my children's futures in mind. Though they've grown, the journey has proven invaluable. I'm deeply committed to making this dream a reality and would gladly dedicate my life to its success.

We invite you to be part of this transformation – as a participant, parent, supporter, or advocate. Will you join us in revolutionizing education and career development?