During my recent assignments as an interpreter at the Jobcenter, I have witnessed a grotesque paradox. Young Ukrainians who have completed the official recognition process now hold certificates equating their degrees to a German IT Specialist (Fachinformatiker). Yet caseworkers increasingly tell them flatly: "IT is dead." They claim IT specialists stand no chance because AI is destroying the market.
How does this add up? On one hand, the system tells young professionals with years of rigorous computer science training that their field is dead. On the other hand, the exact same system funds four-week crash courses, throws a handful of IT buzzwords at novices, and allows providers to claim an 87 percent job placement rate!
For a long time, Ukraine was considered probably even the number one country when it comes to programmers—and especially for new technologies. I know this from my own experience: I’ve talked to a great many Ukrainian companies in the IT sector, to startups, above all from Kharkiv, because Kharkiv is still the central hub for IT. Many American, but also European companies hire Ukrainian programming teams for the “heavy lifting”—that means the actual coding, the programming, and of course other tasks as well, because historically, education in these fields—mathematics and later computer science—is, or was, at a high level in Ukraine, especially in Kharkiv.
Of course, AI has changed that too. And I’ve seen it happen: young people who have now arrived here, who fled from Kharkiv and have training, a qualification, a degree in IT from Kharkiv in their pocket, are told by the Jobcenter: “IT is dead. Forget IT.” And of course that’s very demotivating for a young person who has programming skills, who knows how a programming language is built and how coding works—who brings along all the prerequisites you need to work well with AI now, too. So people who know, for example: What is a Linux server? How does the internet work?—all these many things you need to know, and the skills you need to have, to use AI as well as possible: they are now being told to their face that IT is dead. And of course that simply isn’t true.
I would offer these young people to find ways together for how they can now use this new kind of coding, too. Because the combination—human programmer and AI—is of course ideal, because then you can achieve much more with the tools we have than when someone like me uses them, someone with very little technical background knowledge and skills.
So my plea here would be to our society as a whole, but above all to the institutions that deal with young people: don’t tell them IT is dead, but rather: “Of course there are lots of opportunities for you now—use them!” But for that, the structures would also have to be created. Unfortunately, they don’t exist. There are only ossified education providers, or new education providers that still work according to ossified and wrong principles—like OneCareer or the Digital Career Institute. By the way, we have two candidates here that are similar in that they both carry the English word “Career” in their names and use English names: the Digital Career Institute (DCI) from Berlin, and OneCareer GmbH.
And in my view, neither of them has understood what this is really about; they’re just using the “opportunity”—in the end, they’re opportunists. They promise a rosy future for people in so-called digital marketing. But digital marketing, in turn, is one of the reasons why our planet has reached its limits and why our ecosystems will soon be on the verge of collapse: digital marketing is pushed like there’s no tomorrow, without ever asking what the point is. And I find that very, very worrying. That’s why I believe the time—the zenith—of such companies has already passed. And UNO.TEAM will fill this gap and build a bridge into the future.
The 87-percent fairy tale violates the core principle of truthfulness, anchored in the Bahá’í teachings as the foundation of all virtues and essential to any healthy society. Truthfulness demands ending this institutionalized self-deception and respecting genuine skills again.
What do you take away from this thought?
Thank you. Every answer fits – take it with you into your day. Would you like to share something yourself?
