The Education Crisis Nobody Can Ignore

If you want a glimpse of the future, start with the numbers.

McKinsey estimates that 375 million workers worldwide will need to switch occupations by 2030. Not retrain, not take a course, but switch careers entirely. At the same time, the World Economic Forum projects that 50% of all employees will need reskilling by 2025. That’s not “someday.” That’s right now.

We are staring at a workforce transformation of staggering scale, and the truth is: our current education system is not built for it.

Education as the Ultimate Multiplier

Before diving into the crisis, let’s step back to why education matters so profoundly.

UNESCO has shown that each additional year of schooling increases earnings by 8–10%.
The World Bank reports that one more year of education reduces poverty rates by roughly 9%.
Georgetown University projects that by 2031, nearly three out of four jobs will require post-secondary training. A high school diploma alone will no longer be enough to ensure stability.
The World Economic Forum estimates that closing the global skills gap could add $11.5 trillion to GDP by 2028.

Think about that for a moment: $11.5 trillion. That’s not just a nice-to-have. That’s the difference between growth and stagnation for entire economies.

Education has what economists call a multiplier effect. When someone gains skills, it doesn’t just help them. They earn more, they spend more locally, they invest in their children, and they strengthen their community. Every dollar invested in education typically returns five dollars to the community over time.

So yes — education is personal, but it is also profoundly economic. And when we fail to equip people with the skills they need, the losses ripple out far beyond individuals.

The System We Have vs. The System We Need

Now, layer the urgency of workforce change on top of this.

375 million people switching jobs in less than a decade.
50% of employees needing reskilling by 2025.

And what’s our response? A system designed for the 20th century:

Too slow. It takes months, sometimes years, to design and launch a new course. By the time it’s ready, the market has already moved.
Too expensive. Building a single continuing education program can cost $50,000 or more. That price tag doesn’t scale when millions need retraining.
Too credential-focused. Degrees and certificates dominate, even when what people really need are skills.
Too rigid. One-size-fits-all classrooms move too fast for some, too slow for others, serving nobody well.

This isn’t just a mismatch. It’s a structural impossibility. We cannot retrain half the global workforce using the same methods that got us here.

The Tidal Wave of Change

What makes this crisis especially acute is that we’re not just talking about incremental skills updates. Many jobs are disappearing entirely.

Automation and AI are wiping out whole categories of work. It’s not just factory jobs or low-wage roles — it’s also white-collar professions in accounting, law, and even medicine that are being reshaped. Entire industries are in flux.

That means we’re not talking about refreshing knowledge within a field. We’re talking about mass career pivots. Nurses learning data analytics. Accountants becoming product managers. Factory workers moving into renewable energy.

The scale of this challenge is staggering. And under current models, it’s financially impossible. Even if we wanted to throw resources at the problem, the costs would bankrupt us.

What’s at Stake

Let’s be blunt: if we fail to address this crisis, the consequences are immense.

Economic stagnation. That $11.5 trillion in potential GDP growth? It evaporates. Instead, economies shrink under the weight of unprepared workers.
Social instability. Displaced workers don’t just quietly fade away. They struggle, they disengage, and social tensions rise.
Personal despair. At the individual level, people feel left behind, unable to provide for their families, unable to find meaningful work.

We have been here before. The industrial revolution displaced entire classes of workers. The digital revolution created divides between knowledge workers and those left behind. In both cases, education was the bridge. The difference now is the speed and scale of the change.

Why This Time Feels Different

When I first saw the internet in 1991, I knew it would change everything. It felt like a once-in-a-generation shift. Now, with AI, I feel the same way again.

The difference is that this time, the technology driving the disruption is also the technology that can help solve it.

AI isn’t just creating the need for reskilling — it’s also giving us the tools to deliver that reskilling faster, cheaper, and more effectively than ever before.

But here’s the key: we don’t have time to waste. If half the workforce needs new skills in the next year or two, the clock is already ticking.

A System Stuck in Neutral

It’s worth underscoring just how ill-prepared our institutions are. Higher education is excellent at many things — research, credentialing, knowledge dissemination. But when it comes to rapid, career-oriented retraining at scale, it simply doesn’t have the capacity.

Universities aren’t designed for speed. Their processes take years, not months.
Employers struggle to design effective training internally. They’re experts in their business, not in pedagogy.
Governments often move too slowly, and policy lags behind reality.

So who’s left? Right now, millions of individuals are left to navigate this on their own, cobbling together YouTube tutorials, online courses, and bootcamps, with little guidance on what actually matters.

That’s not a system. That’s survival.

The Urgent Necessity

Let’s connect the dots.

Education is the most powerful driver of prosperity.
The workforce is being reshaped at a scale never seen before.
Our current systems are structurally incapable of responding.
The cost of inaction is measured in trillions — not to mention human lives and futures.

This is not a side issue. This is the central challenge of our time.

We can argue about the ethics of AI. We can debate its risks and its potential harms. But one thing is non-negotiable: if we don’t use it to address the reskilling crisis, we will leave millions behind.

Setting the Stage

This post is about the problem. In the next installments, I’ll write about the solutions I’m building:

How AI collapses the bottleneck of content creation.
How practice bots create safe learning spaces for difficult conversations.
How competency libraries make personalized learning at scale possible.
How even something as niche as a “skeptical VC bot” democratizes access to high-value feedback.
And finally, the hard questions we still have to face: quality, cheating, privacy, human connection.

But we can’t start with solutions until we’re honest about the problem.

The education crisis is not abstract. It’s here, it’s massive, and it’s accelerating. And ignoring it is the most dangerous move we could make.