Three posts this week have approached the same underlying question from different angles. The first looked at universities making bold public commitments to graduate AI-fluent professionals and asked who is actually verifying those claims. The second looked at organisations investing heavily in AI training, measuring completion rates, and calling it competency assessment and asked whether a HR platform tracking module completion has anything meaningful to say about profession

Last week. A large UK organisation. 10,000-plus workforce. They want a skills inventory and a program to close the AI fluency gap. We walk them through what rigorous assessment actually looks like. What it measures. Why it matters. And then the response - the one we hear constantly right now: "But surely our HR platform can do this? It checks who's done what course, identifies the gap, gives them a list of courses to complete. It's not exactly complicated, is it?" That's the

Accreditors are deciding which programmes meet the standard. Employers are deciding which candidates are genuinely ready. And individuals ­­­­­­– millions of them ­­– are considering career decisions and self-education trying to guess what is going to make them and keep them employable. Everyone in this chain is trying to make an informed decision. Who has the information they actually need to make it well? Because the question underneath all of it, the one that keeps getting

A few weeks ago I was presenting ten days of work to a university client – a detailed accreditation methodology built from the ground up. The report was substantial. The analysis was deep. And on the front page, as we always do, there was a disclosure that the deliverable had been produced in part using AI. The client paused. Looked up, and asked: "So why should I pay you for something I could produce myself using Co-Pilot?" I paused too. Not because I didn't have an answer.

Think about the day you qualified. How capable did you actually feel? How much did you really know? Were you confident? Or were you like me, a little terrified, when you walked out with that designation in your hand? And how much of what makes you genuinely valuable today did you learn in the years that followed? The clients you couldn't have handled then. The decisions you now make without thinking. The judgement that only comes from being tested, failing quietly, and findin

The FT ran a sharp analysis this week on what's happening to software engineers under agentic AI. Job vacancies are up. But only for seniors. Entry-level roles remain flat and the pay gap between top and bottom appears to be widening. The conclusion many people are drawing is that the future will belong to those who can delegate and direct, not those who can code. The ability to critique and critically review over technical depth. I understand the conclusion but I think it i

What's the real accreditaion bottleneck costing us? Accreditation is infrastructure. That’s not a metaphor – it’s the World Bank’s conclusion. Its flagship World Development Report, published in December 2025, is the first comprehensive global analysis of what quality standards really do for economies. It names accreditation as one of four pillars of quality infrastructure globally, alongside metrology, conformity assessment, and standardisation. Countries with stronger accre

Accreditation is economic infrastructure. It’s foundational to development as roads or power grids. The World Bank’s 2025 World Development Report makes this striking claim. The UNESCO 2026 roadmap for transforming higher education points in the same direction. Taken together, the case is clear. So, that leaves us with the question: Who holds the infrastructure accountable? Accreditation bodies operate with significant delegated authority. They set the standards that deter