Silent Years of Education.
Time to move from “lifelong learning to human capital”.
Farza’s memo, Build Education Machines, arrived at a moment that feels less like disruption and more like reckoning.
Not because the ideas are shocking, but because they articulate what many of us building in education and workforce development have been feeling quietly for some time.
We are entering what I believe are the silent years of education.
They are not silent because nothing is happening. Governments are investing billions into education and human capacity. Platforms, credentials, bootcamps, and programs continue to multiply. But they are silent because the signal no longer matches the noise. Learning is everywhere, yet outcomes are increasingly absent.
Lifelong learning with no outcomes is dead. Shiny certificates on their own are dead. What has never been dead and will never be dead is value. The ability of a human to create, to solve, to build, to adapt, to compound usefulness over time. In essence, human capital.
This is the contradiction no one wants to sit with. We are told we live in the most educated era in history, yet unemployment and underemployment are accelerating. FAANG and FTSE 100 companies are laying off exceptional people at scale. AI is not only replacing low-skill work, it is flattening the middle. This is not a failure of individuals. It is a systemic failure.
Education historically served three core purposes. It transmitted knowledge. It signalled competence. It increased economic security. Today, it reliably does only the first, and even that is increasingly commoditised. The signal is diluted and the guarantees are gone.
When survival is threatened, humans do not look for inspiration, they look for exits. That is why bootcamps surged, creator education exploded, and side hustles became mainstream. And now, many people are quietly panicking again because even those escape routes are narrowing.
There is an uncomfortable truth that education companies struggle to articulate. If humans are not being trained to create new value rather than simply perform known tasks, automation will always win. This is where dystopia creeps in, not through malicious AI, but through obsolete humans. That weight is now sitting squarely on the shoulders of modern education companies, including mine.
Many founders are tired. Many teams are firefighting. Many of us are asking the same question Farza is asking, even if we phrase it differently. What are we actually building that still matters?
The question that keeps resurfacing for me is how we pipeline a human from zero to ten. Not zero to certificate, not zero to course completion, not zero to employability buzzwords, but zero to builder, zero to producer, zero to architect of tomorrow’s needs. The honest answer is that we do not fully know yet, and anyone claiming certainty is overstating their position.
There is a deeper fear beneath this uncertainty. Education risks becoming parental again. Dependent on proximity, networks, capital, and exposure. Those who grow up around builders will compound. Those who do not will remain trapped in cycles of learning without leverage. If education companies do not intervene meaningfully here, inequality does not just widen, it hardens.
So what should education companies become in response?
I believe the next generation of education companies cannot simply distribute content faster or cheaper. They must orchestrate transformation. Learning must be inseparable from building. Economic outcomes must be embedded, not promised. AI must be used to accelerate human agency, not replace it. Judgment, taste, and problem selection must be cultivated alongside technical skills. Education companies must function as talent foundries, not content libraries.
This is not a trivial shift. It requires experimentation that borders on prophetic insight.
I sit with these questions in contemplation, in prayer, with the Holy Spirit, and in dialogue with founders across the US and UK workforce development ecosystem. I do not believe dashboards alone will guide us through this transition. We are not just redesigning education. We are redefining what it means to be useful as a human in an AI-shaped economy. That requires wisdom as much as strategy.
I do not believe we are in decline. I believe we are in transition. The silent years are not the end of education. They are the end of pretend education.
What we should build next
If education companies are to remain relevant, I believe we must build fewer platforms and more engines.
We should build outcome-first education systems where the unit of success is not completion but value created in the real world. Programs should culminate in tangible outputs such as deployed products, revenue-generating services, open-source contributions, or validated solutions to real problems, not certificates.
We should build builder pathways rather than career pathways. Instead of training people for predefined roles that may disappear, we should train them to identify problems, assemble tools including AI, and ship solutions repeatedly. The goal is not employability but economic agency.
We should build AI-augmented apprenticeship models where learners work on real projects from day one, supported by AI copilots that compress time to competence while preserving human judgment. Learning should happen inside production, not before it.
We should build talent intelligence layers that track what people can actually do over time. Evidence of work, iteration velocity, problem complexity, and impact should replace static credentials. This creates a new, more honest signal for the market.
We should build ecosystems, not just courses. Communities where builders collaborate across disciplines, share infrastructure, access capital pathways, and are exposed early to real economic constraints. This is how taste and discernment are formed.
Finally, we should build education companies that are comfortable saying no. No to vanity metrics. No to learning without leverage. No to pretending that content consumption equals transformation.
Where I believe Niyo Labs fits
I do not see Niyo Labs as another education platform competing in an already saturated market. I see it as an attempt to rebuild the missing middle between learning and value creation.
The role Niyo Labs is attempting to play is not to promise jobs, nor to distribute credentials, nor to compete on content volume. It is to act as a progression engine that helps people move from exposure to competence to real-world output.
At its core, Niyo Labs is designed to answer a single question honestly and repeatedly: what can this person actually build now that they could not build before?
That stance shapes everything. Programs are structured around applied pathways rather than abstract curricula. Learners are placed into problem spaces early, not after months of preparation. AI is used as an accelerator to compress time to capability, not as a substitute for human thinking. Progress is measured by shipped work aligned with learning , not just by completion rates.
I believe Niyo Labs has a responsibility to serve those who are most at risk of being left behind by this transition. Adults who are capable, motivated, and intelligent, but disconnected from networks, capital, and real opportunities to build. If education becomes increasingly parental, then platforms like ours must act as counterweights, providing access, exposure, and structured progression where none exists.
This also means accepting limits. Niyo Labs cannot be everything to everyone. We cannot afford to try to train for every role or chase every trend. Its value lies in creating repeatable pathways that take people from uncertainty to agency, from consumption to contribution and production.
If we succeed, Niyo Labs will not be known for the number of learners it enrolls, but for the number of builders it produces. People who can identify problems, assemble tools including AI, and create real value in the world.
That is how I believe education companies justify their existence in this era.
The education companies that survive this era will not be the loudest. They will be the ones quietly producing humans who can shape what comes next. That is the only credential that will endure.
