Thoughts on the Future of Education

Having just hired a few people again at Ormigo / Adcloud, the following two videos connected very well with me. The thing is that education is often not the deciding factor. Passion is a lot more important. We actually have one guiding principle when choosing new employees:

_Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities. — Dee Hock_

The very important thing here is motivation and with that comes passion. The people really need to love what they are doing and you those that do often have none-linear schooling. This is probably especially true for developers, which is obviously what I am hiring. What we need is a schooling system that finds out what a person’s passion is and helps them find a job within that passion. This can be anything from rocket ship engineer to plumber. When you have a passion for something you will be very good at it and no outsourced “worker” will beat you there.

So this here is the first video that you should be watching. It is old and I might have linked to it previously, but still, it serves as a good intro to the second one.

[youtube [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mmz5qYbKsvM&hl=de&fs=1]](<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mmz5qYbKsvM&hl=de&fs=1\]>)

Then watch Sir Ken Robinson give an introduction to his new Book The Element:

We need more thinkers like that, or actually we need Doers that follow those thinkers.