By Jane Sonnenschein · August 24, 2026

Recently, I completed a six-and-a-half-month professional development program in Social Media Management.

During this time, I have also been rebuilding several of my own social media accounts. I launched my independent website as well and have been updating it consistently. But all of these things come with one very practical problem: whether you are building a social media presence, writing articles, or slowly developing an independent website, it is very difficult for someone who is just starting out to see a stable financial return in the short term.

Life, however, does not stop and wait simply because you are working on something long-term.

If you need to support yourself and contribute to your household expenses, having a job that provides a stable income is still very important. So lately, I have started thinking seriously about finding a job again.

One day, I happened to see online that there was going to be a job fair in the next few days, and I casually mentioned it to Chris.

As soon as he heard that, he said, “That would actually suit you quite well.”

He had been to job fairs before and was familiar with how they worked. He told me that they were very different from simply sending applications online. You can walk directly up to a company’s booth, talk to someone from HR for a few minutes, introduce yourself, and find out what kind of people they are actually looking for. If both sides feel there might be a good fit, you can submit a formal application afterward.

Of course, the company is evaluating you. But at the same time, you are also evaluating the company and the position.

He said that if I was going to start looking for work seriously, he actually thought I should go to more events like this.

As we kept talking, he brought up something he had mentioned to me more than once before. At the company where he works, quite a few supervisors and managers originally started in frontline positions and gradually worked their way up. Some entered the company doing very basic jobs, but over time their ability, sense of responsibility, speed of learning, or management potential became visible through their actual work. With further internal training, they slowly moved into different positions.

That reminded me of some of the people I had known years ago while working at a U.S. military training base.

I worked there for many years as a COBS — Civilians on the Battlefield — one of the roleplayers who portrayed local civilians during military exercises. The base did not directly recruit large numbers of roleplayers itself. Instead, the contracts were awarded through a bidding process to outside companies that handled the recruitment and organization.

Because I worked there for so long, I ended up going through several different contractors.

What was particularly interesting was that, in two completely different contracting companies, I later saw people who had originally started out just like us, as ordinary roleplayers, eventually move into project management.

One of them was a woman I will call Ms. S. When I first knew her, she was just another roleplayer like the rest of us. Years later, after Chris had become a supervisor there, I discovered that Ms. S had become a project manager. She was responsible for managing the project, and Chris had to work with her directly.

I remember asking in surprise, “Wasn’t Ms. S just one of the roleplayers like us before? And now she’s in this position?”

I do not know exactly what happened in between, or how she moved step by step into that role. But there is one thing I did see with my own eyes: the position where someone enters a system does not necessarily have to be the position where they remain.

So when Chris once again told me about people in his own company who had gradually moved up from frontline jobs, I understood what he meant.

He was not saying that everyone who starts at the bottom will eventually become a manager. And neither of us believes that German companies have suddenly stopped caring about education or professional qualifications.

What Chris said, roughly speaking, was this: some large German companies seem to be starting to realize that having the right certificate and actually being able to do the job are not exactly the same thing.

And that was the question we eventually ended up discussing in much more depth: now that the way people acquire knowledge and skills has changed so dramatically, is the old logic — first look at where someone studied and what qualifications they have, and only then judge whether they are capable — beginning to become less suitable in some areas?

The more I thought about it, the more interesting the question became.

Because if we look back, it is not difficult to understand why Germany has traditionally placed so much value on formal vocational qualifications.

Germany’s system of vocational training, advanced master-level qualification exams, chambers of crafts, and the Chambers of Industry and Commerce, or IHK, did not simply appear one day because the government designed it that way. Behind it lies a long history of trade organizations, apprenticeship systems, and industrialization.

In the past, if you wanted to learn a genuinely complex trade, you usually had to enter that profession, learn from someone experienced, practise in a real working environment, and then pass an examination to prove that you had reached a commonly recognized standard.

In the industrial age, that system made a great deal of sense.

If you are building houses, wiring electricity, manufacturing machinery, or repairing cars, you cannot simply have someone walk in and say, “I studied this at home for two months. I think I know how to do it now.”

Why should anyone trust you?

If a machine fails, the cost is not simply that a webpage looks bad. Real money may be lost. If electrical work is done incorrectly or the structure of a building is unsafe, people’s lives may even be at risk.

So a vocational training certificate, a skilled-worker qualification, or an advanced master-level qualification never meant only, “This person spent a few years studying.”

It also served as a form of social trust.

This person had completed a defined course of training. They had gained practical experience. They had passed a standardized or officially recognized assessment. That meant society could reasonably assume that they had at least reached the minimum standard required for that profession.

Seen from this perspective, I do not think Germany was simply “obsessed with certificates” in the past. Under the economic and technological conditions of the time, formal qualifications were an extremely efficient signal of competence.

What has changed is the way we acquire skills today.

In the past, access to learning itself was scarce.

If you wanted to learn carpentry, someone had to teach you. If you wanted to learn machinery, it was best to get into a real factory. If you wanted to master a complicated piece of software, it was difficult to figure everything out entirely on your own.

At that time, “this person has never received formal training” often really did mean “this person probably has never learned it systematically.”

Today, that assumption is becoming less and less reliable.

Someone can teach themselves WordPress, SEO, video editing, data analysis, e-commerce systems, online advertising, website building, and all kinds of AI tools. There are textbooks, videos, online communities, and courses everywhere. AI has pushed this even further by turning many problems that once required you to “find someone who can teach me” into questions you can ask immediately while you are actually doing the work.

In the past, if you did not know how to use a piece of software, your first question might have been: Where can I learn this?

Today, quite often, you simply open the software and start. When you get stuck, you ask for help at exactly that point.

In other words, acquiring a skill and entering a formally recognized educational institution are gradually becoming two separate things.

This is something I have become increasingly aware of over the past few years.

My own career path has always been rather unconventional. When I ran my own company, I did not have a neat professional title that a German HR department could immediately recognize. But in reality, I had done almost every part of running an online shop: creating product images, listing products, running ads, communicating with customers, processing orders, purchasing, managing products, logistics, after-sales service, and handling complaints.

Later, when I moved into export business, I encountered even more practical problems involving cross-border operations. Whenever something went wrong, I had to make a judgment and find a solution immediately.

In everyday life, this kind of experience is easy to understand because you are actually doing the work every day.

But once you try to compress all of it into a German-style résumé, a strange question appears:

What exactly are you?

E-commerce operations?

Administrative work?

Customer service?

Content operations?

I have done all of these things. But if I had to summarize myself using one of the standard job titles that appears in a German job advertisement, it would actually be quite difficult.

I seem to have done all of them, and yet no single standard professional title fully describes what I have done.

That creates an interesting contradiction: your skills may be broad, while your professional label is weak.

If a recruitment system still filters people primarily through standardized qualifications and standardized job titles in the first round, someone who has actually done a great deal of relevant work may be rejected because their formal qualification does not match — before they ever have the chance to prove what they can do.

That is also why I keep coming back to one sentence that came out of our conversation that day:

AI has lowered the barrier to acquiring skills, but it has not automatically solved the problem of proving those skills.

Today, someone may have no formal qualification corresponding to a particular job title and still genuinely know how to do the work.

But the company still has another problem to solve:

How do I know that you really can?

In the past, the simplest answer was to look at certificates.

Do you have the required vocational qualification?

Yes or no.

One piece of paper can help an HR department reduce hundreds of applications to a manageable number very quickly. This system did not survive for so long simply because companies were lazy. Recruitment is, after all, a process of trying to manage risk with incomplete information.

But as the distance between “where did you learn this?” and “can you actually do this now?” becomes larger, companies may have to look for more signals.

What have you actually done before?

Have you worked on real projects?

What does your portfolio look like?

Can you explain a problem clearly in an interview?

How do you perform on a practical task?

How quickly do you learn once you join the company?

When there is no standard answer, do you know how to work something out for yourself?

All of these things mattered in the past too. But when formal qualifications were an especially reliable signal, there was less pressure to rely on them. Now their importance is being brought back into focus.

But I do not think this means that “certificates will become useless.”

That would simply be the opposite extreme.

In nursing, medicine, electrical work, safety-related jobs, construction, and many professions involving clear legal or technical responsibility, you cannot simply allow someone to start working because they say, “I spent six months learning this with AI.”

Many formal qualifications exist precisely because society cannot leave every risk to an individual’s own judgment.

What may actually be happening is that the labour market is beginning to split into different paths.

Some professions will still depend on highly standardized training and formal qualifications. But in another group of jobs — e-commerce, content, digital operations, marketing, some kinds of office work, websites, project coordination, and even parts of IT — tools and working methods are changing so quickly that a traditional three-year professional profile may not always keep up with reality.

A tool might be learned in three months and replaced six months later. Someone may never have studied the corresponding subject formally, yet may already have spent several years doing that work on real projects.

If companies continue to insist, “You must first complete a three-year vocational training program that matches this job exactly before I am even willing to see whether you can do it,” an increasingly absurd situation may emerge:

The person whose qualification matches perfectly may not know the tools people actually use today.

Meanwhile, the person who works with those tools every day may never even get the chance to demonstrate their ability because they are missing one piece of paper.

The faster technology changes, the more obvious this contradiction becomes.

What the industrial age needed most was a form of standardized competence.

Companies wanted to know: can this person follow the required process and do the same thing correctly and reliably ten thousand times?

Germany’s rigorous vocational training system was particularly strong in that environment because stability, standardization, and reliability were among the most important values of industrial production.

But in the AI age, the central question in more and more jobs is changing.

If the tool you are using today may no longer even look the same six months from now, companies cannot only ask:

What did you learn five years ago?

They also have to ask:

What can you do now? And when the next new thing arrives, how quickly can you learn it?

That makes learning ability, transferable skills, judgment, problem-solving, and initiative increasingly important.

This reminded me of an essay I wrote some time ago, We May Be Living Through the AI Version of 1890.

In that essay, I was thinking about how AI is redefining work itself.

But if the nature of work is being redefined, another question will almost certainly follow:

Do we also have to redefine how we prove that someone is “qualified” to do that work?

I increasingly think that the change ahead will probably not look like this:

“Degrees and professional qualifications will completely lose their value.”

It is more likely that certificates will gradually move from being something close to an entry ticket to becoming one signal of competence among several.

A formal qualification can show that someone has received systematic training and has a certain level of basic reliability.

Work experience can show what they have actually done.

Projects and portfolios can show what they can do now.

Interviews, practical assignments, and trial work can provide further evidence.

And internal company training can fill in whatever is still missing.

In the past, a person’s career path was often relatively clear: first you proved through education, vocational training, or another formal qualification that you had the foundation required to enter a profession, and then you moved into the corresponding job.

But more and more jobs in the future may no longer judge people entirely through that single path. Companies may still look at education and certificates, but they may also care more about what practical experience someone has accumulated, what they can genuinely do now, how quickly they can learn something new, and whether the missing pieces can be taught later.

Of course, this kind of change will not happen overnight.

Especially not in Germany.

A system that has developed over generations does not suddenly throw away all its old rules simply because technology has changed for a few years.

Companies can quickly start saying things like, “We welcome career changers,” “skills matter more to us,” or “we can provide internal training for what you do not yet know.”

But when HR is actually looking through applications and comes across someone without the standard vocational qualification, that hand — trained by decades of habit — may still pause instinctively.

Institutions, like people, have a kind of muscle memory.

They may already know that their old habits no longer fit the present perfectly. But when risk appears, they still tend to fall back on the judgment they know best.

So when Chris says that some large German companies are “starting to wake up,” I prefer to understand it this way:

Germany has not suddenly stopped valuing qualifications. Rather, some companies are beginning to realize that if they continue using an old-world filter to identify people for a new-world labour market, they may screen out capable people before they ever get the chance to show what they can do.

That is the change I find genuinely worth watching.

Because a certificate has never been the same thing as ability itself.

For a very long time, it was simply one of the most reliable, convenient, and cost-effective ways we had of judging ability.

But as knowledge becomes easier to access, and as people become able to learn the same skill through more and more different paths, the central question may gradually shift from:

“Where did you learn this?”

to:

“What can you actually do?”

And perhaps, eventually, to one more question:

“When the next thing comes along that you do not yet know, are you capable of learning it?”

Knowledge becoming less scarce does not mean certificates will disappear.

But perhaps the time has come to ask again what, exactly, they still prove.

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 当知识不再稀缺，证书究竟还在证明什么？

German version: Wenn Wissen nicht mehr knapp ist – was beweisen Abschlüsse eigentlich noch?