Are creators are about to retrain the entire workforce?

A new Forbes report dropped last month with a number that should terrify every university administrator in the world.

Link to the article here →

Fifty-seven million Americans need AI skills right now.

Universities are training 0.2% of them.

Not 20%. Not even 2%.

Zero point two percent.

Meanwhile, the creator economy is forecast to hit $600 billion by 2030, with most of that growth coming from education.

And the CEO of ThriveCart - a platform processing $2 billion in annual transactions for creators - just said what everyone's thinking but nobody wants to say out loud: "It might be too little, too late" for traditional education to catch up.

The institutions we've spent centuries building to educate people? They're about to become irrelevant to the biggest workforce transformation in human history.

And creators teaching courses from their living rooms are going to fill the gap instead.

This is absolutely wild.

We've got 57 million people desperately trying to learn skills so they don't become obsolete.

We've got universities with enormous endowments, world-class facilities, tenured professors, centuries of institutional knowledge.

And they're serving 0.2% of the demand.

You know what that tells me? It's not a capability problem.

It's a structural problem.

Universities physically cannot move fast enough.

By the time they design a new AI curriculum, get it approved through committees, hire professors, and launch the program, the skills they're teaching will already be outdated.

The system was built for stability, not speed.

And speed is the only thing that matters now.

Creators don't have that problem.

The part that should really worry traditional institutions - companies are choosing creators over corporate training programs too.

Corporate training budgets dropped 3.7% while spending on external learning solutions jumped 23%.

The market has spoken.

And it said: we don't care about credentials anymore.

We care about results.

Now, I’m definitely not saying that creators teaching generic "Introduction to AI" courses are winning right now.

Not at all.

They're going hyper-specific.

The report shows creators in ultra-narrow niches command 3-5x higher prices and get 47% more engagement.

We're talking burnout recovery specifically for healthcare workers.

Productivity systems specifically for ADHD entrepreneurs.

AI prompt engineering specifically for marketing teams.

One creator mentioned in the report said something that's stuck with me: "Own a category so completely that price stops being the issue."

That's the game now.

Don't compete on breadth.

Compete on depth.

Be so specialised that you're the only real option.

And it's working.

Another creator in the report built a simple subscription funnel - €1 to €29 into a premium membership - and generated seven figures in annual recurring revenue.

Seven figures.

Teaching one very specific thing to one very specific audience.

The report estimates 40% of workplace skills will be obsolete by 2030.

That's not "some jobs will change."

That's "nearly half of everything you know how to do professionally will need to be relearned."

And when that happens, who are people going to turn to? The institution that takes four years and $200,000 to teach you something?

Or the creator who can teach you the exact skill you need for $497 and you can start applying it tomorrow?

This isn't even a fair fight anymore.

What I find most fascinating about all of this - nobody planned for creators to become workforce development infrastructure.

It just happened organically because traditional institutions failed to adapt.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

The market needed a solution.

Creators provided it.

Now we're watching in real-time as an entire industry gets disrupted by people who weren't even supposed to be competition.

The ThriveCart CEO called this "a reordering."

That feels like an understatement.

This is traditional education losing its monopoly on knowledge transfer.

This is the end of credentials mattering more than capability.

This is the biggest shift in how humans learn since the printing press made books accessible to everyone.

And AI is accelerating all of it.

So where does this leave us?

Universities will survive.

They're too big and necessary in other domains to fail completely.

But their role is fundamentally changing whether they admit it or not.

They're not the primary mechanism for professional development anymore.

Anyway, just my observation!

Remember, the creator mindset is all you need to grow 🌱

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