Reading Azeem Azhar's recent piece on the unraveling of fictions sent me back to a fluid dynamics classroom in 1983 that I'd mostly tried to forget. (Damn, that was over 40 years ago...) I was a chemical engineering student drowning in theory, increasingly convinced that none of it had any connection to anything that actually existed in the physical world. Lab work helped, but not enough. The equations were elegant. The gap between them and a real industrial process was vast and, to me at the time, mysterious.
The solution was a co-op semester and summer at Nestlé, working on real chemical engineering problems at a high-volume food manufacturing plant and their research facility. I came back for my senior year able to see what I hadn't been able to see before — how the theory mapped onto real processes, real constraints, real tradeoffs. High velocity molten chocolate and stinky hydrolyzed plant protein made fluid dynamics real. Same coursework, different student. The co-op didn't replace the credential; it made the credential mean something.
Azhar's argument is that credentials, jobs, and recognized expertise were never fundamental truths about how competence gets organized and rewarded. They were workarounds — social technologies built to solve a specific problem in a high-friction world. When evaluating capability directly is expensive, you outsource the judgment to institutions. A degree meant someone survived a sorting process, not that they could do anything useful. It worked because direct evaluation was prohibitive. That cost is collapsing, and the workarounds are wobbling.
The wobbling isn't limited to the corporate hiring office. It runs through every level of education — undergraduate degrees increasingly questioned as screening mechanisms for jobs that don't require the knowledge conferred, professional certifications that amount to multiple choice tests on memorized content, corporate training programs measured by completion rates and quiz scores rather than any observable change in behavior. The machinery of credentialing is vast, and most of it was built to answer "did this person go through the process?" rather than "can this person do the thing?"
Azhar frames the shift as a cost collapse. When AI can evaluate writing, assess reasoning, and simulate complex scenarios, the gap between "did they pass the test" and "can they do the work" gets very hard to hide behind. The credential as a proxy for capability made sense when assembling evidence of actual capability was genuinely hard. It makes less sense when that evidence is increasingly available and the proxy is increasingly gameable.
I watched a version of this play out for years in lean and continuous improvement training. The lean certification market is a mess — dozens of organizations selling colored belts attached to programs of wildly varying rigor, most of which involves watching videos and passing a quiz. The belt concept itself sits poorly with lean philosophy anyway; the Toyota Production System expects everyone to contribute to improvement, not a credentialed hierarchy. We held off on offering certifications at Gemba Academy for years because of that tension. When demand got loud enough that we eventually gave in, we were determined not to add to the noise.
The solution was a detailed, difficult, capstone project. To earn a certification, students had to apply what they learned to a real problem in their actual organization and show results. No simulation, no hypothetical. Early completion rates were low, and we fixed that not by softening the requirements but by adding structured coaching and accountability — borrowing from improvement kata's rhythm of current condition, obstacles, next step. Completion rates went to near 100%. The difficulty stayed.
The customer conversations were always revealing. Corporate buyers wanted quiz scores, completion rates, grade distributions. Something that fit in a spreadsheet and could be reported up the chain. Our argument was that a quiz is a terrible measure of understanding — maybe the worst available option that still looks like a metric. If you organized learning in ascending order of actual depth, it would go something like: watch or read something (near-zero retained understanding), take a quiz (memorize just enough to pass, then forget), complete a real project, teach others in a classroom setting, and finally coach others through live work at their organization. Most training stops at step 2 and calls it done.
The deeper problem is that proxy systems didn't just measure capability poorly. They shaped what people learned and how they thought about learning. If the goal is to pass the test, you study to pass the test. The content that can't be tested — judgment, tacit knowledge, the ability to read a situation and respond — gets quietly deprioritized because it won't show up in the grade report. My Nestlé co-op wasn't a formal requirement. It was available, I was frustrated enough to take it, and it changed how I understood everything that came after. That's a fragile way to deliver the most important part of an education.
If Azhar is right that the cost of direct evaluation is collapsing, the pressure on proxy-based credentialing is going to build from every direction simultaneously. Employers who can assess capability directly won't need to rent that judgment from institutions. Learners who can demonstrate real work won't need the certificate as a signal. The programs that survive — in universities, in professional training, in corporate development — will be the ones that were always about the work rather than the credential. That's a smaller category than most people in the education business would like to admit.
The certification mills will keep selling certificates. They always will. But the question that's increasingly being asked — "what did you actually build, fix, or improve?" — was always the right one. It just got cheap enough to insist on.