Speaking at the Australian Government Economic Reform Roundtable, Scott Farquhar highlighted the need for short, practical qualifications instead of the old “four-year apprenticeship” mindset. He’s right — because I’ve seen first-hand how our current training systems look good on paper but don’t hold up in practice, especially as AI makes the cracks impossible to ignore.

Blind Spots at the Top
I’ve been inside organisations where executives made decisions in the dark.

Restructures. Program cuts. Shifts in direction. Too often, they happened without a clear view of what the organisation already knew.

The result? Teams with deep expertise walked out the door, programs with long-term value were cut, and strategies shifted for the wrong reasons.

The financial cost is obvious, but the deeper cost is trust, morale, and resilience.

Two Sides of the Same Problem
For the individual, the frustration is clear: skills they’ve worked hard to build aren’t recognised or portable.
For the employer, the challenge is confidence: attendance records and completion rates don’t prove capability.

These can’t remain disconnected. If we want capability that lasts — capability that can be trusted — both sides need visibility.

Where the Cracks Keep Showing Up
Across classrooms, boardrooms, and regulated industries, the same patterns repeat:

• Attendance ≠ capability. Completion numbers look neat but rarely prove performance.
• Organisations don’t know what they know. Restructures often discard expertise that was already there.
• Employers + employees talk past each other. Skills aren’t recognised; assurance isn’t delivered.
• Compliance becomes the finish line. Passing an audit is treated as enough — it isn’t.
• Real practice is the test. If knowledge fails under pressure, it isn’t capability.

These aren’t theories — they’re failures I’ve witnessed repeatedly. And they explain why the cracks keep widening.

Toward the “Next”
This is what pushed me to start building something new.

The design work is under wraps for now, but it’s grounded in real pilots and conversations with leaders, teams, and educators who know the cracks first-hand.

What I can say is this: we don’t need another course, certificate, or dashboard. We don’t need another shiny tool that adds noise without solving the issue.

We need a way to trust that capability is actually being built — and that both individuals and organisations can see it.

At Department of Future, we put it simply: This is your now. What’s your next?

Where Do We Go From Here?
I’ve seen these cracks for too long. Every time, the response has been another bandaid — the same answers, repackaged, with the same results.

At Department of Future, we’ve been designing with the bigger picture in mind. Trust and capability is one of those components that has to “fit” if the rest is going to work.
It’s not the whole story — but without it, the rest doesn’t hold together.

(By Brenda Frisk, Department of Future)