I’ve spent over 10,000 hours teaching, training, and consulting over the past 20 years.
Education is dear to my heart – and it marks this newsletter issue today. 🗞️
Between our hiring spree at DevriX, the job market in the era of AI and global layoffs, and the value of community work (flashback to WordCamp Sofia last weekend), there’s a lot to unpack and foundational questions we should all ask ourselves as we head into 2026 in just a few weeks.
To recap this: ⤵️
The gap between the current employment market and the average role requirements in 2021 is MASSIVE.
➡️ 2021 was an intense hiring spree during a WFH pandemic, recruiting all over the world, filling seats like crazy. For context, Amazon grew from 800,000 employees in 2019 to about 1.6M members – DOUBLE IN 24 months.
This was the top of the bubble and the peak of corporate employment worldwide, maxing out VC budgets across SaaS, spreading stimulus checks, and NFTs selling for tens of millions of dollars (The Merge sold for $91.8M in Dec of 2021)
➡️ 2025 follows 3 years of layoffs, cuts in the Metaverse, worldwide investment in AI (VC + operational efficiency), cutting admin and mundane jobs as most as possible. Return to the office and “trimming the fat”.
Career skills today mixing in hard core skills + management traits, vs. middle level management layers or individual contributors in teams of 5 other people.
AI-enabled users performing 10x better than non-LLM natives. And since most of these tools have been around for 2+ years now, the experience gap is growing larger.
…
We live in interesting times.
Adapting is definitely possible, but surprisingly uncommon.
While information is everywhere around us, freely available (YouTube, tutorials, AI influencers), adoption is almost nowhere to be found.
➡️ If this doesn’t pick up next year, layoffs will keep trickling, and unemployment rates will go through the roof in the next 12 months. Get up to speed during the holidays and bring self-training back on the roadmap in Q1.
Growth Shuttle InsiderGrowth Shuttle Inside
The state of employment, WordCamp Sofia, hiring at DevriX
Mario Peshev
