The Missing Link: Education in the Blockchain Boom

What was once geek-speak is now common parlance, as everyone from teenagers to the Chinese government are talking about cryptocurrency and blockchain. It’s a brave, new world — one that is stoking the imagination of visionaries worldwide.

Blockchain first gained traction in the financial services industry, promising a way to cut inefficiencies and protect privacy. But that’s just the start.

“A permissionless, distributed, trust-free network has the power to revolutionise not just financial technology, stock markets and banking, but also the music industry, digital access in some of the world’s poorest nations, and could even ensure your Italian extra-virgin olive oil really is from Italy,” wrote Alex Hern in the Guardian.

And potentially more revolutionary, the scalability, transparency and engagement of blockchain may provide the backbone for innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems, including:

Address environmental issues through initiatives such as peer-to-peer climate projects, improved resource trading, and transparent reporting to validate compliance.

Ensure humanitarian aid gets to its intended recipients by tracking how resources are distributed, received, and redeemed.

Provide a way for the world’s 1.1 billion “unrecognized people” to access resources, infrastructure, and services currently unavailable to them because they currently have no legal identification.

Eradicate modern slavery and human trafficking through supply-chain transparency and biometric identification.

And that’s just the start, with plenty more on the horizon.

2017 saw some $3.4 billion raised in ICOs — initial coin offerings, a crowdfunding approach to raising capital for cryptocurrency projects — many of which were long on vision and short on details. “I’ve often said that we need fewer white papers and more code,” said angel investor Shidan Gouran, who is also the organizer of the Blockchain Event, a North American conference series. Gouran says the industry needs fingers on keyboards, “people who are starting projects and actually seeing them through rather than just doing crowd sales, raising money.”

Well, there’s a problem with that.

Not enough fingers, not enough keyboards… but plenty of projects.

The 200-plus projects funded by ICOs are just the tip of the iceberg; virtually every major financial services company has blockchain in its sights. IBM alone has over 400 blockchain projects in the works, requiring nearly 2000 employees. In a recent survey of Fortune 500 finservice and tech company execs by Synechron, 188 of the 200 respondents said they had plans to implement blockchain technology.

“Most of the large corporates want to be able to say they have a blockchain team,” says consultant Michael Mainelli of Z/Yen.

That’s a lot of needed blockchain experts.

Unfortunately, there are currently 14 open jobs for every blockchain engineer, a number that grows with each new ICO and initiative. The number of blockchain jobs posted in the U.S. this year has seen a dramatic increase, according to data provided to CoinDesk from Indeed.com. Since last December, that number has increased by 207 percent. Even more dramatically, the number of blockchain jobs has increased 631 percent since November 2015.

And with blockchain jobs expected to grow 16x in the next six years, there’s a huge and ever-widening gap between the potential and the probability.

The missing link between the two? Education.

Because developers with blockchain experience are commanding high salaries — $150/hour for a freelance developer on job site UpWork, and $250,000+ for a salaried employee — engineers have a vested interest in coming up to speed quickly in order to cash in on the high demand for their expertise.

But with so few in the know — some estimates put the total number crypto experts in the neighborhood of 5000 total, worldwide — there’s a huge need for mentors and training programs to help acolytes gain the knowledge and proficiency they need to participate in the innovative projects being funded.

While it’s clear we’ll eventually see traditional universities offer courses, and possibly even degrees, in blockchain in the future, for now, “there has been a surprising dearth of courses available in this nascent but fast-growing field,” wrote Martin Arnold in the Financial Times. A few major universities — Stanford, MIT, and Cal Berkeley, to name three — offer introductory courses in bitcoin and crypto, but have yet to launch blockchain-specific courses.

“Blockchain technology is a recent development and there is always a bit of a lag as academia catches up,” explains Aggelos Kiayias, director of the blockchain technology laboratory at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

Unfortunately, the industry doesn’t have time to wait for traditional academia to catch up. And while behemoths like IBM may be able to pull together the talents and resources to train their own project teams in-house, most companies aren’t able to do so.

And while blockchain coding courses are emerging around the world, they bring their own problems:

They’re non-accredited. Accreditation ensures that the college, university, or other institutions of higher learning are evaluated according to standards set by a peer review board. When an educational program or course isn’t accredited, there’s no guarantee that the organization or institution meets or exceeds minimum standards of quality.

The curriculum is not standardized. Without standardized courses, it’s difficult to compare the training received from different programs or courses. This makes it nearly impossible for hiring managers to be certain that a potential candidate can actually do the work expected of him or her.

There’s no consistency. Software developers looking for training may have to piece together their own programs, trying to figure out themselves what they need to know and where to get it. Not only is this inefficient, it’s costly for the developer.

The last thing the industry needs is a flood of poorly trained developers moving into highly specific jobs in an emerging field. Without an educational infrastructure and dependable source of qualified engineers, the entire promise of blockchain is at risk — for investors, for companies, for founders, and for employees.

Enter, Kingsland University — School of Blockchain, the world’s first accredited school for blockchain.

Founded by John Souza, Moe Levin, Nick Soman and me, Kingsland is leveraging 10+ years’ experience in providing cutting-edge education solutions in social media and programming technologies to over a quarter of a million students worldwide. Kingsland is a fully operational and accredited university, ensuring accountability and professionalism that are largely absent in the pop-up bootcamps emerging in the blockchain space.

Our vision, like the promises of blockchain, is huge. We, quite simply, are the future of blockchain education. We’re working with the leading experts in the field of blockchain and cryptocurrency to design a comprehensive blockchain curriculum, one that will support the high demand for quality blockchain experts.

Through the Kingsland Innovation Centre, companies can align themselves with Kingsland to acquire the best trained blockchain developers in the industry. Access to this labor pool gives employers confidence that they’re hiring an accredited developer with the skills and training to match the requirements of their needs.

Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” We think it’s fitting that a challenge in a disruptive industry requires a disruptive solution. And that’s Kingsland University — School of Blockchain.

Register your interest for our courses today at www.kingslanduniversity.com

This is an updated version of a previous article.