By Praveen RP, Co-CEO, Generative AI Business Services, Happiest Minds Technologies
Your degree was never really a knowledge certificate. It was a trust certificate.
An employer who has never met you cannot verify what you know, so they cede that judgement to an institution with a reputation to protect. In a country where verifying strangers is expensive, this is not laziness — it is the only mechanism that works at scale.
Artificial intelligence has just devalued one half of that certificate and left the other half entirely intact. Knowledge is now rentable by the hour, in any language, at almost no cost. What has not become cheap is the reason anyone believed you in the first place. Understand this properly and most of the confusion clears. The panic in engineering colleges right now is not really about AI writing code. It is about a generation discovering that the thing they spent four years accumulating was valued on an assumption that has quietly stopped holding.
So, the useful question is not whether AI takes jobs. It is narrower: when intelligence becomes cheap, what stays expensive?
The following seven points are what I believe make you a value creator
1. Learn how to learn
Like we have heard, change is the only constant – pick a subject you know nothing about and reach a working output in ninety days. Emerging skills stop being a threat and become an advantage over those who never learned the manoeuvre.
2. Become AI-native, not AI-dependent
A student who uses AI to understand a proof faster becomes dangerous. A student who uses it to never struggle with a proof becomes fluent but hollow — and the difference will not show up in the marksheet. It shows up a decade later, when someone asks them to do a thing nobody has done before.
3. Build depth somewhere
Prompting is already a commodity. Domain knowledge is not — and it does not come from reading about an industry. It comes from being physically near one while it malfunctions.
Pick one industry/sector and spend a hundred hours in primary contact with it. Sit in the clinic waiting room. Ride with the delivery rider. Spend a market morning with a wholesaler. Interview twenty people who do the work. A hundred honest hours will put you ahead of consultants who have read everything and stood in nothing.
4. Learn to spot problems
Everyone notices friction. Almost nobody writes it down, and that is the entire difference.
Keep a friction log. Once a week, one line: something that was harder, slower or more humiliating than it should have been. In a year you will have fifty candidate problems while your batchmates have none, and you will start seeing patterns none of them can see.
Then apply the test before you commit to any of them: is somebody already spending money, time or dignity on this in a bad way? Clients pay, often immediately, for relief from pain. If nobody is paying to solve a problem today, nobody will pay well for your solution tomorrow.
5. Think like an entrepreneur — even inside an organisation
Entrepreneurship in this context is not about company formation. The operational definition is narrower and harder – an entrepreneur is someone who acts without being asked and accepts being blamed.
Spotting opportunities is common; every office is full of people who can tell you exactly what is broken. Volunteering to own the fix, with your name attached the outcome, is rare — and it is one of the fastest ways to grow, because accountability and ownership are the one thing that has not been automated and will not be.
6. Build human capabilities
The usual list — communication, empathy, judgement, integrity, teamwork, leadership — is too broad to act on, so start with the two that anyone can verify: Stay close to the people your work affects, and be the one who says the uncomfortable thing in the room.
Trust is the scarcest commodity, be someone that people can blindly trust.
7. Measure yourself by value created
Degrees, designations, salaries and employer names measure what an institution thinks of you. They are useful and you should not pretend otherwise — but they are inputs, not results.
Every three months, write down the answer to one question: What became better because I was here? Not what you learned, attended or were certified in. What is measurably different for someone else?
If the answer comes back empty for two quarters in a row, change something structural.