Open Institute of Technology (OPIT) masterclasses bring students face-to-face with real-world business challenges. In OPIT’s July masterclass, OPIT Professor Francesco Derchi and Ph.D. candidate Robert Mario de Stefano explained the principles of regenerative businesses and how regeneration goes hand in hand with growth.

Regenerative Business Models

Professor Derchi began by explaining what exactly is meant by regenerative business models, clearly differentiating them from sustainable or circular models.

Many companies pursue sustainable business models in which they offset their negative impact by investing elsewhere. For example, businesses that are big carbon consumers will support nature regeneration projects. Circular business models are similar but are more focused on their own product chain, aiming to minimize waste by keeping products in use as long as possible through recycling. Both models essentially aim to have a “net-zero” negative impact on the environment.

Regenerative models are different because they actively aim to have a “net-positive” impact on the environment, not just offsetting their own use but actively regenerating the planet.

Massive Transformative Purpose

While regenerative business models are often associated with philanthropic endeavors, Professor Derchi explained that they do not have to be, and that investment in regeneration can be a driver of growth.

He discussed the importance of corporate purpose in the modern business space. Having a strong and clearly stated corporate purpose is considered essential to drive business decision-making, encourage employee buy-in, and promote customer loyalty.

But today, simple corporate missions, such as “make good shoes,” don’t go far enough. People are looking for a Massive Transformational Purpose (MTP) that can take the business to the next level.

Take, for example, Ben & Jerry’s. The business’s initial corporate purpose may have been to make great ice cream and serve it up in a way that people will enjoy. But the business really began to grow when they embraced an MTP. As they announced in their mission statement, “We believe that ice cream can change the world.” Their business activities also have the aim of advancing human rights and dignity, supporting social and economic justice, and protecting and restoring the Earth’s natural systems. While these aims are philanthropic, they have also helped the business grow.

RePlanet

Professor Derchi next talked about RePlanet, a business he recently worked to develop their MTP. Founded in 2015, RePlanet designs and implements customized renewable energy solutions for businesses and projects. The company already operates in the renewable energy field and ranked as the 21st fastest-growing business in Italy in 2023. So while they were already enjoying great success, Derchi worked with them to see if actively embracing a regenerative business model could unlock additional growth.

Working together, RePlanet moved towards an MTP of building a greener future based on today’s choices, ensuring a cleaner world for generations. Meeting this goal started with the energy products that RePlanet sells, such as energy systems that recover heat from dairy farms. But as the business’s MTP, it goes beyond that. RePlanet doesn’t just engage suppliers; it chooses partners that share its specific values. It also influences the projects they choose to work on – they prioritize high-impact social projects, such as recently installing photovoltaic energy systems at a local hospital in Nigeria – and how RePlanet treats its talent, acknowledging that people are the true energy of the company.

Regenerative Business Strategies

Based on work with RePlanet and other businesses, Derchi has identified six archetypal regenerative business strategies for businesses that want to have both a regenerative impact and drive growth:

• Regenerative Leadership – Laying the foundation for regeneration in a broader sense throughout the company
• Nature Regeneration – Strategies to improve the health of the natural world
• Social Regeneration – Regenerating human ecosystems through things such as fair-trade practices
• Responsible Sourcing – Empowering and strengthening suppliers and their communities
• Health & Well-being – Creating products and services that have a positive effect on customers
• Employee Focus – Improve work conditions, lives, and well-being of employees.

Case Studies

Building on the concept of regenerative business models, Roberto Mario de Stefano shared other case studies of businesses that are having a positive impact and enjoying growth thanks to regenerative business models and strategies.

Biorfarm

Biorfarm is a digital platform that supports small-scale agriculture by creating a direct link between small farmers and consumers. Cutting out the middleman in modern supply chains means that farmers earn about 50% more for their produce. They set consumers up as “digital farmers” who actively support and learn about farming activities to promote more conscious food consumption.

Their vision is to create a food economy in which those who produce food and those who consume it are connected. This moves consumers from passive cash cows for large corporations that prioritize profits over the well-being of farmers to actively supporting natural production and a more sustainable system.

Rifo Lab

Rifo Lab is a circular clothing brand with the vision of addressing the problem of overproduction in the clothing industry. Established in Prato, Italy, a traditional textile-producing area, the company produces clothes made from textile waste and biodegradable materials. There are no physical stores, and all orders must be placed online; everything is made to order, reducing excess production.

With an eye on social regeneration, all production takes place within 30 kilometers of their offices, allowing the business to support ethical and local production. They also work with companies that actively integrate migrants into the local community, sharing their local artisan crafts with future generations.

Ogyre

Ogyre is a digital platform that allows you to pay fishermen to fish for waste. When fishermen are out conducting their livelihood, they also collect a significant amount of waste from the ocean, especially plastic waste. Ogyre arranges for fishermen to get paid for collecting that waste, which in turn supports the local fishing communities, and then transforms the waste collected into new sustainable products.

Moving Towards a Regenerative Future

The masterclass concluded with a Q&A session, where it explained that working in regenerative businesses requires the same skills as any other business. But it also requires you to embrace a mindset where value comes from giving and that growth is about working together for a better future, and not just competition.

Riccardo Ocleppo’s vision for the Open Institute of Technology (OPIT) started when he realized that his own university-level training had not properly prepared him for the modern workplace. Technological innovation is moving quickly and changing the nature of work, while university curricula evolve slowly, in part due to systems in place designed to preserve the quality of courses.

Ocleppo was determined to create a higher learning institution that filled the gap between the two realities – delivering high-quality education while preparing professionals to work in dynamic environments that keep pace with technology. Thus, OPIT opened enrolments in 2023 with a curriculum that created a unique bridge between the present and the future.

This is the story of one student, Ania Jaca, whose time at OPIT gave her the skills to connect her knowledge of product design to full system deployment.

Meet Ania

Ania is an example of an active professional who was able to identify what was missing in her own skills that would be needed if she wanted to advance her career in the direction she desired.

Ania is a highly skilled professional who was working on product and industrial design at Deloitte. She has an MA in product design, speaks five languages, studied in China, and is an avid boxer. She had the intelligence and the temperament to succeed in her career, but felt that she lacked the skills to advance and move from determining how products look to how systems really work, scale, and evolve.

Ania taught herself skills such as Python, artificial intelligence (AI), and cloud infrastructure, but soon realized that she needed a more structured education to go deeper. Thus, the search for her next steps began, and her introduction to OPIT.

OPIT appealed to Ania because it offered a fully EU-accredited MSc that she could pursue at her own pace, thanks to remote delivery and flexible hours. But more than that, it filled exactly the knowledge gap she was looking to build upon, teaching her technical foundations, but always with a focus on applications in the real world. Part of the appeal was the faculty, which includes professionals who are leaders in their field and who deal with current professional challenges on a daily basis, which they can bring into the classroom.

Ania enrolled in OPIT’s MSc in Applied Data Science & AI.

MSc in Applied Data Science and AI

This is OPIT’s first master’s program, which also launched in 2023, and is now one of four on offer. The course is designed for graduates like Ania who want a career at the intersection of management and technology. It is attractive to professionals who are already working in this area but lack the technical training to step into certain roles. OPIT requires no computer science prerequisites, so it accepted Ania with her MA in product design.

It is an intensive program that starts with foundational application courses in business, data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and problem-solving. The program then moves towards applying data science and AI methodologies and tools to real-life business problems.

The course combines theoretical study with a capstone project that lets students apply what they learn in the real world, either at their existing company or through internship programs. Many of the projects developed by students go on to become fundamental to the businesses they work with.

Ania’s Path Forward

Ania is working on her capstone project with Neperia Group, an Italian-based IT systems development company that works mostly with financial, insurance, and industrial companies. They specialize in developing analysis tools for existing software to enhance insight, streamline management, minimize the impact of corrective and evolutionary interventions, and boost performance.

Ania is specifically working on tools for assessing vulnerabilities in codebases as an advanced cybersecurity tool.

Ania credits her studies at OPIT for helping her build solid foundations in data science, machine learning, and cloud workflows, giving her a thorough understanding of digital products from end to end. She feels this has prepared her for roles at the intersection between infrastructure, security, and deployment, which is exactly where she wants to be. OPIT is excited to see where Ania’s career takes her in the coming years.

Preparing for the Future of Work

Overall, studying at OPIT has helped Ania and others like her prepare for the future of work. According to the Visual Capitalist, the fastest-growing jobs between 2025 and 2030 will be in big data (up by 110%), Fintech engineers (up by 95%), AI and machine learning specialists (up by 85%), software application developers (up by 60%), and security management specialists (up by 55%).

However, while these industries are growing, entry-level opportunities are declining in areas such as software development and IT. This is because AI now performs many of the tasks associated with those roles. Instead, companies are looking for experienced professionals to take on roles that involve more strategic oversight and innovative problem-solving. But how do recent graduates leapfrog past experienced professionals when there is a lack of entry-level positions to make the transition?

This is another challenge that OPIT addresses in its course design. Students don’t just learn the theory, OPIT actively encourages them to focus on applications, allowing them to build experience while studying. The capstone project consolidates this, enabling students to demonstrate to future employers their expertise at deploying technology to solve problems.

OPIT also has a dynamic Career Services department that specifically works with students to prepare them for the types of roles they want. This focus on not only learning but building a career is one of the elements that makes OPIT stand out in preparing graduates for the workplace.

In many ways, the concept of education has remained the same over the millennia – the experienced and learned passing on their knowledge and wisdom to new generations. And some of the biggest revolutions in teaching and learning have been brought about by technology: from the printing press to computers to the internet, they have all changed and democratized the process of teaching and learning. Now, artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as the next big game-changer.

The emerging role of AI agents in education is the subject of a new e-book released by the Open Institute of Technology (OPIT). Going beyond simple AI tools, such as ChatGPT’s generative AI, the e-book looks at how sophisticated AI agents can be deployed as education allies, both in the general sense and referencing OPIT’s AI Copilot as a specific case study.

So, what can you expect to learn from OPIT’s e-book?

What Are AI Agents?

The e-book starts by explaining the concept of AI Agents. These are AI tools that go beyond simple “if a then x but if b then y” reasoning. Instead, they can work autonomously towards specified goals, with very little need for user intervention. To achieve this, the AI Agent must be able to perceive, make decisions, act, and adapt.

What those four steps look like in action depends on how the AI Agent is employed. Let’s take the example of an AI Agent deployed to deliver IT support, integrated with the IT system’s knowledge and user management system.

The AI Agent will perceive the nature of the problem from requests for help submitted by users, reading and understanding written requests, and also potentially gathering data directly from devices if they are networked. It then integrates this input with its IT system knowledge to understand the nature of the problem and the required solution.

The AI Agent will then decide the best way to solve the problem and plan what steps need to be taken. It should then be able to act. For example, it can verify the user’s identity and begin the password reset process, send detailed information to the user explaining how to solve the problem, or issue a ticket with the important information to the appropriate human IT specialist.

Based on outcomes, the AI Agent will assess its success in completing this task and incorporate that information into its knowledge base.

As well as saving time and money on these tasks, AI Agents can be more efficient, as they work continuously and reduce human error, especially for repetitive and mundane tasks. Scalability is another advantage of AI Agents, as they can be easily scaled up or down when workloads fluctuate.

AI Agents in Education

AI Agents can be deployed in education scenarios to achieve a number of different tasks, which is something that OPIT is doing with its OPIT AI Copilot.

These can be programmed to work as virtual teachers or study assistants that are available 24/7 and deliver personalized learning plans. For example, the OPIT AI Copilot is trained on OPIT’s library of educational content, including over 5,000 lectures and 3,500 hours of video content across 131 courses. From this base, it can show students the content they need to study based on their current stage in the course and answer questions posed by the student through a natural language interface.

If the student is struggling with concepts, the AI Agent can produce alternative learning materials that may work better with the student’s learning style. For advanced students, it can bring in related content that connects to their interests and understanding.

The AI Agent can help students prepare for exams by creating practice tests and issuing grades, even for long-form answers based on factors such as grammatical accuracy and the presence of essential concepts in the response. This kind of immediate feedback has been shown to improve student results over time.

The AI Agent is also useful for teachers, who can use it for grading simple tests and as a fairness check when grading large numbers of more complex papers. It can alert teachers when students are struggling and might benefit from direct intervention, and can identify course materials that are proving problematic for the cohort as a whole, flagging them up for review.

There are many other potential applications, such as creating virtual tours of lost or distant historical sites, virtual discussion moderation, resource gathering for assignments, and organizing references in the required format.

The Benefits of AI Agents in Education

The e-book takes a deep look at both the benefits and potential issues of AI in education. Some of the clearest benefits are personalized learning that moves beyond “one-size-fits-all” approaches and improved accessibility. At the same time, there are concerns around algorithmic bias impacting learning and reduced critical thinking due to over-reliance on AI tools.

But this is why the e-book emphasizes that AI is not a replacement for human teachers, but a tool that can be used to enhance the learning environment. OPIT devotes a chapter to discussing how teachers are becoming curators of dynamic teaching environments that leverage a variety of tools, including AI, to create stimulating and accessible learning spaces.

Essential to this is teaching students how to work with AI, when it is appropriate and when it can be a hindrance, and how to critically assess the content produced and delivered by AI. This is an essential skill for the future as AI becomes more prevalent in every aspect of our lives, and we must critically assess its outputs.

AI Agents Empowering Learning

Overall, the e-book assesses how AI Agents are being leveraged to empower both teachers and students in the education space. The recently released OPIT AI Copilot is one of the examples discussed in the e-book, but it is just the beginning. We fully expect more complex and sophisticated education AI Agents to emerge as the AI Agents, teachers, and students gain a better understanding of their capabilities. It is an exciting time to be in education.

Download the OPIT e-book AI in Education.

The Open Institute of Technology (OPIT) is turning two! It has been both a long journey and a whirlwind trip to reach this milestone. But it is also the perfect time to stop and reflect on what we have achieved over the last two years, as well as assess our hopes for the future. Join us as we map our journey over the last two years and look forward to future plans.

July 2023: Launching OPIT

OPIT officially launched as an EU-accredited online higher education institution in July 2023, and offered two core programs: a BSc in Modern Computer Science and an MSc in Applied Data Science and AI. Its first class matriculated in September of that year.

The launch of OPIT was several years in the making. Founder Riccardo Ocleppo was planning OPIT ever since he launched his first company, Docsity, in 2010, an online platform for students to share access to educational resources. As part of working on that project, Ocleppo had the chance to talk to thousands of students and professors and discovered just how big a gap there is between what is taught in universities today and job market demands. Ocleppo felt that this gap was especially wide in the field of computer science, and OPIT was his concept to fill that gap.

The vision was to provide university-level teaching that was accessible around the world through digital learning technologies and that was also affordable. Ocleppo’s vision also involved international professors and building strong relationships with global companies to ensure a truly international and fit-for-purpose learning experience.

One of the most important parts of launching OPIT was the recruitment of the faculty of professors, which Ocleppo was personally involved in. The idea was to build a roster of expert teachers and professionals who were leaders in the field and urge them to unite the teaching fundamentals with real-world applications and experience. The process involved screening more than 5,000 CVs, interviewing over 200 candidates, and recruiting 25 professors to form the core of OPIT’s faculty.

September 2023: The Inaugural Cohort

When OPIT officially launched, its first cohort included 100 students from 38 different countries. Divided between the BSc and MSc courses, students were also allowed to participate in one of two different tracks. Some chose the standard track to accommodate their existing work commitments, while others chose to fast-track to complete their studies sooner.

OPIT was pleased with its success in making the courses international and accessible, with notable representation from Africa. In the first cohort, 40% of MSc students were also from non-STEM fields, showing OPIT’s success at engaging professionals looking to develop skills for the modern workplace.

July 2024: A Growing Curriculum

Building on this initial success, in 2024, OPIT expanded its academic offering to include a second BSc program in Digital Business, and three new MSc programs in Digital Business & Innovation, Responsible Artificial Intelligence, and Enterprise Cybersecurity. These were all offered in addition to the original two programs.

The new course offerings led to total student numbers growing to over 300, hailing from 78 different countries. This also led to an expansion of the faculty, with professionals recruited from major business leaders such as Symantec, Microsoft, PayPal, McKinsey, MIT, Morgan Stanley, Amazon, and U.S. Naval Research. This focus on professional experience and real-world applications is ideal for OPIT as 80% of the student body are active working professionals.

January 2025: First Graduating Class

OPIT held its first-ever graduation ceremony in Valletta, Malta, on March 8, 2025. The ceremony was a hybrid event, with students attending both in person and virtually. The first graduating class consisted of 40 students who received an MSc in Applied Data Science and AI.

OPIT’s MSc programs include a capstone project that sees students apply their learning to real-world challenges. Projects included the use of large language models for the creation of chatbots in the ed-tech field, the digitalization of customer support processes in the paper and non-woven industry, personal data protection systems, AI applications for environmental sustainability, and predictive models for disaster prevention linked to climate change. Since many OPIT students realized their capstone projects within their organizations, OPIT also saw itself successfully facilitating digital innovation in the field.

July 2025: New Learning Environments

The next step for OPIT is not just to teach others how to leverage AI to work smarter, but to start applying AI solutions in our own business environment. To this end, OPIT unveiled its OPIT AI Copilot at the Microsoft AI Agents and the Future of Higher Education event in Milan in June 2025.

The OPIT AI Copilot is a specialist AI Agent designed to enhance learning in OPIT’s fully digital environment. OPIT AI Copilot acts as a personal tutor and study companion, and but rather than being trained on the World Wide Web, it is specifically trained on OPIT’s educational archive of around 3,500 hours of lectures and 3,000 proprietary documents.

The OPIT AI Copilot then provides real-time, personalized guidance that adapts to where the student is in the course and the progress they have shown in grasping the material. As well as pulling from existing materials, the OPIT AI Copilot can generate content to deepen learning, such as code samples and practical exams. It can also answer questions posed by the students with answers grounded in the official course material. The tool is available 24/7, and also has an intelligent examination mode, which prevents cheating.

In this way, OPIT AI Copilot enriches the OPIT learning environment by providing students with 24/7 personalized support for their learning journey, ideal for busy professionals balancing work and study. It is a step towards facing the challenge of “one-size-fits-all” education approaches that have plagued learning institutions for millennia.

September 2025: A New Cohort

On the heels of the OPIT AI Copilot launch, OPIT is excited about recruiting its next round of students, with applications open until September 2025. If you are interested in joining OPIT, you can learn more about its courses here.

Source:

• Authority Magazine, published on July 28th, 2025

By Kate Mowbray, 7 min read

• Authority Magazine

Source:

• EFMD Global, published on July 29th, 2025

By Stephanie Mullins, 3 min read

• EFMD Global

Are you considering returning to study to deepen your fundamental understanding of essential emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), data science, and cybersecurity? But at the same time, are you unsure about the kind of impact this might have on your career prospects and whether it is worth the investment?

Open Institute of Technology (OPIT) student Paulo Mota was in a similar situation. To assist others in choosing the best path forward, he shares his experience as a professional who decided to enroll at OPIT to deepen his understanding of AI. Paulo explains how he was able to immediately apply his new learning in his current role to enhance his impact.

The Challenge

Paulo is a data engineer with Brazilian roots who has been working in the Netherlands for the past five years. He increasingly saw the potential applications of AI to enhance projects in his current position at Coolblue and had a desire to move in that direction. But he was unclear how to set aside the time to study the subject without putting his career progression on hold. This was his biggest barrier in deciding how to move forward.

The Solution

Paulo investigated a number of study opportunities and settled on OPIT. While recognizing that it may not be the most prominent institute in the field, the curriculum of the MSc in Responsible AI was exactly what he was looking for. It combines building technical expertise with a focus on real-world applications, and it is taught not just by professors but also by professionals in the field currently leading the expansion of AI applications.

In addition to this, the degree is flexible and delivered fully remote, allowing Paulo to study without taking a career break. This also had the added benefit that he could apply what he learned on the job, so he did not have to wait to complete the course to start to see the benefits.

Paulo also highlighted that the degree’s EU certification was a bonus for someone with Brazilian roots building a career in the European market.

The Results

Paulo says that so far, his OPIT degree has been a highly worthwhile investment. He has already started to become more involved with projects at his current place of work, using AI to improve how the data analytics team works, improving the speed and impact of their work.

For his final capstone project, Paulo is working on a live challenge in his workplace, enhancing the real-world experience he gains as part of the course and bringing genuine value to his company in the process.

The course has also prepared Paulo for a variety of professional certifications in AI that enhance his CV and improve his competitive edge in the work landscape. While students must still apply to the professional issuing agencies and take tests, OPIT’s courses prepare students to fulfill these requirements with ease.

Other Success Stories

Paulo is one of several recent success stories to come out of OPIT from working professionals who have leveraged their new learning to enhance their impact in their current positions.

For instance, Rinaldo Festa recently shared a similar experience completing OPIT’s BSc in Modern Computer Science while continuing to work full-time as the Chief Technology Officer at Cosmico. He wanted to improve his ability to balance innovation with practical application so that he could perform better in his current job and not interrupt his career. Like Paulo, his course of study had immediate applications, and he was able to work on more transformational projects.

Silvia Garavaglia was in a similar position, working as a project manager on complex projects that increasingly involved big data and AI, but she felt that her lack of technical expertise was holding her back from doing more. She chose OPIT’s MSc in Applied Data Science and AI, again because it married flexibility with a curriculum built around practical applications. This allowed her to rethink her role and create new opportunities for herself within her career.

OPIT’s MSc in Responsible AI

OPIT’s MSc in Responsible Artificial Intelligence is a forward-thinking program designed to cultivate a new generation of AI professionals who are not only technically proficient but also deeply conscious of the ethical and societal implications of their work.

It is a full, comprehensive, EU-accredited Master’s program that typically lasts between 12 and 24 months, depending on whether you decide to take the standard track or fast-track. Both tracks cover the same content, so your choice depends on the time you have to commit. It offers a unique blend of foundational AI concepts and advanced applications, all viewed through a critical lens of responsibility.

The curriculum is meticulously structured to cover both the theoretical underpinnings and practical applications of AI. Core modules include an “Introduction to AI and Ethics,” which sets the stage for the program’s unique focus, alongside essential subjects like “Data Analytics and Visualization,” “Human-Centered AI Design,” and “Programming for AI.” As the program progresses, students delve into more advanced topics such as “Machine Learning,” “Natural Language Processing,” “Computer Vision,” “Computing Architectures for AI,” and specialized applications in “AI for IoT and Automation” and “AI in Business, Strategy, and Entrepreneurship.”

A key expectation of the program is its emphasis on progressive assessment rather than traditional final exams. Students are evaluated through a variety of methods, including programming exercises, collaborative group projects, development of websites or applications, essays, and quizzes. This diverse assessment approach ensures a holistic understanding and application of the material.

The program’s tight course structure is followed by final terms dedicated to a thesis or a capstone project, which can often be integrated with an internship. In the case of those continuing to work, it integrates real-world challenges into their current role.

Graduates emerge from the program as highly versatile AI professionals uniquely positioned to develop AI applications, models, and software responsibly, integrating ethical considerations into every stage of the AI lifecycle. This specialized skill set opens doors to a wide array of career opportunities in a rapidly evolving job market.

The Open Institute of Technology (OPIT) is a new concept in higher education that aims to equip people for a fast-changing work landscape characterized by rapidly evolving technology. This goes beyond deep training in trending technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity to reframing our approach to work and how we envision the future of work.

As part of that ongoing discussion, Stefania Tabi from OPIT Career Services sat down with Matteo Roversi, Co-Founder and Chief Community Officer at Cosmico, to talk about how we need to reframe our approach to work to thrive in the future workplace.

Founded in 2020, Cosmico is an Italian-based talent platform that uses AI-powered technology to connect talent – currently a pool of more than 27,000 independent professionals – with the businesses that need them, including many of Europe’s biggest companies. The platform uses AI for talent screening, matching, and recommendations, as well as to assess coding skills. This can reduce the time from request to screening, interview, proposal, and kick-off to between 24 and 72 hours, letting businesses move faster.

New Rules

Matteo started by discussing the aspects of the work landscape that have fundamentally changed over the last decade, and how this is forcing us to reframe our approach to standing out in the workplace.

CV to Reputation

He explained that while for many potential employees, the main concern used to be populating your CV with the relevant skills and experience to land your next job, that is becoming increasingly meaningless. AI can be used to tailor your CV exactly to what a job description wants, bearing in mind that the description was probably also written by AI and will be assessed by AI. As a result, matching CVs to job descriptions has become an increasingly unreliable way to find desirable candidates.

This has shifted the focus to reputation, as it is increasingly important that people are familiar with your work and know people who can recommend you to get your foot in the door.

Execution to Agency

It used to be that your objective was fulfilling the tasks on a job description, which required intelligence and experience, but not necessarily a significant amount of self-direction. That is changing as new ways of solving problems continue to emerge. Today, businesses want employees who have agency and take the initiative to solve problems. In a way, today, everyone needs the self-starter mindset of an entrepreneur.

Specialization to Deep Generalism

In recent years, the work landscape has been about specialization in specific fields and technologies. But Matteo explained how that focus is disappearing. Technology is moving so quickly that specialist software, coding languages, and algorithms are becoming obsolete, or the work previously required is being automated through AI.

Therefore, today, instead of a focused specialization, applicants need deep generalism, with not only a broad understanding of the technological landscape but a deep understanding of how technology can be leveraged to connect different fields of work, solve problems, and judge decisions.

Hours to Progression

The trend of moving away from paying for hours worked to the product being delivered will only become more pronounced, Matteo explained. Things that once took hours can now be delivered within minutes, but that doesn’t necessarily diminish the value of that delivery.

He explained how we need to think of ourselves as mind athletes. For instance, a sprinter may compete for a little over 10 seconds in their principal race, but they spend vast amounts of time in deep training. This is what professionals must do now: invest in their knowledge base so that they can deliver. As an extension of this, just like athletes, professionals need to focus on recovery. No one is a machine, and we cannot be delivering constantly.

Compete to Create

Matteo explained how the workplace mindset has long been one of competition, with talent competing for a finite number of jobs. But as jobs disappear and emerge rapidly, the field of competition changes significantly, and the market no longer feels finite. He also suggested that the best way to find the job that you want is to create it, rather than wait for someone else to make it for you (and then compete for it).

Taking Charge of Your Career

Having looked in detail at how the work landscape is changing, Matteo then shifted gears and shared his best advice for creating the job that you want.

Shift to AI Mode

He started by pointing out that you need to leverage the available technology to stay competitive, especially AI. But you have to do this in a way that increases your productivity and enhances the value of your contribution. He suggests that people embrace and test technologies and automate where possible by delegating. But delegating should go beyond simple tasks to orchestrating processes. When this is in place, you can reshape your vision of your contribution by identifying what you do that machines cannot replicate.

Build Your Work Stack

Once you have identified your value, Matteo explains how to reform what you offer. Start by thinking of yourself as a company rather than a job description. Don’t tell people what you do, but tell them the problems that you solve. Once this is in place, you can build your presence and your audience by making yourself accessible, both online and offline. This helps you grow your network by actively seeking mentors and peers.

Write Daily, Ship Weekly, Share Always

Matteo emphasized that work must be public to build your reputation, an important factor already discussed in his review of the work landscape. To this end, he suggests writing daily, which means spending at least 15 minutes a day focused on your problem. This should result in something you can “ship” every week to maintain your visibility, and always share to build your profile.

Level Up Your Purpose

Matteo agreed with the advice that to thrive in your work, you need to have purpose, but also agreed with the suggestion that people who say to follow your passion are usually already rich and have a safety net in place for failure. He suggested that your purpose changes according to your circumstances and that you should aim to cycle through these different phases.

• Survival – When you need to pay your bills, you need to find clients and sell your work
• Status – Once you have a stable base, you can focus on gaining recognition for your work and attracting clients to you
• Creativity – While many people stop at the status phase, this is the moment to stretch yourself and push out of your comfort zone to do something new
• Contribution – This is the ultimate phase when you can scale up the impact of your work

Preparing for the Future of Work With OPIT

One theme that came through clearly in Matteo’s discussion was the importance of investing in yourself. This is because you are no longer simply being asked to fulfill a job description; you need to frame yourself as a problem-solver who adds value. In today’s work landscape, this means understanding tech trends and their impact on the business landscape. Making that leap can start with OPIT. We offer bachelor’s courses for those looking to build a strong technical foundation and master’s courses for professionals looking to reframe their value proposition.

Discover OPIT’s accessible and fit-for-purpose programs today.