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If a 25-year-old's resume stands out not for a degree from a prestigious university or professional certifications, but because they have accumulated 2,000 hours playing strategy games, would Taiwan's public sector include the applicant in its talent pool, or reject them outright? US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy on Aug. 10 announced on X that the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) launched a program in April to recruit video game players as air traffic controllers. Within months, it had hired more than 2,000 people, achieving more than 90 percent of its annual recruitment target. What the FAA saw in these gamers-turned-air-traffic-controllers is not their gaming skills, but the abilities they developed through spending years in real-time environments with high information density. When the government redefines experience not recognized in traditional resumes as transferable to high-risk professional work, it is changing not only how it recruits employees, but also the standards by which talent policy judges "professional competence." Both of my children are teachers. They spend their days dealing with students and parents, and the thing they most often do after work is play video games. For their generation, screens are part of their everyday environment — from gaming interfaces and collaborative platforms to generative artificial intelligence (AI), the cost of learning to use new tools is far lower than it was for the previous generation. That does not mean they are inherently smarter, but is a reminder that many abilities are developed outside the classroom. As AI becomes more commonplace, the digital divide would only grow wider. Taiwan has already begun to take action. In May, the Ministry of Digital Affairs upgraded its AI talent industry accreditation guidelines to version 3.0, adding competencies in AI governance literacy and AI collaboration development. Talent cultivation is moving away from a course-and certification-centered approach toward one in which the industry defines the questions and the talent solves them. However, the next step cannot simply be to turn these new skills into another professional certificate. The government and businesses should incorporate work samples, simulated tasks, AI collaboration tests and digital portfolios into their selection processes. What an individual has actually accomplished and what problems they are capable of solving should carry more weight than their field of study. Talent policy should shift from offering courses by waiting for corporate recognition to define verifiable skills and designing education and training around them. That is particularly important for the public sector. From air traffic control, cybersecurity, energy dispatch and disaster prevention to national defense, workplaces increasingly resemble information-dense human-machine collaboration systems. Safety standards cannot be relaxed, but talent recruitment pools can be broadened. What needs to be eliminated is not academic qualifications, but a complacent system that uses them as a substitute for assessing ability. In the AI era, the competition for talent might not be about which country teaches the most people how to use AI, but which country most quickly recognizes where skills are developed. When the next generation puts gaming experience, open-source projects, AI collaboration and simulation experience on their resumes, talent recruitment should no longer focus solely on the universities they attended or their fields of study. Liao Ming-hui is an assistant research fellow at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research. Translated by Kyra Gustavsen
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