UpTrajectory Review
The Fast Company piece explores a significant shift in the business landscape, where technical literacy is becoming more crucial than traditional MBA credentials for leadership roles. As companies evolve, the ability to understand and navigate operational systems is increasingly valued over theoretical knowledge. This change highlights the importance of hands-on experience and practical skills in making strategic decisions that impact a business's success.
For small business owners, this trend underscores the necessity of developing technical skills within their teams. As operational decisions become more complex and intertwined with technology, leaders must be equipped to make informed choices about systems and processes. While MBAs provide a solid foundation in business principles, the ability to interpret and leverage technology effectively may soon be the differentiator in competitive markets. Operators should prioritize technical training and foster a culture of continuous learning to stay ahead.
Takeaway: Invest in technical skills to enhance decision-making and operational efficiency in your business.
From the original item — Fast Company:
Traditional business degrees once guaranteed a path to leadership, but today’s market increasingly rewards technical literacy over classroom credentials. The shift reflects a fundamental change in how companies measure capability and potential. Below, industry veterans and hiring managers examine whether hands-on platform mastery has become more valuable than an MBA for modern professionals.
Technical literacy really isn’t about writing code. It’s the ability to read a system the way an MBA reads a P&L: what it can do, what it costs, where it breaks (or is most likely to), and where a human has to stay in the loop. Most strategic decisions in 2026 are operational systems decisions wearing strategic clothing.
The single reason: build versus buy, in-house versus vendor, AI-assisted versus human-only, automate versus hire. These are technical calls, no matter how strategic the slide deck makes them look. An MBA frames the question. Technical literacy answers it.
I run product and engineering at a K-12 teletherapy company operating under HIPAA and FERPA across 27 states. Last year, we hit a textbook case. Build an internal clinical documentation system, or expand our third-party vendor stack. The financial model pointed to buy, mostly because the ones building the models have no clue what it means to build. The technical read pointed the other way: The vendor’s data model assumed a different consent flow than ours, their audit logs missed two FERPA edge cases, and their AI drafting pipeline had no way for a licensed psychologist to gate the output before it reached a family. None of that shows up in a TCO spreadsheet. We built Pathway, our proprietary platform: secure teletherapy with built-in clinical oversight, progress tracking, and AI-powered personalization. Forbes featured it in their December 2025 Series B coverage. Fast Company named us a Most Innovative Company in Education the same year. None of that recognition would have existed if the financial model had won the argument.
An MBA used to credential you to manage other people’s execution. Today, most execution runs through software, integrations, and AI agents. Manage a layer you can’t read and you’re managing a black box.
Meryll Dindin, VP of Product and Engineering, Parallel Learning, Inc.
I’d argue that technical literacy has become just as important, if not more important, in some industries than traditional business education.
I’ve learned that the pace of innovation is moving far faster than formal education can keep up with. The professionals who stand out today are the ones actively learning in real time: testing new tools, understanding how AI actually works, adapting workflows, and translating technology into practical business outcomes.
For me, the most valuable skills didn’t come from a classroom. They came from hands-on building, leading go-to-market teams in tech, working directly alongside product and engineering, and now building an AI company from the ground up. I’m constantly digesting new information every single day because the landscape changes weekly, sometimes daily. You can’t wait for a perfectly packaged curriculum when the technology itself is evolving in real time.
A great example is AI adoption in business. Right now, there are executives with impressive credentials who still don’t understand how to practically integrate AI into operations, marketing, customer support, or decision-making. Meanwhile, self-taught operators and founders who immersed themselves early are driving innovation because they were willing to learn by doing.
I still believe business fundamentals matter deeply. But modern leadership increasingly requires technical fluency—the ability to understand emerging technology well enough to make strategic decisions, ask the right questions, and adapt quickly. Curiosity and continuous learning are becoming competitive advantages of their own.
Chelsea VanHoecke, Founder, Avira AI
Definitely. Technical literacy is quickly becoming a requirement in all industries that are experiencing fast growth, and cannot be replaced with an MBA from a prestigious university. We have also moved out of the time period where “business” and “tech” were two separate silos as every business strategy is now, in some form or fashion, a technology strategy. The primary reason for this change is because of the decreased need for “translate tax.”
In the past, an MBA would define a business goal and a tech lead would translate that into requirements, resulting in excessive length to finish projects and huge misalignment of expectations. A technically literate person is able to assess complexity in real time. They know not only how to build something but also if it is technically feasible.
We recently partnered with a project manager who had a strong technical background and had the ability to assess a lot of different aspects to achieve the best solution. Unfortunately, the stakeholders wanted to have a very sophisticated custom solution with AI, however, the project manager had an understanding of the way LLM APIs and vector databases work. Therefore, they suggested that the best solution was to have a “low code” solution with the existing orchestration tools. This one suggestion saved the client $40,000 in R&D costs, and allowed the team to deliver the product to the market two months earlier. Whereas, an MBA may have optimized the budget on paper, however, the technical literacy optimized the delivery of the product.
Volodymyr Kaminovskyy, CEO, Lionwood software
Technical literacy is becoming just as important as an MBA for modern professionals because technology now shapes almost every part of how businesses operate, grow and communicate, even in industries traditionally seen as creative or nontechnical.
Having recently finished my MBA while running my business, I have seen how valuable that balance can be. I was fortunate to develop technical skills long before launching my company. Although my background is in design, I taught myself coding and web development years ago and built much of my own platform. That experience gave me a completely different perspective as a founder because I understood both the creative and technical side of the business.
That combination has been incredibly valuable. It has helped me make better decisions around systems, automation, SEO, and customer experience, ensuring technology enables our expertise rather than replacing it.
My MBA strengthened my leadership and strategic thinking, but technical literacy helped me adapt faster and gave me a clearer understanding of the tools that support modern business. I do not think professionals need to become developers, but I do believe having a level of technical understanding is becoming increasingly important across almost every industry.
Samantha-Jane Agbontaen, Founder, CEO, House Designer
Yes, technical literacy is becoming nearly as important as an MBA for many modern professionals because it helps people make better decisions in workplaces that are increasingly driven by data, software, and automation.
It is especially vital for the modern executive because most successful businesses have always been the ones that use the technology of their era better than their competitors. If leadership can’t understand how current technology works well enough to plan growth and strategy around it, the organization may be well-managed on paper but still fall behind in execution.
For instance, we often work with enterprises that are merging with new companies—primarily to help them integrate different technical environments (such as Google Workspace and Microsoft 365) and enable coexistence between systems during gradual transitions. Some traditionally minded executives focus on the corporate politics of mergers but assume technological synchronization can happen too quickly. Underestimating the scale of this task is a leading cause of merger failure, especially in tech-exposed sectors like banking.
When leadership lacks technical literacy, we have seen executives mandate a near overnight switch to email, cloud, and collaboration tools—changing established workflows dramatically without understanding the cost behind them. These methods lead to predictable failures, like broken access, compliance gaps, and a very overworked IT help desk.
In these cases, tech-literate leadership is quite literally decisive. The skill to let technology guide your approach to practical problems like these can be just as important as the business acumen that an MBA gives you.
Thomas Berndorfer, CEO, Connecting Software
I don’t have an MBA. I teach and advise MBA students at top universities and inside Fortune 500 companies. Zuckerberg, Gates, and Jobs didn’t have one either—and they built the companies the MBA curriculum now teaches.
That gap tells you most of what you need to know about where professional credibility is actually being built right now.
Technical literacy isn’t replacing the MBA. It’s revealing what the MBA was actually selling: access.
Now with the internet and AI, access is rapidly becoming a nonissue. The only barriers left are interest and time.
The MBA’s structural advantage was that it bundled three years of cohort access, brand signaling, and synthesis into one credential. AI tools have unbundled all three—all you might need is an experienced operator as a guide. You can simulate the analytical work in an afternoon. You can build a real product in a weekend. The cohort and the brand are still real, but they’re now competing with operator-led communities that move faster and teach what’s actually working this quarter. The universities and schools I work with have adapted to this format too.
Example: This year I’m running an AI curriculum with a few of my own proprietary frameworks—Problem Pressure Test, Build/Skip Matrix, Retention Engine— delivered to high school students, college students, and working professionals and founders in parallel. The same material works across all three because the underlying skill isn’t “business” or “technical.” It’s the ability to specify a problem, ship a system, and judge the output. Credentials describe what you studied.
Right now the market is paying for what you can build—not promises.
Alisha Outridge, Chief Technology & Product Officer (CTO + CPO), Byte&Chord
Yes, technical literacy is becoming as important as an MBA—with one important catch. Technical literacy matters significantly, but only when paired with sound judgment and solid leadership. MBA programs and other top leadership education options teach business professionals how to develop their judgment and leadership skills, which technology cannot replace.
The World Economic Forum listed tech literacy as one of the top essential skills in its 2025 Future of Jobs Report—and 92% of U.S. job postings now require some form of digital literacy. That is an astounding statistic that shouldn’t be ignored.
However, I’ve worked with highly technical clients who still struggle to influence, communicate, or lead through ambiguity. Technical fluency without the ability to make insightful human judgment calls about important things like people, culture, risk, and strategy will create a professional ceiling even faster than tech illiteracy will.
The professionals I see advancing fastest right now have the right credentials AND tech literacy. They’re learning enough about AI and data to be dangerous in the very best way, and they’re pairing that knowledge with their education and leadership skills to make big impacts within an organization.
Amanda Fischer, CEO & Executive Career Coach, AMF Coaching & Consulting
An MBA used to signal you understand how business works. Now it signals you understand how business worked. Technical literacy is what tells employers you can navigate how business is actually operating today—with automation, AI assistance, data-driven decisions baked into every function.
Look at lawyers. Someone might spend seven years qualifying as a solicitor, pass the bar, build expertise in contract law. Then AI tools like Harvey and Claude emerge that can draft contracts in seconds. Suddenly their hard-won qualification isn’t enough. They need to understand how these tools work, what they can and can’t do, where human judgment still matters. A lawyer who learns to use AI effectively, who understands data privacy implications, who can explain technical concepts to clients—that person stays relevant. The one who refuses because “I’m a qualified lawyer, not a programmer” watches their billable hours shrink.
The gap isn’t about coding skills. It’s about professionals who can translate between human needs and technical capabilities versus those who can’t. That ability has become as fundamental as reading a balance sheet used to be. Technical literacy isn’t replacing the MBA—it’s becoming the new baseline that makes an MBA valuable in the first place.
Ricci Masero, CMktr, Edtech Marketer & AI Wrangler | Legal eLearning & Training Management, Intellek
Technical literacy isn’t replacing the MBA, but it is becoming a necessary counterpart.
The unspoken value of an MBA is that it forces you to become a systems thinker. Unlike other advanced degrees that go deep in one domain, an MBA makes you zoom out and integrate knowledge across strategy, finance, marketing, operations, and technology. You learn to anticipate second-order consequences and model how decisions cascade across functions.
But now, technology underpins every one of those functions. Enterprise systems have been the operational backbone of modern business for decades. AI agents are increasingly interacting with these systems—across internal platforms and external partners. Leaders who can’t understand how data flows, where systems integrate, and how AI amplifies or constrains strategy will struggle to create sustainable competitive advantage. I call this capability “digital mindset”—a combination of data fluency, systems literacy, and AI competency. You don’t need to be a computer scientist, but you need to understand how technology shapes what’s possible in your business.
Modern professionals need both. The MBA teaches you to see the business as a complex, adaptive system. Digital mindset gives you the fluency to match challenges across the organization with the right technology tools. Without both, you’re either a strategist who can’t execute in a digital environment, or a technologist who can’t connect tools to business outcomes.
Joe Sagrilla, Faculty Member, The University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business
No. Technical literacy is not the new MBA. And honestly, the MBA was already overrated.
The real crisis facing modern professionals is not a skills gap. It is a mindset gap. We are still thinking about our careers the way our parents did—linear, credential-based, one company, one ladder, one identity. Get the degree. Get the job. Stay loyal. Retire.
That model is gone. And no amount of technical literacy will save you if you cannot pivot.
I work with executives every day who have the MBA, the certifications, the experience, and the track record—and they are stuck. Not because they lack skills. Because they do not know how to tell a new story about themselves. Their LinkedIn still screams the career they are leaving. Their network stops at the industry they want out of. They are waiting for a credential to give them permission to become who they already are.
The most important thing a modern professional can develop is career agility—the ability to pivot, reposition, and reinvent without starting over. That means knowing how to transfer your value across industries, build visibility in new spaces, and own your narrative instead of waiting for someone else to write it for you.
Technical literacy is a tool. Career agility is the strategy. One without the other just gets you stuck faster with better software.
Alison Hemmings, Career Glow Up Coach & LinkedIn Visibility Expert, Newo Executive Solutions Inc
Technical literacy is already more immediately useful than an MBA for most professionals, and AI is accelerating that gap. An MBA teaches you frameworks for thinking about business problems. Technical literacy teaches you how to actually interact with the tools reshaping how work gets done. Those are not the same thing and right now one is more urgent.
The clearest example I have is from my own practice. I have run a B2B communications consultancy since 2002. I do not have an MBA. What has kept me competitive through multiple technology cycles, including the one we are in now, is having enough understanding of how each new tool works to know where it fits and where it does not.
Specifically, with AI, that means knowing which tasks to hand off to it and which require human judgment. That is not a strategic framework. It is operational fluency, and you can only develop it by actually using the tools. That said, I would not declare the MBA irrelevant.
There is a version of technical literacy that is shallow, a professional who knows enough buzzwords to sound current but cannot actually apply anything. The MBA still teaches how to structure a business problem, evaluate tradeoffs, and communicate across functions. Those skills matter. But if you are choosing where to invest your development time right now, learning to work effectively with AI, understanding data well enough to ask the right questions, and building comfort with tools that did not exist five years ago will pay off faster than another credential.
The professionals I watch struggle most are the ones waiting for the technology to stabilize before engaging with it. That is the wrong frame. Technical literacy is not a destination. It is a practice, and the time to start is before you need it.
Christine Wetzler, President & Founder, Pietryla PR & Marketing