For years the message was clear. Line up the degrees, land the graduate scheme, tick the milestones, and hiring managers would come to you. That contract is quietly dissolving. Two people we spoke to this month made the shift feel official.

The first is Hale, a headhunter who works with Dutch scale-ups. He put it plainly on our TechMind webinar. Given two candidates, one with a picture-perfect résumé and one with what he calls a “checkered CV” plus a serious sports background, several of his clients now pick the second one. They know the sports background predicts something the CV does not: how the person performs under pressure and in a team.

The second is Anna Kashkina, a current Amsterdam Tech student. She is six years into her software engineering career, competitive-programming trained, and finishing a degree while shipping a product called CodeProp. Anna’s edge is not a straight line either. It is a series of fascinations she followed all the way through: games, machine learning, and finally the deeply human problem of how developers actually learn a new codebase.

Both stories point at the same shift.

What Tech Employers Now Actually Reward

• Proof of active learning. Not “I studied X.” Show what you built while learning X. A GitHub repo, a Medium article, a shipped side project. Hale’s clients look at GitHub before LinkedIn.
  
• Interesting humans, not tidy résumés. Sports, volunteering, cooking, weird hobbies. These are not padding. They are the signals AI filters cannot fake. They tell a hiring manager how you will show up on a Wednesday afternoon.
  
• The ability to ask a good question. Hale’s fastest route into a shortlist is a candidate who reads the job description, notices something specific, and messages the hiring manager with a real question. Anna’s pivot on CodeProp came from stopping and asking a better question about how people learn.
  
• A pivot in your story. Nobody trusts a career that has never been re-examined. Anna’s willingness to throw out her first prototype is the reason her final project works.
  

Where a Programme Like Amsterdam Tech Fits

None of this is a rejection of degrees. It is a rejection of degrees that produce cardboard-cutout graduates. What Anna and Hale describe from opposite sides of the table is the profile of someone who has built things, pivoted, and can tell the story of both.

That is what our programmes are engineered to produce. The Tech MBA and the BS in Software Engineering are two of the clearest examples. Heavy on real projects, heavy on Self-Leadership, allergic to lecture-only theory.

If the checkered CV is now the winning shape, the question is not how to hide yours. It is how to build one worth showing.