We were talking about this last night at the Girls Dinner. Does a college degree matter any more? When you look at job ads, they all say “degree required”, even for jobs making little more than minimum wage. Why? Part of it is certainly that it’s a buyers market. There are a lot of very highly qualified people out there looking for any kind of work they can get. Why have somebody with a college degree do data entry? Well, why not?
But there’s another side of the story. Many companies have dumped their professional HR staff. People who had actually worked in human resources, knew how to write a job req, and knew how to interview to find out if somebody really knows how to do the job or not. A lot of people who are just managers in their own departments, but have no experience screening candidates, are now responsible for hiring. So, what’s the easiest verifiable stat? A college degree.
We all know that a degree can get you a leg up in a field. You learn theory quickly, and have proven that you can complete a program. But we all have also met people who have a lot of book learning fresh out of school that gets in the way of understanding how things work in the real world. Plenty of people have learned a business from the ground up, and could teach a college professor a thing or two.
Not that I’m saying a college degree is a waste of time. I love what I learned in school. Intellectually, it was a phenomenally stimulating experience. But 50% of it has been of little or no use in my career. Okay, granted, I studied a lot of Shakespeare, and do not actually wear a doublet to work. But still, because of that piece of paper with my name on it, there are a lot of jobs where I get looked at over people who are just as qualified, if not a certified.
What I’m really saying is, as an applicant, what I really want to see is the phrase “four-year degree or commensurate experience”. To me, that says that the employer is looking for good people, and they’ll go to the extra step to find people who know what they are doing, regardless of how they learned how to do it.
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3 comments:
So true.
My experience has been they want the degree, and experience in Access, Lotus Notes AND Outlook, PeopleSoft, QuickBooks, Visio, Call Center and medical records management experience for $14 an hour. Kid-you-not, sigh.
Half because they've laid off the people that did all those things and are trying to replace them all with one person, and half because most of the hiring people don't know WTF they want so they ask for everything.
I feel for ya.
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