University degrees irrelevant

employers want skills, not degrees

Graduate jobs: University degrees no longer relevant to some employers

 

I have four graduate degrees, I'm no longer relevant.

 

In general I agree with the concept. I do not believe you need a degree to be trained for most jobs. I work in oil and gas and other than perhaps an petroleum engineering degree, almost every other degree offers little to no immediate value. We spend a ton of time and money training new hires to get them competent.

Here is a funny story about a new graduate we hired years ago. My company decided we were only going to hire people with masters and PhD's for a certain field position. The field positions are rig based but highly technical. The job requires someone who has mechanical aptitude, computer ability and strong independent thinking. We hired a guy with a PhD in rocket science or some such and he was put under my supervision. I assigned him a mentor to break him in who had a BS in agribusiness and was an ex-cop...however the guy was a top notch field supervisor. The first week he was on a rig, I got a call from the supervisor saying I needed to come out the rig. I jumped in the car and drove out. When I got there, the field supervisor had the trainee demonstrate how to assemble some sensors. I nearly fell over laughing. The guy was using a crescent wrench to try to tighten a nut but was using the end with hole for hanging the wrench rather than the end with the jaws!

My point is that while this guy was obviously intelligent, he lacked real-world experience. He washed out a few months later.

I think that a degree is valuable. It can lead to a person learning how to critically think and perhaps impart key basic skills such as writing and mathematics. All that said, most degrees do not offer job relevant competency skills. If a person has the basic skills to be trained for a job then a firm should not eliminate them just because they lack a degree.

 

Seeing an anecdote about the opinion of one guy isn't exactly going to flip over the world's higher education system. The real world has seen quite the opposite: a credential arms war. Since the advent of defined contribution retirement plans--they're portable--workers have been switching jobs with increasing frequency. This, in turn, has put greater pressure on those workers to show potential employers that they have useful skills. Certifications and degrees tend to do this as proxies for the job applicant. Also, because employers are less willing to make long-term investments in education for what are increasingly short-term employees, that burden falls even more on the worker.

Blow all that up and then get back to me about valuing skills, not degrees.

 

Credentials and degrees. What are they? What do they present to the hiring company?

Long time ago, craftsmen trained their own employees, so there was no need for someone else to vouch for their students' abilities.

Credentials and degrees, not the education, is a shortcut for that knowledge.

 

Basic 2 and 4 year degrees still have tremendous value in my eyes and in the eyes of many employers. The degrees may not teach a skill specific to a job, but they help to ensure a well rounded employee capable of learning a myriad of material. It also shows an employer that an employee has the drive needed to begin something and see it through over a period of years. This is VERY important.

 

Why would you hire a guy with a PhD in rocket science to use a crescent wrench? I'm curious, could this guy's mentor build a rocket? The degree/experience analogy works both ways.

 

Colleges and universities are going to be around for a very long long. Is the skill level of an employee right out secondary school equivalent to an employee right out of college/university? The more critical question who has more valuable skill level with 5 years of experience, the high school graduates, or the college/university graduates? I know employees who are very good at their jobs because of on the job training but that all hey can do. There is no the ability to think beyond the training because there was little investment in education.

 

The article says that EY and PwC have dropped their degree requirements. For which positions have they dropped their degree requirements? I've been looking at their tax jobs, and they're still requiring a degree even though Enrolled Agents don't need one in order to earn the IRS designation.

It's like expecting someone with a PhD in Criminology to know how to handle and shoot a gun. That's not what they're trained to do, and that's not what they should be hired to do.

 

Skills and degrees are separate things.

I have never seen a job posting that says:

"Wanted: Someone with an MBA to do business stuff"

If one is truly a Master of Business Administration, the possibilities for what they can do would be very broad, no? You're talking about a person who, at the graduate level, has studied a little bit of marketing, accounting, finance, operations management, statistics and possibly other things depending upon their concentration (if any) and the specific program.

While having an MBA may be a necessary condition to getting many jobs in business, it is not a sufficient condition. If you want to be a project manager, you may very well need a PMP. At a minimum, a typical employer will want to see that you have experience as a Project Manager.

Before certifications employers relied pretty heavily on experience to gauge skill. If you were a Tax Manager at PWC for say, 7 years, then you likely have the necessary skill to be a Tax Manager (or Director or Managing Director) at Firm X. The theory is essentially "if you really sucked at being a Tax Manager, you either never would have been hired to that position by PWC or they would have fired you at some point before year 7."

The flaws with this approach should be obvious. For starters, corporate cultures differ greatly. At PWC you might have had a very narrow focus, even as a Tax Manager, and now, with a smaller company, you are expected to broaden into areas with which you are not familiar.

Having a Masters in Accountancy establishes a certain baseline skill. Having a CPA establishes a certain baseline skill. But if you're hiring, say, an internal auditor you want to ensure that a candidate has the skills necessary to thrive as an auditor. While having either an M.Acc. or an MBA and a CPA might be requirements for the job, neither demonstrate that someone has the skills necessary to be a good auditor. Work experience, coupled with certifications and designations (in this case, likely the Certified Internal Auditor designation) demonstrate this much more effectively.

If I'm hiring an auditor, frankly, a candidate with a bachelors and a CIA designation and five years of experience as an auditor is more competitive than someone with an MBA, no CIA, and a decade worth of experience in non-audit functions of accounting.

That doesn't mean the degrees are worthless. It means what we've been saying all along; degrees aren't everything. And if you have a Masters degree and can't find a job, you should probably look at industry certifications and skill building to make yourself more competitive. This isn't a particularly new approach to the job market.

 

Similarly, we've heard for years that people in the programming world value certs over degrees.

 

What is valued is the ability to program. A certification "may" demonstrate that but I can assure you hiring managers what to see/know that you can program. Generally this is demonstrated by writing skeleton code on demand (even during an interview) or presenting a portfolio. I've been asked many times to explain how I would solve a specific programming problem. Rather than try to talk my way through it I bust out a notepad/pen and outline a structure. Worked out well. I took this same approach when I was asked to interview candidates. One additional plus was those who did not hesitate to start writing or needed no "additional" guidance turned out to be great hires. YMMV.

 

Your analysis is right on the money. Now if both had the same bachelors, CIA, similar kind and years of experience, but only one had an MBA, which one should have a competitive story?
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I think the article is a non-story. My opinion, it is click-bating as was coined by a DIer.

 

Interwebs content

 

I do not want to flog a dead horse but this morning I have lots of time to waste. Here is what I just received from my EY's newsfeed.

As an MBA or master's degree hire at EY, you’ll make an impact and have great responsibility immediately, working on the cutting edge of the trends and issues facing business leaders today. Where can a career at EY take you? Then EY provided this link.
Highest-paying consulting firms for MBAs - Business Insider

 

I know you want me to say that the one with the MBA has the competitive story, but it simply might not matter.

One of the reasons I hate the "two identical candidates" argument is that there are never two identical candidates. Even if their resumes look exactly the same they are going to likely interview very differently.

This is important.

Of course it's possible that both hypothetical candidates interview fantastically and the hiring manager says "Well, they are both equal in my eyes. I would love to have both of them but, if I have to choose, I'll pick the one with the MBA."

But the odds on it coming down to that are fairly slim. Generally, when candidates get down to the wire like that, hiring managers start nitpicking a ton of other things well before they would ever consider looking that closely at degrees.

Oh, so you have the same years of experience? Which one worked at a firm that more closely resembles the environment in which they would be working here? That sort of thing. With engineers it can get downright microscopic.

Can the degree, and only the degree, matter? Of course. But it seems to be an issue more at the entry level more than with experienced employees. And not finding a proper fit is 99% of the time simply because another candidate had experience that more closely matched with the current role not because of the MBA/no-MBA judgment call.

Frankly, there are just too many variables that a knowledgeable hiring manager can challenge about a person's work experience.

For HR, degrees are a good screening mechanism. If you tell me to hire a marketing associate with five years of experience and a bachelors, I can look for that even if I don't have a lick of experience in marketing. But there is also a reason why, when I send a hiring manager a stack of 25 resumes, they only call 10 for phone interviews. They have the experience to know exactly what they are looking for.

When a hiring manager really wants an MBA, we add it to the job description and post it. To give you an idea, corporate finance loves MBAs. Though technically a "preferred" qualification it is unlikely that someone without those magical three letters would come in for an interview. Corporate Tax, however, couldn't care less if you have an MBA. And during their most recent hiring blitz I saw many offers going out to accountants who had a bachelors and a CPA in favor of seemingly equally qualified MBA holders.

How you interview matters a whole lot more than a lot of people are comfortable with. And no degree can buy you out of a lackluster interview.

 

Well, this article is from Australia. Perhaps EY and PwC only changed their degree requirements for that country?

I'll also add that at my company (a major pharmaceutical firm) the degree requirements have only increased over the years.

 

Depending on the company/location, many engineering firms are in competition and know very clearly what their competitors are doing because they all bid on the same projects. Because of this it's possible for an experienced Manager to ask remarkably specific questions about a persons role/responsibilities and performance.

I would also add that I have been lucky enough to know a whole bunch of "blue collar engineers," guys (mostly) with no real degree but a pile of certs and a mountain of experience. The college educated engineers may be able to put together a prettier powerpoint presentation but when it comes down to actually doing the work, solving problems, etc. it's the old-timers who know how to get it done. I've never been in the military but I imagine it's a bit like the Master Sergeant patiently explaining to the new Lt. why is has to be done a certain way. I'm biased because I'm closer to the Sgt. than the Lt.:drillsergeant:

 

It's true. Many candidates have walked through the door of my office who are undeniably solid candidates. But the manager is looking for a specific skill. And yeah, it means that sometimes Cornell engineering grads get passed over in favor of Binghamton University grads. It means that candidates with Masters degrees get the "thanks but no thanks" call in favor of candidates with only a bachelors degree.

Degree programs do not confer skill.

Earn a Masters in HR. Odds are, that program will not, by itself, give you experience in salary benchmarking. Odds are that you won't actually develop a program (and if you do, it's doubtful you'll have to do it with an interdepartmental team).

It's very possible to earn a BS/MS in HR and have no practical experience conducting an interview, writing a job description or breaking up a verbal altercation between two welders who got too excited when discussing the latest presidential debate. These are all skills. The degree gives you foundational knowledge.

I always thought of the "blue collar engineer" as the warrant officers, if you will, of the workplace. The analogy isn't perfect (since different branches treat warrant officers differently). But to become a Navy warrant officer (at least at the time when I was on active duty) you had to have at least 12 years of service, be an E-7 and essentially be a subject matter expert in your field.

It also kind of makes me wish there was a ranking system in the civilian world. Job titles can be misleading. But I'd hire a solid CWO4 over an O-1 (provided it wasn't an entry level job) any day.

 

I know a VP for a Fortune 10 who only has a GED. But these anecdotes don't mean a lot to the big picture.

I remember a discussion here years ago when someone said, "Some people are lucky and can advance without a degree. For those who aren't so lucky, a degree gives them an opportunity they wouldn't have otherwise gotten." That's pretty much how I look at it.