Comment on School of hard knocks
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 1 day agoA degree is absolutely something I value heavily in applicants. Not because of the specific courses taken, but because what it says about the potential employee.
It says that they can complete a years-long project with disparate, often competing sub-projects, milestones, deliverable dates, and revolving team members while being self-managed. And due to core curricula, they’ve also proven a baseline knowledge unrelated to their specific degree. That may not sound useful, but someone who’s skillet is solely specialized work may have trouble navigating ancillary tasks that are part of the working environment. The best [insert technical skill] person in the world isn’t going to be a good employee if they can’t work in a team, prepare a report, respond appropriately and professionally to emails, document their work, develop/follow SOPs required for project handoff, deliver a presentation, etc.
Getting any college degree requires a baseline skillset that is valuable. Not having a degree doesn’t mean you can’t do all those things, but when I’ve got 40 applications I’m looking at, I can’t interview everyone. It’s a huge bonus to have a degree that tells me you have proven a minimum competency.
And the quality of your candidates will continue to drop. The system is failing you too just slower.
I’m not so much saying degrees are useless as saying they mean less, the ROI for going in general has shifted. We’re at a point where 2 and 4 year degrees look good to employers but are financially foolish for students. If you can afford to go it’s valable. But the proposition of student loans make less sense by the day.
Degrees don’t tell us everything we need to know about a candidate, but they tell us a hell of a lot more than not having a degree does. Candidates are unknowns, and candidates without degrees moreso. If I’m combing through 40 applications then a degreed person is way more likely to get an interview, all else being equal.
I’m someone who has multiple degrees including a clinical doctorate (think similar to optometrist, pharmacist etc). I think that the things you just listed (except maybe working in a group) were less developed or tested in my degree programs than they have been in my hobby spaces. I really wish it were possible for me to submit the afghan that took me two years to complete over my associates degree.
Did your afghan have strict, inflexible timelines for deliverables? Because college courses do. Did completion of your afghan require you to work on simultaneous unrelated sub-projects with shared milestone dates? Because that’s what a college semester is.
sudoer777@lemmy.ml 20 hours ago
Degrees don’t require most of those things.