Education is significant and valuable, nonetheless, top companies realize that most of the skills they hire people for do not come from their academic experience. With college tuition increasing nationwide, many citizens don’t have the money or time to earn a college degree. Nonetheless, that doesn’t imply your job prospects are decreased. Exceedingly, seceral companies are providing handsome jobs to those non-conventional education or a high qualification.
According to Google’s former SVP of People Operations Laszlo Bock, “When you look at people who don’t go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people.”
Unfortunately, this has not been experienced with in the general job market yet. Therefore, academic qualifications are still considered and indeed constitute a good part consideration when assessing the potential employees as a whole but are no anymore act as a barrier to landing a place.
Recent study of 2015 shows that about 82% of the graduate research the field of choice before deciding their college major. When you relook the statistic from the perspective of student loans and the 2008 economic conditions, it is not a surprise that students want to pursue careers that will allow them to pay off their heavy debts. If the degree alone guaranteed a job, this type of strategic long-term planning would make sense. Certainly, some jobs require the skills associated with specific degrees like architecture, engineering, and computer science. However, your college major is not expected to have any bearing on career success.
The article provides some points you need to consider why the attachment to the concept that college degrees should be put to rest, and the companies don’t care about college degrees.
- School Does Not Teach Everything
According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, student loan debts have crossed $1.2 trillion. It is alarming that many young people are spending many bucks on a degree only to earn a diploma and not feel prepared to join the workforce.
College is expected to prepare you for the future career, so why do so many schools seem to neglect courses that teach practical skills for people entering their chosen major.
For many companies, you learn on the job rather than at college. The payment processing and technology industry is certainly like that. The majority of the technicians and programmers in such companies are either trained in-house or on their own. These positions tend to have some basic courses in colleges, nonetheless, in practice, the majority of the people have learned the most on their job.
Apart from the technical skills, there are some interpersonal skills that college doesn’t prepare someone for, specifically, the day-to-day realities of work.
Deadlines for projects are something most of us face in school or work, as well as developing critical thinking skills. Nonetheless, tests don’t help anyone in terms of making them better at their job. When you are working, you won’t have to spend months studying for one test you are either passing or failing. You will have a job to complete each day, and if you don’t know how to do it you will have to figure it out on the spot.
Customer service skills are also critical. Everyone has some experience and a bad relationship with a mean professor, but when you deal with a challenging client you still have to find a way to make them happy. Developing your communication skills to deal with other employees is also significant. A colleague or manager you clash with is still someone you will have to deal with, and you cannot have patience and problem-solving in school just like you can on the job.
- Job Market Is Shifting Norms
For some companies, proving you can do the work is sufficient to land a job without a degree.
Lately, numerous companies have shifted their mindset about the degree requirement for employment, including Tesla, Google, Penguin, Apple, and Bank of America. There are several high-paying jobs and fast-growing careers that don’t need a degree, like a computer programming, tech-related positions.
Several many non-tech-related jobs don’t need a degree, including pharmacy technicians, virtual assistants, online advertising and customer service representatives, and miscellaneous roles.
Harvard Business School’s research discovered that 37% of workers categorize experience as the most significant aspect in an applicant. When a job position is difficult to fill, employers usually overlook the lack of a degree when the candidates have experience instead of the preferred education. Largely, in large companies, experience is more significant than a degree 44% of the times.
- Companies Don’t Just Hire Candidates for A Degree
Resumes are a tricky thing and going only off impressive accomplishments or education can be a bad decision.
Any time the companies hire someone primarily based on skills or experience; it does not go well. Hiring managers are drawn to their resumes and fail to look if they had the actual skills the teams need.
Some companies hire employees with little or no formal education if they can learn their new job responsibilities. They want people who pursue their passions and are willing to welcome change. These skills will always trump a degree from top universities.
Being a graduate of a prestigious university does not mean you have the appropriate personality or skills to do your job. If you want to serve at top tech companies like Google, you need to encompass their core values and a drive to be at your best potential. A degree then becomes a secondary requirement, the candidate’s attitude, ability to learn, and technical skills are of primary importance.
Currently, there are specific professions that need a high amount of professional training that is taught in schools. Lawyers and doctors are among those professions. However, they still have to spend time out of school shadowing other experts. Business owners are required to see past the CV and look at the candidate in front of them.
Sometimes even if a candidate has not been working within the specific industry, they may have fundamental skills like a good work ethic, problem-solving, or show the talent to evolve into the required position.
- Employees Evolve and Grow into The Required Roles
Generally, when you own a small business or even a medium business you will hire employees who will evolve and grow with the business. According to a 2019 study, about 45% of recruiters and hiring managers inform that candidate’s potential is the most significant aspect of their application.
Sometimes, you will need to outsource a specific position in leadership to someone from outside the company, but other times the managers overlook the people who have worked in the base buildings when they were just starting.
You can hire a person with a high qualification but with no leadership skills, or who is not compatible with a team, but that does not suggest they can run a department better. It can’t be expected for the employees to follow someone they can’t communicate with primarily because they have the required education.
Being educated in a specific subject does not automatically make someone a perfect match to lead, and a great amount of leadership can only be learned through failure and experience. Several people in the teams joined the company early on who lacked experience of the skills at the time to be a department manager, but they had more significant personality traits, passion, and ambition.
These capable candidates know they are required to grow and develop their skills to be in a leadership role. All of them evolve so much and challenged themselves, moreover, they took on extra duties. When the time arrived some years later when there was a position open, they were prepared and ready to lead.
These candidates took the time and the difficult path of challenging themselves to be matched for leadership.
The managers could have hired someone from the outside with a more reputed degree or high experience, but they are the most qualified when it comes to leading the team.
- Networking is an Important Aspect
Candidates can choose a major that correlates with a high-paying job in the real world, get the perfect GPA, and be a graduate from a prestigious university, but without a concrete network of contacts, you are missing out on the important part. It is important to build relationships with colleagues, professors, internship and volunteering activities, and even strangers who can help you in this regard.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, the job market is seeing a major shift in norm by skipping the requirement of a college degree. Education is undoubtedly an important factor and an asset, but the companies are seeking people with extraordinary interpersonal skills. The best-suited employees with the leading companies are people with honesty, ambition, integrity, and passion, all these skills are traditionally acquired outside of the conventional educational institutes. Additionally, developing a solid network can facilitate you in landing a job at a top-notch company.