Degree vs Experience

Castiel said:
I'm an Operations Director for a public transport company. I have been in the industry for almost 7 years. I was a soldier for the preceding 18.

The point is that with or without a degree you need to be experienced and have something that justifies your position, merely having a degree guarantees nothing.
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Do you think the preceding 18 years may have given you am edge and skills plus aptitude others would lack. As not really the same as a grad. have you done your managers cpc?
 
mrk1@1 said:
Do you think the preceding 18 years may have given you am edge and skills plus aptitude others would lack. As not really the same as a grad. have you done your managers cpc?
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Yes I have the CPC and all the relevant compliance licences though what that has to do with the topic at hand I fail to see. (unless you are a CPC management consultant touting for business?)

I'm not denying that experience and proven skills are important, I am merely saying that having a degree is not necessary and your post seemed to indicate that without one you would be unable or unlikely to progress.

I disagree, and gave myself as an example. In fact many of our senior managers have no degree and rose through the company on merit.

There are alternative routes to many careers, including Chartered Accountancy, Engineering, Management and so on.
 
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Degrees are most useful for professional highly qualified jobs, which require technical knowledge. By this I mean:
Science
Law
Engineering

These types of roles can have apprenticeship entry (engineering only I believe), but otherwise to get into a role doing this type of work and not into general managing a degree is required. Depending on what exactly the op is trying to do at the end of there degree will mean how relevant the degree actually is to getting ahead in the industry.
 
A degree is a stepping stone for sure (from just a tick box to actually piquing and employer's interest). That of course doesn't mean you need a degree...
 
Simpic said:
As an employer I say both, degree for younger staff starting lower on the rung and experience for folks further up the tree.
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I'd agree. Qualifications beyond a degree will also render it largely irrelevant. A girl I know has no degree but is a chartered tax adviser with a few years experience at manager level. I doubt it will matter to any person employing her to do tax that she only has a-levels.
 
vonhelmet said:
I'd agree. Qualifications beyond a degree will also render it largely irrelevant. A girl I know has no degree but is a chartered tax adviser with a few years experience at manager level. I doubt it will matter to any person employing her to do tax that she only has a-levels.
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Speaking to my wife and she said similar, in her business (HR, Payroll, Accountancy, IT solutions) she looks at Experience, Professional Qualifications (ACA, MCPD, CIPD, and so on), Degree in that order.
 
A degree does two things:

1. Get's you in the door.
2. 10 to 15 years down the line, it will visibly raise your potential career ceiling over and above an equivalently experienced individual without a degree.
 
Castiel said:
I disagree, and gave myself as an example. In fact many of our senior managers have no degree and rose through the company on merit.
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I do see your point but have to note that many people identify friends and colleagues in senior management positions who do not have a degree.

There is a chance that these people (likely in their forties?) began work at a different time when degrees were not as common or expected as they are today.

We can applaud but we can't really compare such successes when attitudes to degrees have changed so much, even in the last decade.
 
NathanE said:
A degree does two things:

1. Get's you in the door.
2. 10 to 15 years down the line, it will visibly raise your potential career ceiling over and above an equivalently experienced individual without a degree.
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This to be honest.

You may not need a degree to get a job, and early on experience may count more than a degree, but later on a degree will become vital to shift up the ladder.

Anyway, I think OCUK is a little biased since there are so many people in IT whee clearly experience is important and degrees are less important than in other fields.

Anything I would ever want to do as a career requires a Master level degree at the minimum. Most careers in most fields requires top education if you want to make it far.
 
my daughters doing biomed but as regards experience shes having an interpolated year working for the government in their labs and is also a commitie member with st johns ambulance plus a few other things coming up so i think you can have both
 
I decided to skip Uni and go stratight into working in the area I wanted to (IT).

My theory was to start at the bottom with a 3 year plan to be above the point I'd enter a job at after leaving Uni. Within 2 years I'd passed that point and gained far more work experience than I'd ever get at Uni. Within 5 years I had climbed to the highest position within the organisation I worked for and moved on. Most of my friends who had gone to Uni were still struggling to find decent jobs and the others who had found them where doing the same work I'd been doing 4 years previously.

Sure sometimes I wish I'd gone to Uni. I think my life skills would have developed much faster if I had. However I had no debt, learned what I needed to while earing a wage and to this day have a better job than most of my friends who went to Uni.
 
I tried to get into the IT industry with my degree and after 12months got nowhere as compared to the competition I had no experience - at that point the job I was in for Lloyds TSB I decided to focus on and work up - within 2 years I had gone from a base level Telephony Operator to an Operations Manager - my degree didnt really help as it was in Comp Sci and the jobs were very people/procedural based so my phone experience helped me more.

It's a bit of a balance sometimes - but ultimately I think Experience > Degree
 
I talked to my wife about this and she said that a recent change in the guidance she's being given by HR and the Board in her hiring process is that the 'fit' of a person is taking precedence over qualifications and experience. This is, admittedly, talking about senior management in the biggest company in NZ but the basic premise is that they're all on an equal footing in terms of achievement, education and experience so who is going to 'get' the company and the people he or she will be managing is more important.

Not sure I agree with it but it's an interesting take.



e : 6,000 posts. That's kind of sad.
 
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*has no experience*

Yeah its great fun... if i'd of known it would be this frigging impossible to get a job after uni i'd of spent more time looking into summer jobs while i was there. At least getting placements through the uni wouldn't have been as difficult.
 
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