How important is a degree to work in I.T.?

[Narj]

* Our entry roles in dev require a degree in software engineering or something close; mathmatics is good too. also require ability to code in our choice of language; unless they have other skills i.e. degree math and we will cross train.

I'd have thought that a degree in mathematics would be one of the single most advantageous things you could have in the development aspect of IT - particularly if you were looking at working in finance/banking.

I often think if I was better at maths then I could have been a pretty good coder - loved assembler when I did Electrical & Electronic Engineering at college. My maths mental capacity fail is why I'm just a bash/perl etc scripting monkey these days (although it really helps in my day to day job!). :/

 

[Ordinarytom]

well as ive just finished my i.t and business degree (involving 3 years of running a student business) i realised i love finance and started applying for accountancy jobs... i have no previous experience at all and in interviews id refer to my 3 years running a student bussiness as financial manager). All i can say is i did well in interviews but they would always reject me saying i needed some experience in a financial type of work even if that meant cashier.

after looking and looking for 6 months unemployed i eventually got my job which im sat at the desk right now. im on minimum wage 6.08, but because i have a 2.1 degree in i.t and business and im now gaining a year of accoutnancy experience its going to help me tenfolds for my next job.

a degree is extremely useful and is the difference between starting at 10k or 25k for ur first job. But a degree is not very useful if theres no previous experience with it.

but seriously you should complete your final year because experience can only get you so far, in the end you will have to study to get a better job/pay (unless you know your manager well and he can see your skills/potential hands on.)

 

[Banzai_Joe]

But when his friend leaves and tries to find a job, he might come up against one of last years graduates.
Neither have any experience, one of them has a degree. Who gets the job?
A year later, his friend still has no experience but no degree either.

If you cant get a job because you dont have the right qualifications, you'll never have any experience.

Yeah, i agree with you, it was just 'my' experience. There seems to be so much divided opinion.
None of it is necesarily 'bad' advice, i advised on my experience, which is how i got my job, so it proves that some employers think one way and others the other way.
The OP's issue is he really doesn't want to go back to uni. If the evidence for degree over experience when looking for jobs was overwhelming then i'd say finish your degree. But if he's not convinced and his heart aint in it....he could well be wasting his year by failing at the end.

Your last sentence is the paradoxical catch 22 that a lot of people suffer with.

 

[mikeh501]

I'd have thought that a degree in mathematics would be one of the single most advantageous things you could have in the development aspect of IT - particularly if you were looking at working in finance/banking.

I often think if I was better at maths then I could have been a pretty good coder - loved assembler when I did Electrical & Electronic Engineering at college. My maths mental capacity fail is why I'm just a bash/perl etc scripting monkey these days (although it really helps in my day to day job!). :/

I completely agree, although maths degree postgrads who have good coding expertise and want to work in development dont crop up very often.

 

[Banzai_Joe]

but seriously you should complete your final year because experience can only get you so far, in the end you will have to study to get a better job/pay (unless you know your manager well and he can see your skills/potential hands on.)

I still say this is very debatable. No amount of honours/degrees will mean a thing if you can't apply them in a real working environment.
Experience is exactly that, real working environment, regardless of education. Like me if you were lucky enough to be given the opportunity without higher education, then you need to knuckle down and be good at what you do.......after 6 years i guess i'm doing ok, so that's evidence of experience of eduation. My wage is very respectful too. Otherwise, you're looking for a job again.

Incidentally as this topic has got my interest i've just rang around 4 of my fellow I.T. support colleague companies. ALL of them have said they'd prefer a foundation amount of education mixed with experience, which i guess it what a lot of people have been saying on here.

I think it would be a shame for the OP to NOT finish his degree, bu

 

[ubersonic]

For those of you who do work in I.T., do you have a degree?

I have just finished a Foundation Degree (first two years of a Bachellors) and I am an MCP and have done a few Cisco Explorer courses. I also have one year of I.T. Support work experience under my belt.

The important thing is, who is doing the interview for the job.

If its a human resources department type, they will go "Ooh degree!", think the work experience is nice and not know what the MCP/Cisco stuff is.

If its somebody who actually works in the I.T department, they will love the MCP/Cisco and see the experience as a big bonus, and not care less about the degree as they know their mostly worthless in the real world.

I did the HND to FdSc to BSc path and know what a joke they are. MCP/CCNA/CCNP/etc are worth infinity more as is on the job experience, the only advantage a degree would be useful for is if the job requests applicants to have a degree, or if the interviews are done by a HR muppet without any I.T staff present.

 

[Ordinarytom]

to the op, if your hearts not in it and ur likely to fail, then by all means go get a job(which i assure you will be very difficult in this present job market) unless your looking for a supermarket job. There are thousands of graduates with 2,2 2,1 and 1st at the job centre all finding it difficult to get a job. business tax is being reduced eventually enticing more companies to set up in our country whether their local companies or foreign. the fact is the amount of jobs will be increasing(and so will student fees) thus the next few years theres going to be a lot less competition for jobs, and getting the degree will boost your chances greatly in the future just not so much right now.

 

[Ev0]

I think the responses in the thread go a long way to proving my point in that it totally depends on the job you're wanting to do and what that particular employer wants, there is no hard and fast right answer.

I would not be doing what I am doing today without a degree, no question about it as I would not have got the role I had for my first job as they were a strictly degree only hirer at the time. Without that job I likely wouldn't have been working in a certain area which lead to my second, which lead nicely to my third etc etc.

Depends on what sort of person the company wants, if it's a role where they want to develop you then I'd say they are more likely fussed on a degree than what experience/industry certs you have as they will 'mould' you as such, but the degree will give some implied ability for learning etc.

If they just want you in to do xyz job then they probably couldn't care less about the degree, just that can you do the job.

To say a degree is either useless or essential is poor advice imho, but my opinion is with the OP being so close to having one he may as well put a tick in that box.

Also I know many of us will say 'I've been in IT 10+ years now and I don't have a degree and I'm now a manager' or the like, which is all well and good but the main thing is times have changed and it's not the same as it was 10+ years ago breaking into industry.

 

[Raumarik]

No degree but with 15 years experience in I.T. I have little need for one, that doesn't mean I don't want one - I'd love to have a degree but probably won't have the opportunity now.

I'd say stick with it, 1 years experience most likely won't be as much benefit as having a degree and there's no guarantee that you'd get a job that would enable you to gain that 1 year experience anyway. Later on you may well need that degree anyway, there's no reason to think that you'll be in I.T. for life and might change your mind about the industry like so many others have after a few years, in which case that degree could be worth it's weight in gold.

 

[kingbal]

Completely agree with the Ev0- when your starting out with limited experience and applying for junior/mid-level jobs, the recruiters will bin your CV if you don't have a degree or equivalent qualifications.

Stick it out and put some effort in to get a decent result - more doors will be open to you with a higher classification.

 

[D.P.]

What, so you walked out of Uni and straight into a job and had all that at your fingertips did you? You are only posting to show off...

no, that is just a mere fraction of the algorithms, techniques, methods and experience i gained during a bachelors and PhD. Any good CS graduate form a good university should know a fair chunk of those, they are bread and butter algorithms. Some are more control theory, robotic and AI related but a majority are computer fundamentals.

That is whey you go to university, to learn methods, techniques, skills and ideas which you don't learn at school and are not likely to learn by yourself. MIT and other universities have their Computer Science lectures on you-tube, this is the kind of topics covered in a good CS degree:

Analysis of Algorithms:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPyuH4qXLZ0

Algorithms and data structures:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpRRUQFbePU

Linear programming:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2QgdDk4Xjw

Etc. etc. I highly recommend going through these lecture series, very ell taught classes.

You know as well as I do that a degree gives you the name and a few examples on any single topic. In the real world you still have to research the same topic and work out how to apply it.
Most jobs may require a subset of a degree but in greater depth and have to be translated into something practical.

In the lala world of Cisco they must imagine that everyone subnets their network, in the real world that only happens in very big companies.

a bad degree might give you a few examples of a single topic. a good degree is in a hole different playing field. You don't learn ad verbatim a technique, you learn the theoretical underpinnings of why that technique works, when and why it is applicable, the implementational dependencies and implications, run-time complexity, advantages and disadvantages and alternatives - across a diver range of techniques. Such knowledge leads to an incredibly powerful toolset and analyses and solve unique real-world problems. You may have to check one of David Knuths programming books for support but the degree has given one he ability to understand the intricacies of different algorithms in levels far beyond what a school leaver could ever achiever.

Anyone can look up a book and find an algorithm on sorting and implement it from pseudo, but a smart and knowledgeable person may realise sorting wouldn't be needed at all if they changed the data structure, or amortized the costs with a modified insertion procedure into the DB. A school leaver wont even know what amortized run-time is!


And a degree gives you so much more than the academic abilities, which is why many companies are not too bothered about what the degree subject is, just the grade and the university.

 

[D.P.]

To all those saying a degree is just a bit of paper, so is a CV, so is a 2- pound note, so is a warrant for your arrest, so is a check for $500,000,000. It is what that paper signifies that is important.


It is really an employers market out there for entry and low level positions. They can simply dump your CV in the bin if it doesn't have a degree.

 

[bitslice]

^^
Phd isn't a degree

And I think you are vastly over-rating the foundation a degree gives you in any one subject.
I go back and look at specific textbooks now and I'm amazed at the depth possible in areas where I thought I understood to a reasonable level.

 

[D.P.]

I always chuckle at the job adverts that stipulate that you must have a degree from a certain university or universities. Not sure I'd want to work in that sort of elitist environment (at least that's how it comes across).

"Have you seen those backup tapes, old chap?"
"Oh yes, they're in the safe next to the latest delivery of Foie Gras!"

There's a mix in my team of people who've done degrees and those who haven't. Everyone is very capable and down to earth.

It has nothing to do with elitism but is a way to simplify the hiring process.
A first class degree form a Russell Group university is a much higher standard than a 2:2 from the 20-50 bottom rated university. If a company wants strong candidates then it makes for a simple test.

I work for a company that advertises a requirement equivalent of a 1st class from a Russell group (being us it is a GPA >3.8 from an Ivory league or similar institution). There is no one posh or elitist here, most of the people belong on the set of the Big Bang Theory (most of them are even physicists by degree).

it costs a lot of money to fly someone in for an interview and give them a couple days of hotel accommodation. A glance at the CV will show whether the person is worth investigating, they then have to do a 3 day programming test, phone interview, then they have a fly out.

 

[D.P.]

^^
Phd isn't a degree

And I think you are vastly over-rating the foundation a degree gives you in any one subject.
I go back and look at specific textbooks now and I'm amazed at the depth possible in areas where I thought I understood to a reasonable level.

Most of those listed techniques are from my undergrad degree, and is far from a complete lost. I didn't list much from my PHD as it is too bespoke, actually skimming through that list that was almost all covered in my AI degree although some of it I may have learnt as an aside to the course (I did a lot of programming at home).

I agree that there is a seemingly never ending depth and breadth to a subject, but that is one of thing you learn doing a degree- you learn that the world is a much bigger places and that your knowledge is much smaller than wheat you thought. The further in academia you go the more your realize how little you know. That is an important skill. This why a degree is useful, it will open your eyes to realise more thought, care and research is needed.

Everyone may need to look through a book to get a refresher or look at the pseudocode,, but with a good CS degree you can do this less often but more importantly you understand the algorithms t a much more fundamental level, you understand the jigsaw puzzle of how different things fit in, you can bake bigger jumps of reasoning or become much more aware of clever tricks and techniques. As I said, a naive person may realize they need to sort an array and not knowing the best way to do this will research and find out a merge sort is optimal, then find some code online that implements it. A smarter person with a more indepth understand of the problem may realise that sorting is not at all required if insertions into the array are made in order, amortizing the costs of the sorting, or perhaps a different data structure like a binary or Trie Tree would simplify the problem.
That is the kind of reasoning that is absent from a school leaver who learnt to program on the job who has a few programming books on his desk.

Programming is easy, so yes a school leaver can do that, being a good developer is very difficult and will not arise automatically from self-taught skills (exceptions for some very smart people).

 

[XeNoN89]

Nope

I left school with 5 A-C GCSE's. did random bits of work for a year (not IT related), went to college for an IT technician course for a year (got Computer technician NVQ and Comptia A+) and then went straight to my job which i am still at now.

 

[swillsy]

Depends on the company some of them like mine will not hire without one so for that reason alone it's worth it.

However in real world terms there isn't much of a difference between degree owners and none degree owners imo