[ILUG] OT: A university degree is required. Why?

[Declan Moriarty]

On Wed, 2006-05-03 at 10:34 +0100, Thomas Bridge wrote:
> On 5/1/06, Declan Moriarty <junk_mail at iol.ie> wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 2006-05-02 at 18:35 +0200, Rory Browne wrote:
> 
> > Realistically, many
> > personnel demons (excuse me all HR staff present :) types operate like
> > this:
> 
> > 1. Check for exact education level required.
> > 2. Check for 2 years experience doing exactly what they want you doing
> > now.
> > 3. If enough candidates pass these tests, junk all CVs that don't.
> 
> Which is fair enough and understandable.
> 
> If you're finding you're being filtered out too often as a result of
> these filters, then you two options.   Either change career, or go and
> get some educational qualifications.   As has been pointed out, the
> degree from a good college/university does say something positive
> about you, and you have to deal with the fact that particularly on
> "soft skills" which HR types care about, it's a huge plus.

I'd quibble with none of that in general. The application is somehow a
little different in practise. Let's take my example.

I can't go for Batchelor of Engineering because among other things, I
lacked honours Math. So the career path for me by that reckoning is

Leaving Cert --> 4 year Engineering Degree to get the piece of paper
that says I might be able to do what I am already doing. By that stage
my hardware experience is seriously out of date, as other skills have
been neglected to get a piece of paper. What is my family going to live
on for five years while I do this? Engineering is a pretty full time
degree.

> Someone I know used to work in a factory in Bray with just his Leaving
> Cert, and got so fed up of having to tell engineering graduates how
> things worked, he left the factory and spent the year studying for a
> CCNA and some sort of Microsoft qualification.    He's now in a much
> better job working for a large telco.
> 
> If someone is finding the lack of formal education is a barrier, then
> they should do what my friend did - get off their arse and go and get
> some,

The other real option for me is to change areas, and IT would be the
ideal one in that case, as I am fairly handy with PCs. But that also
condemns me to the constant battle to stay up to date which applies
there. Anyone worth his salt needs C, C++, Shell Scripting, Perl,
Python, PHP, HTML, Java, and so forth, before you start into assembler,
Fortran, or other more specialist languages.

There is another side of this rarely explored. The standard career path
for an employed person is to specialise, and then get a job in their
speciality. If their speciality disappears(as mine more or less has),
they're sunk. The standard approach for the self employed is to be as
versatile as possible. This makes for more useful employees in a small
organisation, but the skills and experience gained translate poorly on 
to a CV, and are ignored by prospective employers. It is seen as a
disadvantage that I wasn't doing the same thing continuously for 2-5
years.
-- 
        With Best Regards,

        Declan Moriarty.