There is such a thing as too much education

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25 September 2013

Fair play to Adrienne Hall, general manager at Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing, for making an extremely important point about women and IT. Actually, although her remarks were about women and IT, they could equally apply to men too. And, now I come to think of it, pretty much any industry at all.

So what did she say? Basically that women didn’t need a technical degree to work in IT. She even confessed: “I’m in a technical field but I don’t have a technical degree.”

Hall said women with business or arts degrees could still apply for jobs such as IT operations, network analysis and threat modelling and then, once they got the job, work to get the relevant qualifications through evening courses or learning on the job.

“There’s a lot of things you can learn over time,” Hall added. “You can get a certification. You don’t have to start with a computer science degree. Don’t self-limit based on whether or not you have a science or technical background.”

Personally, I think the same is true for men as well as women. It seems unnecessarily limiting on the part of the individual not to apply for jobs just because they have a degree in another discipline. But Hall might also have mentioned the same is true for employers that refuse to countenance job candidates without technical degrees.

I’ve gone on about this before and I’m going to continue to argue (or labour) the point again. There’s no reason why companies shouldn’t employ candidates from other disciplines that can learn on the job.

Years ago, when there was less of a fetish for specialisations, people with arts and humanities degrees could reasonably expect to get jobs in all sorts of areas that you wouldn’t find them in today. The problem today is that employers and employees have become too restrictive and reductive.

The proliferation in degree courses in all manner of subjects, many of which were previously the preserve of apprenticeships and on-the-job training, have merely transferred the burden of training and education from the employer to the employee. An unfortunate byproduct has been that because university courses have to be generic, they don’t arm future employees with the same level of skills for a particular company that they would get if they’d already worked at the business for three years.

There was an interesting column in The Guardian by Aditya Chakrabortty which argued university education was an expensive experiment for many students. The new batch of students going into university were “the latest batch of guinea pigs in an experiment that has already largely failed”, he wrote . While Chakrabortty was focusing on the UK, much of what he said could apply equally to other western countries, including Ireland, which have fetishised university education.

“Britain now has a generation of expensively educated graduates – without the graduate work for them to do,” he argued. “Instead, faced with all this surplus talent, employers who previously didn’t ask for a degree now demand one. Nursing, policing, hotel management: these sectors now hire from university.”

The same is true for many industries where the expectation has become that prospective employees will have attained degrees that allow them to slot neatly into a predefined career. Unfortunately, real life has a habit of being very different from theory and the lecture theatre. It also tends to be much wider and more diverse than anything someone might cover in a three year degree course in, for instance, computer studies. Especially when the IT industry keeps reinventing itself.

You could argue that it would stand people that did go to university in better stead if they had a less restrictive degree because it would make them more open to other trends and more willing to widen their experience and skills. You could also argue that it might stand them in even better stead (and their employer as well) if they didn’t go to university at all but went straight to work and learned on the job because they would be more aware of the real-life application of technology and its uses.

Years ago, there were no such thing as a media studies degree. Some people came into journalism after completing other degrees while others went in straight from school. Training was done on the job. Today, it is becoming a more and more restrictive and narrow profession drawn mainly from the ranks of those that can afford to pay for their kids to do a three-year degree in media studies and to support them as they undertake a number of unpaid internships afterwards. Many of us watch TV news, read the papers/websites or listen to the radio, so we can ask ourselves: has the focus on recruiting people with a specialist university education made journalism any better?

 

 

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