In the 80s college degrees meant a lot. Now everyone wants to dismiss your degree and they attempt to tell you how it doesn’t mean much. Everyone has a story about some dumbass at their company who has a Masters degree who can’t do the job they can while they only have a high school diploma or GED.
Frequently, you can’t get through the job hiring process without doing some assessment test.
For example:
Your co-worker Martin notices his paycheck is short so he steals some product to compensate for the shortage. He thinks his actions are justified.
Do you:
- Strongly Disagree
- Disagree
- Have no opinion
- Agree
- Strongly Agree
Those tests are worth more than four years of college? Try to refuse to do one and see if you can get the job. Write an email to HR and point out the degree on your resume and see how far you get.
I believe the degradation of the college degree is a conspiracy that corporations have used to pay lower wages. And just like with taxes and politics they get the average worker to repeat their talking points so that now if you try to tell someone you have a degree you are immediately hit with all those “I know a guy with a Masters who is a dumbass…” anecdotes.
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Yes a test to figure out if you can perform your job is significantly more valuable than a collage degree, this doesn’t mean that college has no value, mind you, it just means that knowing how to do the job and knowing that you fit in with the company culture is vastly more important.
Those certifications are useless, they look good on your resume because managers love showcasing their staff’s “certifications”, as many companies that don’t understand IT put value on the certifications more than anything else, but they don’t actually provide you any value in of themselves. Sure it might be interesting how many network switches you can daisy chain according to the standards, but it has no real value most of the time, if that’s information you need in your job it’s something you can just look up, HOWEVER, asking you random questions that pertain to the job during the interview IS a good way to understand if you’re a good candidate, and, often, the actual response doesn’t matter as much as your reasoning for getting to that response.
When an interviewer at google asks you how many pennys it would take to make a structure as tall as the empire state building, it doesn’t matter what the answer is, truly, even if you got the exact number of pennys, just saying the number would mean you don’t pass the interview, your answer would be worth less than an answer that gets it wrong by 75% but is well reasoned, what they care about is how you come up to the conclusion that you come up with, the solution is useless.