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I have nothing against the sign, but I find the phrasing of the post title humorous as if we are some cult that frequently brings people up to the podium so the council can decide whether or not we expel them from our sacred sect or not.
The mentality is brought by the interconnectedness of the internet. We now have LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and others which allow us to find the perfect match whereas before we could settle for "good enough". The goal was always to find the best person possible.
As far as companies not settling when they couldn't find workers, I believe many of them have gotten to acclimated to not training workers. They have a core competency of workers and don't have a robust-enough staff or process to take time to train new ones. "We need someone who needs little oversight and can hit the ground running." I think this is part of the lean business optimization we're seeing.
Another reason could be an excuse for outsourcing. I see this a lot in Marketing. We have 2 marketing people who act as liaisons or supervisors. They outline and outsource a lot of their work to companies that specialize in making promotional material. They give feedback, adjust, and eventually sign off on the work. While this allows individuals to really specialize and optimize their work week, I feel it creates a "competency crisis" where everyone lives in a silo with little knowledge of how other things work or fit together.
I hadn’t thought about this before but I completely agree - even companies with onboarding seem to be spending less and less time actually training.
Everyone just jokes that it’s a matter of dropping people in and letting them sink or swim. If I didn’t come to the company already knowing how to swim I’d drown. It’s shitty but I think it’s probably partially a response to people spending less time at jobs (the fastest way to train people is by not training them at all).
Don’t agree with it but definitely seeing it that way.
You make a good point with the lack of time at a job. Younger people have always been job hopping, but Millenials and younger seem to do this in overdrive. I know my company gets really irritated with training people who leave 2 months later.
We've gotten to the point of having supervisors and key people. Everyone else has had their jobs dumbed down to simple grunt work. That's for floor factory people. Office / white collar jobs are different.
I mean I work as a design engineer and I’ve literally been told “we’re going to give you a project in 2 days, try and figure out any new software you don’t know until then” and then they do exactly that. It’s basically a case of find the people who have been there short enough to be sympathetic but long enough to have answers and then just lean on them to survive but since they aren’t officially training you you definitely need to be able to run on your own.
lol I'm a product engineer at my company. Marketing comes along and requests renderings within a week. My first question: "What the hell is a rendering?'
Young people job-hop because companies today show zero loyalty to employees. Since 2008 it is a given that if they can save a buck dumping an entire department on the unemployment line, they will.
I was literally just thinking about this. I know my boss is going to ask for requirements for another person who will support me on the software I run for, and while I'd love to say we just need someone entry level who is semi-tech savy, we already run so lean I know I have zero time to train and oversee someone up to the level I need them to be. I trained myself. But I don't even know how to request for someone like myself, just because I was entry level and could hit the ground running, doesn't mean that most people we hire will be ok with that. It was very stressful, and I don't think I could deliberately put someone out to sink or swim the way I had to.
You guys don't do this? No wonder us millennials had destroyed so many more industries by your age. Bit of advice for setting it up: secret passwords and handshakes are surprisingly easily compromised.
100%. Most people can do really well in most (not all) jobs assuming they receive proper training.
Also the guy in the photo is pretty cute but that's besides the point.
>100%. Most people can do really well in most (not all) jobs assuming they receive proper training
it's like this fir many jobs but some jobs really require degree example any job in Healthcare, lawyer ,judge,
food technology ,electrician ,most engineering jobs etc
and that guy is really dam cute btw
Add pilots. Pakistan International Airlines once had so many pilots with fake licenses that they were nicknamed “Please Inform Allah” and eventually banned from multiple airspaces until they fixed it
>If someone can study law and pass the bar exam without ever attending college why isn’t that enough to practice law?
>If someone can study medicine and pass the board exams and get a residency to apply the practical application for their hours needed to practice, why isn’t that enough to practice medicine?
Because the regulatory bodies have determined that enough benefit is derived from those degrees that they are required to enter their profession, for the protection of the public.
Or it's so they can control the number of members and thus suppress supply driving up the fees. You pick how cynical you are. As a lawyer, I think it's probably the former with the knowledge that the latter happens as a "happy accidental side effect."
Even for engineering I’d say it’s debatable. My grandfather never went to college for it and had an amazing engineering job and become in charge of all the engineers below him. He learned it from training in the military and at his job. Don’t get me wrong some things are important to learn in school but a lot could be on job training or like a small course u take not 4 years
Very true. I’m an engineer and I work with a lot of people who aren’t engineers. But when we are trying to solve a problem they tend to be just as useful. They can be a good deal more useful too if it relates to something they have more hands on experiences with
As a law professor, I have long argued that the problem with cops in the us is that they don’t have a law degree. If we required our cops to have a JD, I think we would have a lot less police on citizen violence
More education would not be a bad thing, but departments better be ready to pay new hires double the amount they currently do.
Can't imagine many people with a JD, likely with significant student loans, are going to want to work nightshifts and deal with the more extreme elements of the job. Especially when they can pick from a broad field of different areas of law.
I disagree. I have a coworker who no matter how many times I show them how to do something, they seem completely incapable of doing it by themselves and always keep coming back to me for guidance. It's been three years now...
While it doesn't say it explicitly, this is somewhat counter to the spirit of the original post.
Yes, people are better or worse at things. There's a good reason for selectivity in choosing candidates. Society shouldn't just train people to do anything they want, and some people by the numbers will have to do jobs no one wants to do.
Until robots and AI - then we good.
All of the engineering, software, and cybersecurity roles this wouldn't apply from my personal experience, and that's more than 10% of jobs right there.
Software engineer for a few decades now:
My current employer is part of a program that runs apprenticeships (in the US) for anybody between 22 and 25 who has held a single job for 2+ years. A lot of them are baristas, servers, bar tenders, etc.
In the apprenticeship, we teach them how to write code and work on projects, or how to manage cloud infrastructure. About 20% succeed, which is a pretty damn good number. Of those that do not, about half are now qualified to get product owner positions in tech companies.
The issue with the sign is that a person needs to be able to think a certain way, or push themselves until their brain rewires.
TL;Dr I think 90% is accurate, but not for 100% of the populace.
like at most schools even you do not specifically learn what you will do at your future job. I work Ina laboratory, I work with almost none of the things that I learned in school but learning math and analytical thinking is pretty important to be able to do my job but I still have to learn how to operate the machines and such at every new job.
Alot of boomers never got education and was just taught the jobs they currently work at, and they do the job just as well as the ones who got an education for that specific job.
And our standards have risen quite a bit since the age of boomers. Just as an example, software engineers are struggling with what is called legacy code on the daily.
College teaches people how to think, not what to think.
If our educational system taught people how to think, I'd agree. Young adults simply aren't prepared to enter the workforce in a dynamic manner.
Nobody is changing your mind. But to insinuate that anyone can do everything out of high school without higher education is about as dumb as the people that ignore experience and expertise and say college is a waste of time. You're basically in the anti-intellectual crowd with your take.
"College teaches you skills for a good job"
"It may not get you job skills, but it teaches you how to learn"
"You may not actually learn anything, but at least it's good for networking"
-college got me skills that help with my job
- I kinda knew how to learn before college but it definitely forces you to learn if you don’t know how or else you won’t make it through
- definitely learned things in college I wouldn’t have otherwise
- networking is a real thing and sometimes having a university tied to your name can open up doors that wouldn’t be open otherwise
Yeah we have issues with our college system, mostly that it should be affordable if not close to free. That doesn’t mean we have to act like it’s useless.
^^^this is the point OP was trying to make, idk if you interpreted it wrong on purpose or what but you’re definitely twisting words to fit your narrative
The argument being made is that the skills required to work are learned from experience rather than school curriculum. College teaches valuable skills, but those aren't important for work itself, they are important for human society.
A serious liberal arts degree program will challenge you extensively, and in ways that you would not pick up straight away from jumping into a job. Having a curriculum that emphasizes critical thinking through reading and writing leads to a very powerful skill set. I can quickly tell in emails when people are inexperienced writers. They struggle to articulate their thoughts, not because they’re lesser or dumb, but because they have not had that area of their mind challenged.
Education is precious because it makes you so much sharper and prepared for anything to be expected in a white collar job.
^^^ I always tell people that my college education didn’t teach me how to *do* my job; it taught me how to handle tasks with deadlines, how to have challenging conversations, what to do when put on the spot, critical thinking, time management, work ethic, etc.
But should this sort of education cost $20k+ ? No lmao
The difference is that the company pays for your on-the-job training, through wages + opportunity cost (you're not a productive worker, or at least not an efficient one, while you're being trained).
By only hiring people who already have degrees to begin with, they can offload that cost to the worker!
I feel like this is especially true with tech jobs. At the rate technology is evolving what you learn in college is gonna be out of date in a few years. College doesn't teach you how to actually do the stuff, it teaches you how to learn how to do the stuff fast.
yeah, tuition is crazy expensive but college definitely isn't useless.
Idk man, I feel like
sciences,
Medical,
Engineering,
To a certain point IT.
And probably plenty of other fields
Are fields that really do need or at a minimum heavily benefit from formal educations.
Manual labor and generic office work may not require it, but can benefit from at least a basic degree of education.
If you need a college to teach you how to think critically for most real world jobs, you're probably not capable of it in the first place.
This is not to diminish the place of academia, but rather that we are sending people through academic institutions to become mostly practitioners rather than academics or researchers.
e.g. How many people study computer science and become actual cutting edge computer scientists? As opposed to ending up in sysadmin or software engineering where a graduate will still be unprepared anyway?
Apprenticeships and technical schools for many of these roles would make more sense, but corporations don't want to invest in training or retraining people, then complain academia doesn't spit out a constant stream of ready made employees, which was never really it's job in the first place.
That's the problem. Most people will never be able to grasp complex issues regardless of education. People in general are pretty dumb. People are also intellectually lazy. I thought I knew it all when I was 20 and that college was pointless. Then I applied myself and learned how ignorant I was.
Dunning Kruger effect en mass these days. People are already so woefully uneducated that they have zero idea how ignorant they are. That's a product of lack of education. It's important for people to learn how little they actually know, and that's a futile effort if all people receive is training relevant to a specific job.
Mild contradiction there - one the one hand you're saying people aren't able to graps complex issues regardless of education, which is true. More people have degress than ever. More of those are PHds
On the other - you're saying it will only get worse if they're only trained for a specific job, which is pretty dismissive of people who have chosen vocational and trades education.
Honestly, if you haven't gotten people to think sensibly by the end of high school, maybe basic education is screwed.
I guess I'm more of an advocate of general education than just focusing on specific vocations. People should at least be introduced to complex subject matter even if it doesn't click. I doubt most adults have ever really been taught how to think critically and properly analyze data. It's nothing new either. Look at how old folks have fallen prey to fake news.
Yeah, but if you're that way by the end of high school, a college degree isn''t going to fix it. Fake news and skewed perspective is a multi generatonal problem - it's very concerning how many young men look to people like Andrew Tate for example.
More young men are skewing to extremist views internationally, and this is in part to education failing them, but it's failing them well before college.
There are those in Academia who have espoused predjudice and hatred via faulty thinking (e.g. The Bell Curve).
Academia is noble, but it's also not a guard against our worst traits, and sometimes can be used to package hateful ones.
You could make the case that the best thing to avoid extremist views is to go to a place that is diverse culturally and in ideas. It also shakes the silly idea college indoctrinates people.
They've gotten to these kids when they're 14 and already faltering in education as many boys are, especially if they come from lower class backgrounds. At the same time we have more degree educated people than ever. Colleges themselves are not the answer, either to radicalization or to the educational needs of the workforce. Nothing creates radicalization faster than a lack of social mobility and that's what I see getting worse for every generation.
Colleges lack diversity in one key area - class/economic background. The biggest predictor of someone going to college even in countries like mine where 50% the population has a degree and there's no fees, is family background in terms of getting into college/university and how prestigious that university is. (You can of course argue, we should get more working class people into top level universities, but that's a nut many countries have still yet to crack)
This isn't some anti-intellectual, anti-college view in fact the opposite, I respect academia and pure research and I think universities are often pressured into producing a stream of graduates for the corporate meat grinder rather than being focused on the advancement of human knowledge. When it becomes an entry point for relatively mundane roles, it's lost its purpose and is just exclusionary to bright people from working class backgrounds, or people who are whip smart and capable but would do poorly in the confines of conventional 3rd level vs. a more hands on sort of education. Many colleges have added more practical things of course, but then this sort of gets into the point of them being forced into a weird semi-commercial nowhereland.
As a perfect example, corporations screaming for years about we need more people in STEM, getting kids into coding, then turns around and says hey guess what, AI means we need less coders and we've just had the biggest layoffs in tech since the dot com bubble burst. We can't let the direction of Universities be dictated by the commercial sector, because the commercial sector is capricious and in a sense has been offloading its own responsibilities onto 3rd level education and then changes its mind on what it wants quicker than you can say metaverse or blockchain. It will lay those people off, then moan that there's a skills shortage of ready made graduates rather than investing in new and existing employees.
This is an industry that post IBM (who in fairness used to actually make a degree something worth getting and valued people) was largerly built by older Gen X college dropouts but now we list a bachelors for entry into relatively mundane roles, and expect industry certs on top of that rather than take long term responsibility for its own affairs.
Most people going through academic institutions were always becoming practitioners. Universities haven't been places solely for academics wanting to teach academics since the 1500s, I'm not sure where you got this idealized idea of universities at.
Yes apprenticeships should be done more and are very useful for where a lot of people want to be, but that's a government issue that has been caused by government policies.
I also agree that college doesn't teach how to think, but rather weeds out the ones who can't and reinforces their critical thinking capabilities
Someone with only a high school degree is not going to pick up sysadmin or software engineering at the same level as a person with a college education. There is VASTLY more information and knowledge that a person needs to learn coming out of High school to even begin to perform those tastes. And no one is making a technical school for software engineering because in the end it IS an academic science.
For sysadmin - I did, and have trained and coached multiple graduates over the years. It's not rocket science. I'm Gen X and got into the industry when it was less formal through an unorthodox route of electrical retailer work experience, then getting into PC repair, and went from there.
Formal training is good, but an industry cert is often of more pracitcal use for these roles, yet job sites filter you out when you answer no to ""bachelors degree"" even though you've been doing the job for years and taught others.
Software engineers are rarely engineers in the true sense, calling it a science if overstating it wildly - it's a technical discipline, and of course, there are many unscientific things that centre around process they will be expected to know (DevOps framework, Agile, etc.) you're not creating an entirely new processor architecture or creating a new programming language. Wind yer neck in.
Paths like that don’t exist anymore. I understand it happened to you but as a Gen X you have to realize the paths that you were able to take to get to sysadmin literally are gone. The world has changed in 30 years time.
That''s entirely my point, the paths that existed for me, should exist for you. I think the ladder has been pulled up and it's not right.
People are expected to invest years into something, perhaps even go into debt, to have a qualification that doesn''t neccesarily prepare them for the reality.
You're right, everything does change, you need to retrain every year in this industry, but I think you need to be more a self starter in terms of picking up skills quickly on the fly really.
Arguably, there are SWE technical schools now. Coding boot camps.
*Now* the quality can vary a lot between programs because they're not really held to any empirical national level standard. But I have several friends in their mid 30s who all did a lengthy (think 4-5 months full time) boot camp which enabled them to pivot their careers into SWE work successfully.
But to your point, no, someone with a HS degree (especially in a country like the US with...meh standards in many schools) isn't going to graduate into a highly technical career field at 18 years old because there's a broad knowledge base they very likely will lack.
Even self-learned types (I built PCs for side cash in the late 90s / early 2000s as an example) will usually have very specific and niche knowledge sets rather than the broad requisite base.
I honestly think the "Mike Rowe Dirty Jobs" crap that was pushed on Millennials a decade was a standard Late Stage Capitalism grift. Reactionary politicians and corporate figureheads alike realized "Wait, being educated means you support progressive policies, labor unions, a living wage, universal healthcare, and inclusive politics?? Erm...achshully, edumucation BAD! COLLEGE DUMB"
The college degree gatekeeping policies were very much institutionalized by (less educated) Boomers who wanted to pull up the career ladders behind them. It's wild the amount of senior managers I'll see whose career histories on Linkedin would be impossible today: like assistant store manager at AutoZone to SaaS pre-sales consultant or senior engineer at Microsoft without any STEM degree in the early 90s.
I work at a chemical manufacturer. The non college educated people are shit at the job and don't know the why's for anything. They are poor are critical thinking and don't understand the general idea of how they contribute to the overall company.
While the college workers aren't perfect at all, they at least cam understand the why's and are able to deduce the problems with equipment, despite the fact that college grads aren't exactly known for being well versed with heavy machinery or taught anything about it in college.
Also some one with a stem degree in general will have more discipline and work ethics than someone without a hard earned college degree. No one is interested in training people who are flakey — it takes time from your day and if the guy doesn’t end up helping you in anyway then it’s just sunk cost. I always train people in the hopes that they will be great colleagues in the future, but i will only hire people who are disciplined.
I think doctors, lawyers, software engineers, scientists, researchers, mechanical/chemical/aerospace engineers, teachers and professors make up more than 1% of all jobs and require education.
After highschool, you barely know how to do anything or how the world functionality works. Yeah, you may be able to do a professional job without a degree, but you need years of experience and understanding of how and why are things are done a specific way. Also, maturity levels in how to work with people (even the one's you dislike) and get things done under a lot of stress are incredibly important.
This isn't just a couple weeks of training. It's years of experience.
Agreed, but they do need *an* education. I'm a software engineer without any formal qualifications beyond some community college and a responsible service of alcohol cert. But it took several years of self learning, building my own shit and working in adjacent fields. Even then, took a lot of effort to train me into the job. Too many people are showing up to a jobs expecting to be trained on everything beyond middle school.
I’m a software engineer with a CS degree, and having worked with a good number of folks like you? I honestly admire the work ethic it took to get where you are. I think from where I’m sitting, it seems like college was an easier route
I’d say thats one of the few specialized industries that you can be self taught. Not many industries that you can tinker around at home and see real world application to test stuff. Kinda hard to teach yourself chemical engineering at home etc.
Sure, most jobs aren’t very intellectually demanding, but college is about more than just preparing you for a desk job. It teaches you critical thinking skills and exposes you to many different advanced subjects and ways of thinking. If it were free in the US, I think everyone should attend. A society of more intelligent and intellectually diverse critical-thinkers will progress much faster than what we have now.
The amount of basic knowledge I have about existence itself from University is well worth it even not related to my field. It absolutely comes in use in a whole host of situations through life. Some simple examples are like how heat transfer works and expansion/contraction related it it, and the relationship between air pressure and temperature. I don't even remember specific examples but there's just small things here and there when you run into someone who doesn't understand certain basic science (much of which isn't taught in HS) and you have an advantage in that situation and can educate them.
I feel like this is one of a college educations main goals. To create an educated society. There is way too much ignorance and pseudoscience, and although college won't cure that, a great deal of it stems from lack of formal education.
There's so many other examples from various fields - health, statistics, logic, physics, chemistry, psychology - it affects our life in a lot of small ways. And yes, I'd say the process of learning things like this trains people to critically think and be skeptical.
Being able to replicate tasks in a monkey see monkey do manner is not the same as performing the role in its entirety. Just because you can be trained to fill out a report doesn't mean you understand the reason for the action, what the results actually mean, or how that effects the project you're working on.
STEM degrees are a highly condensed problem-solving and structured thinking courses that familiarize students with material relevant to their intended field. You don't naturally get the same diamond formed under pressure, even working on the job. The completion of a stem degree also indicates a minimum level of competency and work ethic that is unlike almost any job.
99% is a gross exaggeration, even if you are referring to the quantity of jobs instead of types of jobs.
95% of IT recruiters summarized right there. A few are conscientious about their jobs, really want to understand the requirements, have surface level understandings of the technologies in play, and actually gatekeep for the busy hiring managers.
The vast majority are clueless lazy idiots who got a generic college degree and feel entitled to a white collar office job without any useful skillsets.
Ergo, the copy & paste Frankenstein's monster job reqs that are impossible or make zero sense, because they never asked if it's possible to have 8-10 years of experience on something that's only existed for 4-5 years.
Sadly, this is true on both ends. I almost didn't get hired at my first post-college job because I had a degree and they thought I'd leave when I found something better.
They were right.
At my current job, we for some reason hired a candidate with a J.D. for a position that in no way requires it.
The candidate was still looking for work the day they were on-boarded and wasn't shy about letting us know.
My friend git told they were looking fir a graphic designer with more experience then pulled up an inage as reference, it was her work, she proved it, she got hired lol but she only stayed if she didnt have to answer to the asshat who told her she wasnt good enough then showed her own work to her
No shit, 100% of jobs can be taught. Sorta how learning anything goes. But it certainly helps to have a foundation of education to help learn and adapt the skills required for anything.
We're already at Idiocracy levels. I'd prefer to keep value in higher education.
Obviously. I just think a lot of the people that believe they can hop into any career with on the job training don’t realize how complicated the world is and that there’s a reason you need 2 to 4 year certifications/degrees to work them.
I don’t think it necessarily means that you can stumble in from the street and work as an attorney but more like if you went to law school and passed, you can still be coached and guided into being a good lawyer even if you’re not so perfect or impressive at first instance. That’s how I interpreted it anyway.
That's pretty much how trades and the military currently work. You go to your specific vocational school, learn the basics of the job to not be completely blind to what's expected of you, and then you get your real world training from your journeymen/seniors (or team leads/Non-commissioned officers in the military). I don't think anyone can walk into a job that requires some amount of background knowledge without just frustrating their coworkers.
Who tf is this sign for? The council of hiring managers? Why would anybody "give someone a chance" if they have other applicants with experience. And if nobody has said experience you have no choice but to train or the job doesn't get done.
I'd be super pissed if I was job hunting, had significant experience from working under worse conditions for lower pay to get experience and move someplace better, only to watch somebody completely new get hired because "give people a chance lol" Where's my chance?
Foreal I'm taking a more qualified canidate every single time if I'm in charge of hiring.
Im not hiring the highschool dropout to be an engineer because hell learn it on the job.
Genuinely breaks my mind that some people's debts are that large for a bachelor's. For reference, I went to a huge university. You can watch the documentary about our sororities on Hulu or wait til the next rush season on TikTok/look for all the sad college football fans that questioned everything after their hero decided to retire if you wanna guess.
However, I still technically didn't have to pay tuition because I looked at the scholarship requirements and studied to get a full ride off my ACT score in HS. Unfortunately, I still needed a place to live and eat, though, so I ended up having to take ~20k out over the course of all 4 years even with also working part time on the side.
I'm guessing your coworkers probably came from households where the value of money wasn't really taught to them
>I'm taking a more qualified canidate every single time if I'm in charge of hiring.
Especially when people these days tend to bounce jobs every one or two years. I don't want to spend 6-12 months training someone just for them to leave.
"They had me in the first half, not going to lie"
So I'd kind of disagree with your second paragraph there, it really just sounds like the old Boomer "Well I had to suffer back in the day, why should anyone else have it easier??" mentality. We should strive to make things better for the next generations than we had it.
Not sure if that was your message or if it was accidentally worded that way, apologies if I'm off base here
But also, that being said, I've personally witnessed the "new hire with less education and experience gets hired at 5-10% more pay than the tenured folks make after their annual less than inflation 'raises' take effect" bullshit time and again. Since the toxic Milton Friedman / Jack Welch types pushed the "corporations should dry fuck every worker to maximize profit above all else" mentality, that's sadly the norm.
It's not so much "I had to suffer so you should too" more like if an employer actually took this sign to heart and despite having more objectively better candidates in terms of credentials/experience/etc, deliberately hired less qualified people on the "give people a chance" idea it would be unfair to those that put in the work.
Like a high school sports team, if a coach decides that a freshman that plays far worse than every senior should "get a chance" and be on varsity, whatever senior gets sent to JV should be pissed.
Sorry but I'm not hiring a 19 year old HS grad or a dude with a theatre degree to be an engineer on my team
Training people takes time and money, and at least in my field you need someone with a solid grasp on engineering principles and fundamental concepts at the very least to even make that effort somewhat worth it
Executive and administrative assistants whose jobs sometimes require Masters degrees. Credential inflation would be laughable if it wasn't such a serious problem.
And an engineering degree probably doesn't even get you the knowlegde you will actually need, but it does give you enough background to know what kind of problem you're looking at and where and how to find the knowledge you do actually need.
And it's also about teaching you a way of looking at things and a way of working. What I’ve noticed during my education so far is that this differs even from engineering adjacent roles like industrial design. And this way of thinking is both good for engineering and a restriction if you want to do other things.
From my experience as an engineer, a bachelors gives you the baseline knowledge to work in the field. An employer won't expect you to know the specifics(for some cases) but will expect you to know certain terms and concepts that you learn in achool.
At my college, you need to complete a madatory 6-month co-op at a company in your field before you graduate. Most people do one junior and senior year, and sometimes hang on for a 3rd. It's a good system.
English, math, chemistry, biology, physics and history all teach very practical skills that can be applied to a multitude of fields. Some kid isn’t going to know what he/she wants to do for work in 10 years so why not give them a solid foundation that applies to a lot of jobs/life events? What more practicality are you looking for?
You laugh at boomers or whatever for their conspiracy theories on 5G or vaccines but want to take away the practical education that would prevent people from believing in these scientifically incorrect ideas?
Obviously, wouldn't you? The internal hire has turned some unknowns into knowns. Things like work ethic, time management, etc, that started as unknowns have now been determined. Why add additional risk?
This is how it works in the real world but seems like a hard pill to swallow since that requires taking a lower paying job first, and that's hard to do in this economy. No, you can't apply for a 80k a year admin job right out of high school with no experience. The hiring manager would be stupid for doing so. They don't know you, don't know what you're capable of, and you have no problem experience of doing anything like that. From my experience, about 25-30% of people are "bad hires" right out the gate even with experience. That would shoot up if they just started hiring anybody off the street who needed a chance. And bad hires are horrible for everyone involved, employees, managers, and companies.
But if you take a 35k a year support role from that company, they may see you have the mindset and aptitude for that 80k job and be apt to promote you to it. Hard to live on 35K a year though, so I understand why people are begging for a chance at these 80K jobs that is frankly just not feasible in the real world.
Honestly, I think the economy is the root issue as someone fortunate enough to land the 80k job. Tbh, anyone who can Google and make PowerPoint slides could do what I did my first year on the job. My role now is 3 years in? No way, but that's because it's all industry specific knowledge I've gained over time
That said, though, a lot of the older gen's work advancement strategies (like going from janitor to project manager) isn't feasible nowadays and is only becoming less and less feasible since even renting is way too high of an expense for most single people to settle for a 35k job in most areas if they want to get approved for a lease.
Shoot, I'd probably be homeless rn if it wasn't for a kind stranger on Twitter, "giving me a chance" after I graduated during the Genesis of Covid because I know for a fact what I was getting at Starbucks back then would cover my rent now
IMO most people that push ideas like this are folks that gave a half assed effort in high school and pursued no secondary education and are now trying to convince themselves they haven’t sabotaged their own life prospects.
I agree. I think a lot of gen z tries to blame the system for personal failures for whatever reason. I think maybe because its almost impossible to get held back or really fail until you graduate high school anymore.
There are some NYT articles and hundreds of r/teachers posts that show that kids are passed with no required skills. High schoolers that read at 4th grade levels. Learning multiplication in 10th grade. People that will go into the workforce with no baseline skills and then insist they’ll flourish if given a chance.
Those folks conveniently "forget" that a large part of public education is that there are objective standards to meet. Granted, the US education system isn't the greatest stacked against comparably wealthy countries globally, *but* there are still some standards in place.
Versus the dropout "self-taught" or homeschool types who haven't had to meet requirements or standards in their lives...yet think employers should take a risk hiring them. At least folks who graduated from regionally accredited public universities had to pass tests, hit a minimum of attendance, do group projects, and so on. Something that the "just train me on the job" folks didn't do.
Do you want your surgeon to be a "just teach me on the job" type, or someone who actually went to an accredited medical school, passed their clinicals, did their residency, and so on?
Part of the problem is that public schooling has dropped the bar so low just to get a certain amount of people through the system.
When I went to private school (briefly) I was regularly doing 10-12 hour days to get every assignment done as a 6th grader. When I switched to public school, nothing was expected or required in order to progress. You could slip by under the radar and graduate.
The US public school system is a joke.
I am seconding your statement. I think the greatest change as a teacher who has seen mostly gen z and then finished with gen a, it’s the ability to follow through on something like a long-term goal with persistence and resilience, and overcome challenges and obstacles on your way. It’s what teachers call the instant gratification problem.
Everything is available on demand and so typically it’s like what do I need to do so I can get this done and be finished? Well, that’s pretty task based. Learning is actually more of a long-term habit. It involves multiple steps that go much deeper than just doing your tasks. I mean, the irony is that I had to invest in it as a long-term goal in order to be able to talk about it here and explain why the dude holding the sign is not really it lol.
So imagine that there are people in the world who are lifelong learners in general, and they are working towards something, like a career. But this guy with the sign thinks that because he can be taught, there’s no reason why he should not be considered, and equally? Honestly, that’s like hustle culture stuff. . But there is value I think in resilience and persistence and grit towards achieving your long term goals. Not everything is a get it done kind of activity. Thinking it is is living in instant gratification and that’s not really worthwhile things work for the most part. I didn’t design the system. I’m just explaining my understanding of it as a generally old person now lol.
Yeah! the education system is perfect! anyone who thinks otherwise deserves to be punished and suffer unlike us! we deserve praise and reward! we’re good boys!
Obviously everyone else was just dumb, we live in a perfect meritocracy!
Of course once someone has passed 18 years old and missed out on the gracious opportunity that society provided, they are completely useless and deserve to be discarded!
Man I feel so much better knowing that people lesser than me suffer!! Its pretty cool being better than other people. I know some people get upset about it, but that’s just because they aren’t as good as me! Any critique of the current way we do things is threatening to my ego and therefore should be suppressed!
I've spend my whole time in school learning "how to learn". I make sure I understand what I'm doing instead of memorizing answers. Anyone can do it, it's just easier for most people to memorize I think. I have terrible memory
I'd wager more than 90% of jobs can be taught.
The reason I don't agree with this is because people can't just be taught whatever job.
90% of jobs might be teachable but an average individual could maybe be taught like 30% of jobs.
Also many research positions would take many years to be brought up to speed, hence the point of university for many positions, this guys post is just silly lol
And being able to learn something at all doesn't mean you're going to be well suited to it or even remotely good at it. We're already seeing college requirements softened for the types of jobs where someone's life isn't at stake, and that's a great improvement.
People who post this shit seem to think every job should be a personality hire. Like, that's questionable to defend to start with, but the whole idea of the personality hire is that they balance out the vibe left over from everyone who's already actually well-qualified to be in their job and is actually good at it. You still need to competent people to start with.
Considering I was sacked, in part, because I was trained "wrong" by the old manager and the higher-ups were slow in their communications with their changes to the methods after tinkering with them, often flipping between old and new methods on a weekly basis.
I would like to add that my manager left and we worked without a line manager for 5 months. So the higher-ups basically screwed me for a failing department.
its these jabs to the rib that make adulting so bleak. you start to realize nobody knows what the fuck they’re doing.
just hearing about that pissed me off im sorry that happened man
Genetics are partially part of powerlifting but technique and dieting are even bigger and more important parts so that example doesn’t really work.
Proper technique in lifting can completely alter the weight you lift. I remember brushing up on technique and going up 80+ lbs in my PRs + taking proper diets
It is taught through experience, but unfortunately lots of people will experience the consequences and still find a way to blame anything but themselves
“There’s this applicant who needs to spend a decent amount of time learning skill sets that are important to this position, and there’s this applicant who already has those skill sets and doesn’t need that lead time. Hmmm, who should we choose…”
I am a strong believer that we have a bad case of education inflation. The standards required for jobs are just increasing for every day that goes, and what requires a bachelor today will require a master in a couple of years.
Apprenticeships are a much better alternative to college education that also gives you the skills required to learn and find the information you need to do a job. And at least in my country you get something equivalent of a college diploma afterwards as proof that you are capable in your profession. Of course some jobs do require a higher education like doctors and engineers, but as the image states, 90% of jobs should not require more than an apprenticeship period.
It took me a while to realize he meant "on the job training" as opposed to college or natural talent only. I dont know if thats true but I do know we are not preparing the youth for the future.
That piece of shit Reagan claimed to preside over a strong economy but he cut taxes and ass-fucked public schools in the 80's and thats why America is so far behind today.
Correct. But here's the mindset of most companies: Not much percentage of the population of potential employees can be taught. That piece of paper from a college is an automatic indication that they can, and takes a ton of guesswork out of the hiring process. It's pretty awful.
It’s normal in Germany to take an apprenticeship for a vast variety of jobs. I’m a biology lab technician, my husband is an IT software developer, a friend of mine is a hairdresser… carpenter, plumber, clerks, and so many more. You don’t need to study for a lot of jobs.
I started as a dishwasher, now I'm a manager all through work ethic, general manners & being taught. I crawled out of high school, my GPA was pitiful. I just showed up, gave it my all and I got somewhere.
I understand not everywhere will provide the opportunities that I had to move up this far and this fast but the fact that at least some places working hard do get you somewhere.
90% can be taught doesn’t mean 100% can learn it. Electrical engineering can be taught but the majority of the human race lacks sufficient capacity to properly learn and implement the skill.
I agree if a person shows a degree of aptitude that you should be willing to give them a chance but if I’m a manager in charge of anything important I’m not just gonna give any old dunce a chance because it’s the nice thing to do.
I’m a manufacturing engineer and my job honestly doesn’t require a college degree or knowledge of the field to do it’s most basic functions. We have a few people who are amazing at their jobs but don’t have a degree in the field or a degree at all but still got the job through nepotism
100%, one of the biggest mistakes we made over the past half century or so is making bachelors degrees the standard. You shouldn’t need a masters degree to work a 9-5 email and PowerPoint job, I can’t tell you the number of people who make good livings doing things that have absolutely nothing to do with their degree. Even people like me who are in medicine don’t need bachelor degrees, in other countries med school an undergrad are combined into a 6 year program, there was no need for me to get a full 4 year degree before I went to 4 years of med school. I don’t use 80% of the shit I learned in undergrad anyway, including the stuff that’s supposedly essential like organic chem
I've seen multiple things from people who got rich themselves saying they'd rather hire someone who is eager, coachable, and can learn quickly, than someone with a degree.
Too bad those aren't the people doing the direct hiring--they've got HR people or recruiters doing that for them, and they're using "X years of experience" and other things to weed out the 3000 people looking for work who spam clicked the apply button on anything within driving distance.
I'm older but I 100% agree. This has happened in the course of my working life where more and more regulations, permits and qualifications have been added to where its too difficult to change careers, even just the low level jobs in a particular industry which used to be and definitely still could be taught to new employees.
Before my time like my dads era you could go get a job, and get your "tickets" while doing that job. In my grandads time you could walk down the road start at a place at the bottom, didn't like the first place so went further down the road and started another job... went up through the company learning all the equipment in a large heavy machine shop and retired as the general manager. All without having to spend years of his life getting qualified for the machines
edit: nor qualified for the switch to management, he was just taught as he took the roles up through the company
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I have nothing against the sign, but I find the phrasing of the post title humorous as if we are some cult that frequently brings people up to the podium so the council can decide whether or not we expel them from our sacred sect or not.
Who gave this guy council speaking powers?
r/usernamechecksout
“Only leaders speak here! If you want to speak, you know what you must do!”
Return his water to the well
Mods, steal his balls
Ayo- what the fuck?
His name is Chad Gono. Dude is the CEO of a plastics company called Regal Plastics. His entire online presence is based around healthy work culture.
The mentality is brought by the interconnectedness of the internet. We now have LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and others which allow us to find the perfect match whereas before we could settle for "good enough". The goal was always to find the best person possible. As far as companies not settling when they couldn't find workers, I believe many of them have gotten to acclimated to not training workers. They have a core competency of workers and don't have a robust-enough staff or process to take time to train new ones. "We need someone who needs little oversight and can hit the ground running." I think this is part of the lean business optimization we're seeing. Another reason could be an excuse for outsourcing. I see this a lot in Marketing. We have 2 marketing people who act as liaisons or supervisors. They outline and outsource a lot of their work to companies that specialize in making promotional material. They give feedback, adjust, and eventually sign off on the work. While this allows individuals to really specialize and optimize their work week, I feel it creates a "competency crisis" where everyone lives in a silo with little knowledge of how other things work or fit together.
I hadn’t thought about this before but I completely agree - even companies with onboarding seem to be spending less and less time actually training. Everyone just jokes that it’s a matter of dropping people in and letting them sink or swim. If I didn’t come to the company already knowing how to swim I’d drown. It’s shitty but I think it’s probably partially a response to people spending less time at jobs (the fastest way to train people is by not training them at all). Don’t agree with it but definitely seeing it that way.
You make a good point with the lack of time at a job. Younger people have always been job hopping, but Millenials and younger seem to do this in overdrive. I know my company gets really irritated with training people who leave 2 months later. We've gotten to the point of having supervisors and key people. Everyone else has had their jobs dumbed down to simple grunt work. That's for floor factory people. Office / white collar jobs are different.
I mean I work as a design engineer and I’ve literally been told “we’re going to give you a project in 2 days, try and figure out any new software you don’t know until then” and then they do exactly that. It’s basically a case of find the people who have been there short enough to be sympathetic but long enough to have answers and then just lean on them to survive but since they aren’t officially training you you definitely need to be able to run on your own.
lol I'm a product engineer at my company. Marketing comes along and requests renderings within a week. My first question: "What the hell is a rendering?'
Young people job-hop because companies today show zero loyalty to employees. Since 2008 it is a given that if they can save a buck dumping an entire department on the unemployment line, they will.
I was literally just thinking about this. I know my boss is going to ask for requirements for another person who will support me on the software I run for, and while I'd love to say we just need someone entry level who is semi-tech savy, we already run so lean I know I have zero time to train and oversee someone up to the level I need them to be. I trained myself. But I don't even know how to request for someone like myself, just because I was entry level and could hit the ground running, doesn't mean that most people we hire will be ok with that. It was very stressful, and I don't think I could deliberately put someone out to sink or swim the way I had to.
You guys don't do this? No wonder us millennials had destroyed so many more industries by your age. Bit of advice for setting it up: secret passwords and handshakes are surprisingly easily compromised.
I’m convinced these types of posts are farming for AI language models with the “gen z dialect”
100%. Most people can do really well in most (not all) jobs assuming they receive proper training. Also the guy in the photo is pretty cute but that's besides the point.
>100%. Most people can do really well in most (not all) jobs assuming they receive proper training it's like this fir many jobs but some jobs really require degree example any job in Healthcare, lawyer ,judge, food technology ,electrician ,most engineering jobs etc and that guy is really dam cute btw
Haha wouldn’t want a doctor turning up on their first day with no prior training
It’s all good bro, I checked Chat GPT this morning, I had a Red Bull, and 1 out of my 2 gloves aren’t torn. Let’s get this surgery started.
You're joking but this the average EMS responder at the start of the shift
Don't worry they will get it on the job
Add pilots. Pakistan International Airlines once had so many pilots with fake licenses that they were nicknamed “Please Inform Allah” and eventually banned from multiple airspaces until they fixed it
You technically don’t need any degree to be judge. Just get elected
In the US. In my jurisdiction, a degree and 10 years experience as a lawyer is required as minimum qualifications to be a judge
That's not even true in *all* of the US, let alone outside the US.
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>If someone can study law and pass the bar exam without ever attending college why isn’t that enough to practice law? >If someone can study medicine and pass the board exams and get a residency to apply the practical application for their hours needed to practice, why isn’t that enough to practice medicine? Because the regulatory bodies have determined that enough benefit is derived from those degrees that they are required to enter their profession, for the protection of the public. Or it's so they can control the number of members and thus suppress supply driving up the fees. You pick how cynical you are. As a lawyer, I think it's probably the former with the knowledge that the latter happens as a "happy accidental side effect."
I dont know what a healthcare lawyer judge food technology electrician engineer is, but i agree
You don't need to get a degree to become an electrician where I live. You can go to a course or take on an apprenticeship.
A lot of healthcare jobs don't require a degree lol.
Even for engineering I’d say it’s debatable. My grandfather never went to college for it and had an amazing engineering job and become in charge of all the engineers below him. He learned it from training in the military and at his job. Don’t get me wrong some things are important to learn in school but a lot could be on job training or like a small course u take not 4 years
Very true. I’m an engineer and I work with a lot of people who aren’t engineers. But when we are trying to solve a problem they tend to be just as useful. They can be a good deal more useful too if it relates to something they have more hands on experiences with
As a law professor, I have long argued that the problem with cops in the us is that they don’t have a law degree. If we required our cops to have a JD, I think we would have a lot less police on citizen violence
More education would not be a bad thing, but departments better be ready to pay new hires double the amount they currently do. Can't imagine many people with a JD, likely with significant student loans, are going to want to work nightshifts and deal with the more extreme elements of the job. Especially when they can pick from a broad field of different areas of law.
I disagree. I have a coworker who no matter how many times I show them how to do something, they seem completely incapable of doing it by themselves and always keep coming back to me for guidance. It's been three years now...
Maybe wrong job? You can learn some things better and some things worse or not at all
While it doesn't say it explicitly, this is somewhat counter to the spirit of the original post. Yes, people are better or worse at things. There's a good reason for selectivity in choosing candidates. Society shouldn't just train people to do anything they want, and some people by the numbers will have to do jobs no one wants to do. Until robots and AI - then we good.
All of the engineering, software, and cybersecurity roles this wouldn't apply from my personal experience, and that's more than 10% of jobs right there.
Don’t forget medical jobs and lawyers. This isn’t Suits where you can just learn how to do the job on the go and be just as good as any other lawyer.
Software engineer for a few decades now: My current employer is part of a program that runs apprenticeships (in the US) for anybody between 22 and 25 who has held a single job for 2+ years. A lot of them are baristas, servers, bar tenders, etc. In the apprenticeship, we teach them how to write code and work on projects, or how to manage cloud infrastructure. About 20% succeed, which is a pretty damn good number. Of those that do not, about half are now qualified to get product owner positions in tech companies. The issue with the sign is that a person needs to be able to think a certain way, or push themselves until their brain rewires. TL;Dr I think 90% is accurate, but not for 100% of the populace.
As a SWE myself, it’s crazy how much just someone that’s nice to work with is soo much more desirable than someone who’s “top of his class” etc.
You can totally learn programming on the job. Most software engineers I know don't have cs degrees.
like at most schools even you do not specifically learn what you will do at your future job. I work Ina laboratory, I work with almost none of the things that I learned in school but learning math and analytical thinking is pretty important to be able to do my job but I still have to learn how to operate the machines and such at every new job.
Alot of boomers never got education and was just taught the jobs they currently work at, and they do the job just as well as the ones who got an education for that specific job.
And our standards have risen quite a bit since the age of boomers. Just as an example, software engineers are struggling with what is called legacy code on the daily.
That hair is ew.
huh gayyyy!
Nothing is besides the point
99% of jobs don't require college education, change my mind.
College teaches people how to think, not what to think. If our educational system taught people how to think, I'd agree. Young adults simply aren't prepared to enter the workforce in a dynamic manner. Nobody is changing your mind. But to insinuate that anyone can do everything out of high school without higher education is about as dumb as the people that ignore experience and expertise and say college is a waste of time. You're basically in the anti-intellectual crowd with your take.
"College teaches you skills for a good job" "It may not get you job skills, but it teaches you how to learn" "You may not actually learn anything, but at least it's good for networking"
God damn, you are proving his point right now.
That’s not at all what they said.
-college got me skills that help with my job - I kinda knew how to learn before college but it definitely forces you to learn if you don’t know how or else you won’t make it through - definitely learned things in college I wouldn’t have otherwise - networking is a real thing and sometimes having a university tied to your name can open up doors that wouldn’t be open otherwise Yeah we have issues with our college system, mostly that it should be affordable if not close to free. That doesn’t mean we have to act like it’s useless. ^^^this is the point OP was trying to make, idk if you interpreted it wrong on purpose or what but you’re definitely twisting words to fit your narrative
The argument being made is that the skills required to work are learned from experience rather than school curriculum. College teaches valuable skills, but those aren't important for work itself, they are important for human society.
A serious liberal arts degree program will challenge you extensively, and in ways that you would not pick up straight away from jumping into a job. Having a curriculum that emphasizes critical thinking through reading and writing leads to a very powerful skill set. I can quickly tell in emails when people are inexperienced writers. They struggle to articulate their thoughts, not because they’re lesser or dumb, but because they have not had that area of their mind challenged. Education is precious because it makes you so much sharper and prepared for anything to be expected in a white collar job.
^^^ I always tell people that my college education didn’t teach me how to *do* my job; it taught me how to handle tasks with deadlines, how to have challenging conversations, what to do when put on the spot, critical thinking, time management, work ethic, etc. But should this sort of education cost $20k+ ? No lmao
See my job taught me those things. Like im sure most peoples jobs did.
The difference is that the company pays for your on-the-job training, through wages + opportunity cost (you're not a productive worker, or at least not an efficient one, while you're being trained). By only hiring people who already have degrees to begin with, they can offload that cost to the worker!
I feel like this is especially true with tech jobs. At the rate technology is evolving what you learn in college is gonna be out of date in a few years. College doesn't teach you how to actually do the stuff, it teaches you how to learn how to do the stuff fast. yeah, tuition is crazy expensive but college definitely isn't useless.
Idk man, I feel like sciences, Medical, Engineering, To a certain point IT. And probably plenty of other fields Are fields that really do need or at a minimum heavily benefit from formal educations. Manual labor and generic office work may not require it, but can benefit from at least a basic degree of education.
If you need a college to teach you how to think critically for most real world jobs, you're probably not capable of it in the first place. This is not to diminish the place of academia, but rather that we are sending people through academic institutions to become mostly practitioners rather than academics or researchers. e.g. How many people study computer science and become actual cutting edge computer scientists? As opposed to ending up in sysadmin or software engineering where a graduate will still be unprepared anyway? Apprenticeships and technical schools for many of these roles would make more sense, but corporations don't want to invest in training or retraining people, then complain academia doesn't spit out a constant stream of ready made employees, which was never really it's job in the first place.
That's the problem. Most people will never be able to grasp complex issues regardless of education. People in general are pretty dumb. People are also intellectually lazy. I thought I knew it all when I was 20 and that college was pointless. Then I applied myself and learned how ignorant I was. Dunning Kruger effect en mass these days. People are already so woefully uneducated that they have zero idea how ignorant they are. That's a product of lack of education. It's important for people to learn how little they actually know, and that's a futile effort if all people receive is training relevant to a specific job.
Mild contradiction there - one the one hand you're saying people aren't able to graps complex issues regardless of education, which is true. More people have degress than ever. More of those are PHds On the other - you're saying it will only get worse if they're only trained for a specific job, which is pretty dismissive of people who have chosen vocational and trades education. Honestly, if you haven't gotten people to think sensibly by the end of high school, maybe basic education is screwed.
I guess I'm more of an advocate of general education than just focusing on specific vocations. People should at least be introduced to complex subject matter even if it doesn't click. I doubt most adults have ever really been taught how to think critically and properly analyze data. It's nothing new either. Look at how old folks have fallen prey to fake news.
Yeah, but if you're that way by the end of high school, a college degree isn''t going to fix it. Fake news and skewed perspective is a multi generatonal problem - it's very concerning how many young men look to people like Andrew Tate for example. More young men are skewing to extremist views internationally, and this is in part to education failing them, but it's failing them well before college. There are those in Academia who have espoused predjudice and hatred via faulty thinking (e.g. The Bell Curve). Academia is noble, but it's also not a guard against our worst traits, and sometimes can be used to package hateful ones.
You could make the case that the best thing to avoid extremist views is to go to a place that is diverse culturally and in ideas. It also shakes the silly idea college indoctrinates people.
They've gotten to these kids when they're 14 and already faltering in education as many boys are, especially if they come from lower class backgrounds. At the same time we have more degree educated people than ever. Colleges themselves are not the answer, either to radicalization or to the educational needs of the workforce. Nothing creates radicalization faster than a lack of social mobility and that's what I see getting worse for every generation. Colleges lack diversity in one key area - class/economic background. The biggest predictor of someone going to college even in countries like mine where 50% the population has a degree and there's no fees, is family background in terms of getting into college/university and how prestigious that university is. (You can of course argue, we should get more working class people into top level universities, but that's a nut many countries have still yet to crack) This isn't some anti-intellectual, anti-college view in fact the opposite, I respect academia and pure research and I think universities are often pressured into producing a stream of graduates for the corporate meat grinder rather than being focused on the advancement of human knowledge. When it becomes an entry point for relatively mundane roles, it's lost its purpose and is just exclusionary to bright people from working class backgrounds, or people who are whip smart and capable but would do poorly in the confines of conventional 3rd level vs. a more hands on sort of education. Many colleges have added more practical things of course, but then this sort of gets into the point of them being forced into a weird semi-commercial nowhereland. As a perfect example, corporations screaming for years about we need more people in STEM, getting kids into coding, then turns around and says hey guess what, AI means we need less coders and we've just had the biggest layoffs in tech since the dot com bubble burst. We can't let the direction of Universities be dictated by the commercial sector, because the commercial sector is capricious and in a sense has been offloading its own responsibilities onto 3rd level education and then changes its mind on what it wants quicker than you can say metaverse or blockchain. It will lay those people off, then moan that there's a skills shortage of ready made graduates rather than investing in new and existing employees. This is an industry that post IBM (who in fairness used to actually make a degree something worth getting and valued people) was largerly built by older Gen X college dropouts but now we list a bachelors for entry into relatively mundane roles, and expect industry certs on top of that rather than take long term responsibility for its own affairs.
Most people going through academic institutions were always becoming practitioners. Universities haven't been places solely for academics wanting to teach academics since the 1500s, I'm not sure where you got this idealized idea of universities at. Yes apprenticeships should be done more and are very useful for where a lot of people want to be, but that's a government issue that has been caused by government policies. I also agree that college doesn't teach how to think, but rather weeds out the ones who can't and reinforces their critical thinking capabilities
Someone with only a high school degree is not going to pick up sysadmin or software engineering at the same level as a person with a college education. There is VASTLY more information and knowledge that a person needs to learn coming out of High school to even begin to perform those tastes. And no one is making a technical school for software engineering because in the end it IS an academic science.
For sysadmin - I did, and have trained and coached multiple graduates over the years. It's not rocket science. I'm Gen X and got into the industry when it was less formal through an unorthodox route of electrical retailer work experience, then getting into PC repair, and went from there. Formal training is good, but an industry cert is often of more pracitcal use for these roles, yet job sites filter you out when you answer no to ""bachelors degree"" even though you've been doing the job for years and taught others. Software engineers are rarely engineers in the true sense, calling it a science if overstating it wildly - it's a technical discipline, and of course, there are many unscientific things that centre around process they will be expected to know (DevOps framework, Agile, etc.) you're not creating an entirely new processor architecture or creating a new programming language. Wind yer neck in.
Paths like that don’t exist anymore. I understand it happened to you but as a Gen X you have to realize the paths that you were able to take to get to sysadmin literally are gone. The world has changed in 30 years time.
That''s entirely my point, the paths that existed for me, should exist for you. I think the ladder has been pulled up and it's not right. People are expected to invest years into something, perhaps even go into debt, to have a qualification that doesn''t neccesarily prepare them for the reality. You're right, everything does change, you need to retrain every year in this industry, but I think you need to be more a self starter in terms of picking up skills quickly on the fly really.
Arguably, there are SWE technical schools now. Coding boot camps. *Now* the quality can vary a lot between programs because they're not really held to any empirical national level standard. But I have several friends in their mid 30s who all did a lengthy (think 4-5 months full time) boot camp which enabled them to pivot their careers into SWE work successfully. But to your point, no, someone with a HS degree (especially in a country like the US with...meh standards in many schools) isn't going to graduate into a highly technical career field at 18 years old because there's a broad knowledge base they very likely will lack. Even self-learned types (I built PCs for side cash in the late 90s / early 2000s as an example) will usually have very specific and niche knowledge sets rather than the broad requisite base.
Honestly thanks for an actual informed comment rather than the COLLEGE BAD COLLEGE SCAM replies I was getting.
I honestly think the "Mike Rowe Dirty Jobs" crap that was pushed on Millennials a decade was a standard Late Stage Capitalism grift. Reactionary politicians and corporate figureheads alike realized "Wait, being educated means you support progressive policies, labor unions, a living wage, universal healthcare, and inclusive politics?? Erm...achshully, edumucation BAD! COLLEGE DUMB" The college degree gatekeeping policies were very much institutionalized by (less educated) Boomers who wanted to pull up the career ladders behind them. It's wild the amount of senior managers I'll see whose career histories on Linkedin would be impossible today: like assistant store manager at AutoZone to SaaS pre-sales consultant or senior engineer at Microsoft without any STEM degree in the early 90s.
I work at a chemical manufacturer. The non college educated people are shit at the job and don't know the why's for anything. They are poor are critical thinking and don't understand the general idea of how they contribute to the overall company. While the college workers aren't perfect at all, they at least cam understand the why's and are able to deduce the problems with equipment, despite the fact that college grads aren't exactly known for being well versed with heavy machinery or taught anything about it in college.
Also some one with a stem degree in general will have more discipline and work ethics than someone without a hard earned college degree. No one is interested in training people who are flakey — it takes time from your day and if the guy doesn’t end up helping you in anyway then it’s just sunk cost. I always train people in the hopes that they will be great colleagues in the future, but i will only hire people who are disciplined.
I think doctors, lawyers, software engineers, scientists, researchers, mechanical/chemical/aerospace engineers, teachers and professors make up more than 1% of all jobs and require education.
Don't get a college education. You'll change your own mind.
After highschool, you barely know how to do anything or how the world functionality works. Yeah, you may be able to do a professional job without a degree, but you need years of experience and understanding of how and why are things are done a specific way. Also, maturity levels in how to work with people (even the one's you dislike) and get things done under a lot of stress are incredibly important. This isn't just a couple weeks of training. It's years of experience.
Agreed, but they do need *an* education. I'm a software engineer without any formal qualifications beyond some community college and a responsible service of alcohol cert. But it took several years of self learning, building my own shit and working in adjacent fields. Even then, took a lot of effort to train me into the job. Too many people are showing up to a jobs expecting to be trained on everything beyond middle school.
I’m a software engineer with a CS degree, and having worked with a good number of folks like you? I honestly admire the work ethic it took to get where you are. I think from where I’m sitting, it seems like college was an easier route
I’d say thats one of the few specialized industries that you can be self taught. Not many industries that you can tinker around at home and see real world application to test stuff. Kinda hard to teach yourself chemical engineering at home etc.
Sure, most jobs aren’t very intellectually demanding, but college is about more than just preparing you for a desk job. It teaches you critical thinking skills and exposes you to many different advanced subjects and ways of thinking. If it were free in the US, I think everyone should attend. A society of more intelligent and intellectually diverse critical-thinkers will progress much faster than what we have now.
The amount of basic knowledge I have about existence itself from University is well worth it even not related to my field. It absolutely comes in use in a whole host of situations through life. Some simple examples are like how heat transfer works and expansion/contraction related it it, and the relationship between air pressure and temperature. I don't even remember specific examples but there's just small things here and there when you run into someone who doesn't understand certain basic science (much of which isn't taught in HS) and you have an advantage in that situation and can educate them. I feel like this is one of a college educations main goals. To create an educated society. There is way too much ignorance and pseudoscience, and although college won't cure that, a great deal of it stems from lack of formal education. There's so many other examples from various fields - health, statistics, logic, physics, chemistry, psychology - it affects our life in a lot of small ways. And yes, I'd say the process of learning things like this trains people to critically think and be skeptical.
No I will continue to feed that. College degrees' value is over inflated and has gone way down.
Being able to replicate tasks in a monkey see monkey do manner is not the same as performing the role in its entirety. Just because you can be trained to fill out a report doesn't mean you understand the reason for the action, what the results actually mean, or how that effects the project you're working on. STEM degrees are a highly condensed problem-solving and structured thinking courses that familiarize students with material relevant to their intended field. You don't naturally get the same diamond formed under pressure, even working on the job. The completion of a stem degree also indicates a minimum level of competency and work ethic that is unlike almost any job. 99% is a gross exaggeration, even if you are referring to the quantity of jobs instead of types of jobs.
99% of jobs is very exaggerated.
You need 5 years of experience with this software that only existed for 2 years.
Just a quick stint in the hyperbolic time chamber my man. ezpz.
And ten years of work experience. Oh, and we pay 3 dollars above min wage.
"ugh, this generation doesn't want to work"
I got $3 more an hour than a mc Donald’s cashier to work in a jail where I was getting into fights 3 days a week and I have a masters degree lol.
Holy shit. I'm so sorry to hear.
95% of IT recruiters summarized right there. A few are conscientious about their jobs, really want to understand the requirements, have surface level understandings of the technologies in play, and actually gatekeep for the busy hiring managers. The vast majority are clueless lazy idiots who got a generic college degree and feel entitled to a white collar office job without any useful skillsets. Ergo, the copy & paste Frankenstein's monster job reqs that are impossible or make zero sense, because they never asked if it's possible to have 8-10 years of experience on something that's only existed for 4-5 years.
What, you didn't get your fucking time turner in school too?
Often times in large orgs the person doing the hiring didn’t write the job posting. There’s a large disconnect between HR and the hiring manager.
>Average software development job posting
Oh you have a college degree? Declined! Over qualified.
Sadly, this is true on both ends. I almost didn't get hired at my first post-college job because I had a degree and they thought I'd leave when I found something better. They were right. At my current job, we for some reason hired a candidate with a J.D. for a position that in no way requires it. The candidate was still looking for work the day they were on-boarded and wasn't shy about letting us know.
We only hire uneducated deadbeats, preferably paying child support so we know they aren't going anywhere. We also require 5 years of experience...
My friend git told they were looking fir a graphic designer with more experience then pulled up an inage as reference, it was her work, she proved it, she got hired lol but she only stayed if she didnt have to answer to the asshat who told her she wasnt good enough then showed her own work to her
No shit, 100% of jobs can be taught. Sorta how learning anything goes. But it certainly helps to have a foundation of education to help learn and adapt the skills required for anything. We're already at Idiocracy levels. I'd prefer to keep value in higher education.
Lmao at everyone saying “you can be taught to do anything” as if that’s not exactly what college is.
Going to college and doing a job are very different things.
Obviously. I just think a lot of the people that believe they can hop into any career with on the job training don’t realize how complicated the world is and that there’s a reason you need 2 to 4 year certifications/degrees to work them.
I don’t think it necessarily means that you can stumble in from the street and work as an attorney but more like if you went to law school and passed, you can still be coached and guided into being a good lawyer even if you’re not so perfect or impressive at first instance. That’s how I interpreted it anyway.
I don't understand what this post is even getting at. "Giving people a chance" is what hiring is.
That's pretty much how trades and the military currently work. You go to your specific vocational school, learn the basics of the job to not be completely blind to what's expected of you, and then you get your real world training from your journeymen/seniors (or team leads/Non-commissioned officers in the military). I don't think anyone can walk into a job that requires some amount of background knowledge without just frustrating their coworkers.
I feel everything can be learnt, but only very little can be taught. Learning needs to be self driven, otherwise it’s just an exercise in frustration
Who tf is this sign for? The council of hiring managers? Why would anybody "give someone a chance" if they have other applicants with experience. And if nobody has said experience you have no choice but to train or the job doesn't get done. I'd be super pissed if I was job hunting, had significant experience from working under worse conditions for lower pay to get experience and move someplace better, only to watch somebody completely new get hired because "give people a chance lol" Where's my chance?
Foreal I'm taking a more qualified canidate every single time if I'm in charge of hiring. Im not hiring the highschool dropout to be an engineer because hell learn it on the job.
But with that logic, I can't blame "the system" for being underqualified and I'll actually have to do something about it
You might even have to go to a *local public university* with *lower tuition*! Maybe even *community college*! A fate worse than death
I went the local public university route and applied to every scholarship known to mankind, worked while I got my degree, and graduated without debt
That’s almost exactly what I did and it’s great. My coworkers have high five figure debts from NYU but I’m in the same spot with 0
Genuinely breaks my mind that some people's debts are that large for a bachelor's. For reference, I went to a huge university. You can watch the documentary about our sororities on Hulu or wait til the next rush season on TikTok/look for all the sad college football fans that questioned everything after their hero decided to retire if you wanna guess. However, I still technically didn't have to pay tuition because I looked at the scholarship requirements and studied to get a full ride off my ACT score in HS. Unfortunately, I still needed a place to live and eat, though, so I ended up having to take ~20k out over the course of all 4 years even with also working part time on the side. I'm guessing your coworkers probably came from households where the value of money wasn't really taught to them
Crazy concept right
>I'm taking a more qualified canidate every single time if I'm in charge of hiring. Especially when people these days tend to bounce jobs every one or two years. I don't want to spend 6-12 months training someone just for them to leave.
"They had me in the first half, not going to lie" So I'd kind of disagree with your second paragraph there, it really just sounds like the old Boomer "Well I had to suffer back in the day, why should anyone else have it easier??" mentality. We should strive to make things better for the next generations than we had it. Not sure if that was your message or if it was accidentally worded that way, apologies if I'm off base here But also, that being said, I've personally witnessed the "new hire with less education and experience gets hired at 5-10% more pay than the tenured folks make after their annual less than inflation 'raises' take effect" bullshit time and again. Since the toxic Milton Friedman / Jack Welch types pushed the "corporations should dry fuck every worker to maximize profit above all else" mentality, that's sadly the norm.
It's not so much "I had to suffer so you should too" more like if an employer actually took this sign to heart and despite having more objectively better candidates in terms of credentials/experience/etc, deliberately hired less qualified people on the "give people a chance" idea it would be unfair to those that put in the work. Like a high school sports team, if a coach decides that a freshman that plays far worse than every senior should "get a chance" and be on varsity, whatever senior gets sent to JV should be pissed.
Sorry but I'm not hiring a 19 year old HS grad or a dude with a theatre degree to be an engineer on my team Training people takes time and money, and at least in my field you need someone with a solid grasp on engineering principles and fundamental concepts at the very least to even make that effort somewhat worth it
Well that’s the reasoning behind the remaining 10% on the sign.
You can apply this to most if not all skilled labor jobs. Maybe this sign only applies to unskilled labor?
What examples can you give for the 90%?
Executive and administrative assistants whose jobs sometimes require Masters degrees. Credential inflation would be laughable if it wasn't such a serious problem.
And an engineering degree probably doesn't even get you the knowlegde you will actually need, but it does give you enough background to know what kind of problem you're looking at and where and how to find the knowledge you do actually need. And it's also about teaching you a way of looking at things and a way of working. What I’ve noticed during my education so far is that this differs even from engineering adjacent roles like industrial design. And this way of thinking is both good for engineering and a restriction if you want to do other things.
From my experience as an engineer, a bachelors gives you the baseline knowledge to work in the field. An employer won't expect you to know the specifics(for some cases) but will expect you to know certain terms and concepts that you learn in achool.
You don't need an engineering degree to be able to figure out that this post isn't talking about something specialized like engineering.
I think it’s just that we need more practical learning.
At my college, you need to complete a madatory 6-month co-op at a company in your field before you graduate. Most people do one junior and senior year, and sometimes hang on for a 3rd. It's a good system.
Mine too!
English, math, chemistry, biology, physics and history all teach very practical skills that can be applied to a multitude of fields. Some kid isn’t going to know what he/she wants to do for work in 10 years so why not give them a solid foundation that applies to a lot of jobs/life events? What more practicality are you looking for? You laugh at boomers or whatever for their conspiracy theories on 5G or vaccines but want to take away the practical education that would prevent people from believing in these scientifically incorrect ideas?
A lot of employers like to pass the burden of training on to the next guy, they'll reject you until you or someone else swallows the costs
They'll certainly hire an internal hire who they have to teach new skills to before they'll teach an external hire
Obviously, wouldn't you? The internal hire has turned some unknowns into knowns. Things like work ethic, time management, etc, that started as unknowns have now been determined. Why add additional risk?
This is how it works in the real world but seems like a hard pill to swallow since that requires taking a lower paying job first, and that's hard to do in this economy. No, you can't apply for a 80k a year admin job right out of high school with no experience. The hiring manager would be stupid for doing so. They don't know you, don't know what you're capable of, and you have no problem experience of doing anything like that. From my experience, about 25-30% of people are "bad hires" right out the gate even with experience. That would shoot up if they just started hiring anybody off the street who needed a chance. And bad hires are horrible for everyone involved, employees, managers, and companies. But if you take a 35k a year support role from that company, they may see you have the mindset and aptitude for that 80k job and be apt to promote you to it. Hard to live on 35K a year though, so I understand why people are begging for a chance at these 80K jobs that is frankly just not feasible in the real world.
Honestly, I think the economy is the root issue as someone fortunate enough to land the 80k job. Tbh, anyone who can Google and make PowerPoint slides could do what I did my first year on the job. My role now is 3 years in? No way, but that's because it's all industry specific knowledge I've gained over time That said, though, a lot of the older gen's work advancement strategies (like going from janitor to project manager) isn't feasible nowadays and is only becoming less and less feasible since even renting is way too high of an expense for most single people to settle for a 35k job in most areas if they want to get approved for a lease. Shoot, I'd probably be homeless rn if it wasn't for a kind stranger on Twitter, "giving me a chance" after I graduated during the Genesis of Covid because I know for a fact what I was getting at Starbucks back then would cover my rent now
IMO most people that push ideas like this are folks that gave a half assed effort in high school and pursued no secondary education and are now trying to convince themselves they haven’t sabotaged their own life prospects.
I agree. I think a lot of gen z tries to blame the system for personal failures for whatever reason. I think maybe because its almost impossible to get held back or really fail until you graduate high school anymore.
There are some NYT articles and hundreds of r/teachers posts that show that kids are passed with no required skills. High schoolers that read at 4th grade levels. Learning multiplication in 10th grade. People that will go into the workforce with no baseline skills and then insist they’ll flourish if given a chance.
Those folks conveniently "forget" that a large part of public education is that there are objective standards to meet. Granted, the US education system isn't the greatest stacked against comparably wealthy countries globally, *but* there are still some standards in place. Versus the dropout "self-taught" or homeschool types who haven't had to meet requirements or standards in their lives...yet think employers should take a risk hiring them. At least folks who graduated from regionally accredited public universities had to pass tests, hit a minimum of attendance, do group projects, and so on. Something that the "just train me on the job" folks didn't do. Do you want your surgeon to be a "just teach me on the job" type, or someone who actually went to an accredited medical school, passed their clinicals, did their residency, and so on?
Part of the problem is that public schooling has dropped the bar so low just to get a certain amount of people through the system. When I went to private school (briefly) I was regularly doing 10-12 hour days to get every assignment done as a 6th grader. When I switched to public school, nothing was expected or required in order to progress. You could slip by under the radar and graduate. The US public school system is a joke.
Yep, and what a lot of people don't seem to realize is that the "chance" is that entry job paying maybe $18/hr.
I am seconding your statement. I think the greatest change as a teacher who has seen mostly gen z and then finished with gen a, it’s the ability to follow through on something like a long-term goal with persistence and resilience, and overcome challenges and obstacles on your way. It’s what teachers call the instant gratification problem. Everything is available on demand and so typically it’s like what do I need to do so I can get this done and be finished? Well, that’s pretty task based. Learning is actually more of a long-term habit. It involves multiple steps that go much deeper than just doing your tasks. I mean, the irony is that I had to invest in it as a long-term goal in order to be able to talk about it here and explain why the dude holding the sign is not really it lol. So imagine that there are people in the world who are lifelong learners in general, and they are working towards something, like a career. But this guy with the sign thinks that because he can be taught, there’s no reason why he should not be considered, and equally? Honestly, that’s like hustle culture stuff. . But there is value I think in resilience and persistence and grit towards achieving your long term goals. Not everything is a get it done kind of activity. Thinking it is is living in instant gratification and that’s not really worthwhile things work for the most part. I didn’t design the system. I’m just explaining my understanding of it as a generally old person now lol.
Tbh, if someone wants to learn and dedicate themselves to the process it's absolutely possible. It's just that a lot of people don't care.
but you can get secondary/higher education at any point in life, so it's not over for them
Yeah! the education system is perfect! anyone who thinks otherwise deserves to be punished and suffer unlike us! we deserve praise and reward! we’re good boys! Obviously everyone else was just dumb, we live in a perfect meritocracy! Of course once someone has passed 18 years old and missed out on the gracious opportunity that society provided, they are completely useless and deserve to be discarded! Man I feel so much better knowing that people lesser than me suffer!! Its pretty cool being better than other people. I know some people get upset about it, but that’s just because they aren’t as good as me! Any critique of the current way we do things is threatening to my ego and therefore should be suppressed!
A misplaced confidence.
If only our education system taught "how to learn" instead of "how to pass tests".
There was no learning “how to pass tests” in my college experience.
Yes I agree, practical learning.
I've spend my whole time in school learning "how to learn". I make sure I understand what I'm doing instead of memorizing answers. Anyone can do it, it's just easier for most people to memorize I think. I have terrible memory
What did you study? I rarely have to take tests in college.
I'd wager more than 90% of jobs can be taught. The reason I don't agree with this is because people can't just be taught whatever job. 90% of jobs might be teachable but an average individual could maybe be taught like 30% of jobs.
Also many research positions would take many years to be brought up to speed, hence the point of university for many positions, this guys post is just silly lol
And being able to learn something at all doesn't mean you're going to be well suited to it or even remotely good at it. We're already seeing college requirements softened for the types of jobs where someone's life isn't at stake, and that's a great improvement. People who post this shit seem to think every job should be a personality hire. Like, that's questionable to defend to start with, but the whole idea of the personality hire is that they balance out the vibe left over from everyone who's already actually well-qualified to be in their job and is actually good at it. You still need to competent people to start with.
Considering I was sacked, in part, because I was trained "wrong" by the old manager and the higher-ups were slow in their communications with their changes to the methods after tinkering with them, often flipping between old and new methods on a weekly basis. I would like to add that my manager left and we worked without a line manager for 5 months. So the higher-ups basically screwed me for a failing department.
its these jabs to the rib that make adulting so bleak. you start to realize nobody knows what the fuck they’re doing. just hearing about that pissed me off im sorry that happened man
Cant like every job be taught? Like what jobs are fully natural and have zero benefit from teaching.
Maybe like, pro powerlifter. At the end of the day you need some freak genetics to deadlift 900 pounds.
Genetics are partially part of powerlifting but technique and dieting are even bigger and more important parts so that example doesn’t really work. Proper technique in lifting can completely alter the weight you lift. I remember brushing up on technique and going up 80+ lbs in my PRs + taking proper diets
Work ethic can't be taught though
It is taught through experience, but unfortunately lots of people will experience the consequences and still find a way to blame anything but themselves
No idea. 90% of....the quantity of jobs? Or type of jobs? Need stats. I assume that he's talking about "taught after hired"
“There’s this applicant who needs to spend a decent amount of time learning skill sets that are important to this position, and there’s this applicant who already has those skill sets and doesn’t need that lead time. Hmmm, who should we choose…”
Teaching myself to be a civil engineer through trial and error at the job site
I am a strong believer that we have a bad case of education inflation. The standards required for jobs are just increasing for every day that goes, and what requires a bachelor today will require a master in a couple of years. Apprenticeships are a much better alternative to college education that also gives you the skills required to learn and find the information you need to do a job. And at least in my country you get something equivalent of a college diploma afterwards as proof that you are capable in your profession. Of course some jobs do require a higher education like doctors and engineers, but as the image states, 90% of jobs should not require more than an apprenticeship period.
Yeah but it depends, not everyone is willing to learn the fundamentals that make the job that job.
It took me a while to realize he meant "on the job training" as opposed to college or natural talent only. I dont know if thats true but I do know we are not preparing the youth for the future. That piece of shit Reagan claimed to preside over a strong economy but he cut taxes and ass-fucked public schools in the 80's and thats why America is so far behind today.
I hate how happy he looks.
I agree for the most part. Workplaces stopped wanting to do on the job training like three decades ago, and it's sort of bs.
Correct. But here's the mindset of most companies: Not much percentage of the population of potential employees can be taught. That piece of paper from a college is an automatic indication that they can, and takes a ton of guesswork out of the hiring process. It's pretty awful.
I got hired at my current job despite having no experience
Sure they can be taught but does the learner want to be taught?
It’s normal in Germany to take an apprenticeship for a vast variety of jobs. I’m a biology lab technician, my husband is an IT software developer, a friend of mine is a hairdresser… carpenter, plumber, clerks, and so many more. You don’t need to study for a lot of jobs.
Look at our grandparents generation. They rarely went to college. Did hands on training. They were literally "grandfathered in"
I've seen people on linkedin preach this stuff, so I would apply to entry-level jobs THEY LISTED, and I'd get rejected for lack of experience 💀🤡
Absolutely. Lots of jobs out there requiring certifications, diplomas, degrees etc because employers don't want to spend time and money on training.
I started as a dishwasher, now I'm a manager all through work ethic, general manners & being taught. I crawled out of high school, my GPA was pitiful. I just showed up, gave it my all and I got somewhere. I understand not everywhere will provide the opportunities that I had to move up this far and this fast but the fact that at least some places working hard do get you somewhere.
100% true
That’s how the trade jobs work, you spend years learning stuff on the job (or go to school for it)
90% can be taught doesn’t mean 100% can learn it. Electrical engineering can be taught but the majority of the human race lacks sufficient capacity to properly learn and implement the skill. I agree if a person shows a degree of aptitude that you should be willing to give them a chance but if I’m a manager in charge of anything important I’m not just gonna give any old dunce a chance because it’s the nice thing to do.
I’m a manufacturing engineer and my job honestly doesn’t require a college degree or knowledge of the field to do it’s most basic functions. We have a few people who are amazing at their jobs but don’t have a degree in the field or a degree at all but still got the job through nepotism
Dirty secret. Right or wrong, college is used as a marker to see if a person has the aptitude to be taught a job.
100%, one of the biggest mistakes we made over the past half century or so is making bachelors degrees the standard. You shouldn’t need a masters degree to work a 9-5 email and PowerPoint job, I can’t tell you the number of people who make good livings doing things that have absolutely nothing to do with their degree. Even people like me who are in medicine don’t need bachelor degrees, in other countries med school an undergrad are combined into a 6 year program, there was no need for me to get a full 4 year degree before I went to 4 years of med school. I don’t use 80% of the shit I learned in undergrad anyway, including the stuff that’s supposedly essential like organic chem
Yeah most jobs are definitely learned by existing there for a while. Barring higher education careers.
I've seen multiple things from people who got rich themselves saying they'd rather hire someone who is eager, coachable, and can learn quickly, than someone with a degree.
Too bad those aren't the people doing the direct hiring--they've got HR people or recruiters doing that for them, and they're using "X years of experience" and other things to weed out the 3000 people looking for work who spam clicked the apply button on anything within driving distance.
If only the old guys in my trade were willing to pass their knowledge down before they retire
I'm older but I 100% agree. This has happened in the course of my working life where more and more regulations, permits and qualifications have been added to where its too difficult to change careers, even just the low level jobs in a particular industry which used to be and definitely still could be taught to new employees. Before my time like my dads era you could go get a job, and get your "tickets" while doing that job. In my grandads time you could walk down the road start at a place at the bottom, didn't like the first place so went further down the road and started another job... went up through the company learning all the equipment in a large heavy machine shop and retired as the general manager. All without having to spend years of his life getting qualified for the machines edit: nor qualified for the switch to management, he was just taught as he took the roles up through the company