What proof is a degree when you have life experience and other skills ?

[mummydear]

Just a thought, I do not have a degree but sat a few exams in my last career, got promoted and did some fantstic courses that gave me other skills within my workplace.

Now that I am 40 and have worked since I was 18 and have 'life experince' and a good school education , if I want to go on and change my career , for example teacher training , I have to have a degree before I could start the teacher training. But the degree could bear no reemblence to primary school teaching .

Why is a degree so important when you may have done it 20 years ago ,and have many other skills.
Different if it is directly related to your job .

but graduates not being able to find graduate-style jobs is a slightly different problem isn't it? It's not that secretaries need degrees, more that some graduates can't find any other job (and secretaries are a well-paid, if dying, breed).

Lots of people are doing degrees that don't actually have very good career prospects, ignoring subjects like engineering which are perhaps less groovy but can lead to very well-paid careers with a huge range of opportunities.

Haven't read all the thread but I went to school in Ireland and my primary school had 2 teachers one of whom did NOT have a degree. Apparently it used to happen there. She did some sort of training via correspondence course but not a formal degree course.

Anyway two of my siblings are teachers having gone down the traditional route (in Ireland you attend a teacher training college as soon as you leave school and spend 3 years studying for a B ED) and did their teaching practice at my primary school. My sister maintains that to this day she has never met a better teacher than my old (unqualified )one. My sister has been teaching for over 20yrs. Apparently she was years ahead of her time and had a natural flare. My brother shared this view.

I have to say she was light years ahead of the one with a Degree from a child perspective.

Thought I would share that with you.

why do you need a degree to be telesales though? that one always confused me

I also think that lots of employers do not take much account of a degree taken 20yrs ago and are much more concerned with relevant experience. I think you could change career but there will be some not open to you cos that's just the way it is. I have a sister who still goes on about being a graduate as if it is important when at her stage in life a good reference and good examples of work based competencies are what will get her the next job. She is caught is a time warp I think.

I guess with external (job-based) exams, it depends on how well regulated they are. Universities have to jump through endless hoops to have their course content validated, and all degree material (course and exams) validated by external examiners from other institutions. That's why it's more of a standard, recognised qualification.

I am planning on going into teaching. I already have 8 standard grades, 5 highers (Scotland) an HND and loads of experience working with children but still have to do a full degree and post grad course to become a teacher. I have just started a BA(hons) in Child and Youth studies and most graduates of this go on to youth work, social work or teaching. I am doing this all online through the UHI and I can also do the post grad part online and part local placements which is ideal for me as I have a 3 year old and a 21 month old. The post grad is so competitive though so I will have to do something like unpaid work at the local school to show my commitment and gain more relevant experience. I think a degree show a willingness to learn, commitment and self discipline which are things employers are looking for.

when i was young, you only needed a degree if you wanted to go into a profession, i seem to work with loads of people who have degrees that are completely irrelevant to the work they end up doing. and some of the jobs they feel are beneath them as graduates.

When I recruit, in my field I find degrees completely worthless. I need people with actual hands-on & corporate skills rather than 4 years of essay writing, theory and advanced drinking.

That just happens to be my line of work though, it doesn't translate too well to the classroom.

Despite that, I'm still doing an OU because I think degrees are worthwhile. I will be very proud when I get mine.

And mummydear - if you are trying to get a visa for overseas work your work experience also counts if you don't have a degree. Normally 10 years experience equals one degree. This may not help but at least you know you've got recognition somewhere.

what field are you in arfishymeau?

Ok , lets throw another question in -

Xena says that 50 % of people are getting degrees, no doubt some are vocational. Getting degrees is on the increase with so many different and diverse subjects , but perhaps moving away from the more traditional subjects.

How is this going to affect the work force say in 20 yrs time, perhaps when my children leave UNI... will we be going a step further and more peole will be doing post graduate work , or will degree become so common that it will be replaced by something else ?

At the moment lots of graduates who are unemployable and can't think of anything better to do do a post graduate degree. Of course some do it because they love it and want to lecture etc but often it's because they can't get a job and it fills in time.

There are teachers in the UK private sector who don't have teacher training qualifications, some just with a degree and others have the old 2 year Cert. Ed (as my mother had), some of them taught my children and are brilliant but state schools require a degree and PGCE in most cases.

Amusingly a mother at home could start an agency supplying supply teachers without a degree and could probably earn a lot more than most teachers by doing it.

In terms of jobs anyone can set up a business today without any qualifications so loads of things you don't need a single GCSE. I know one lady who set up employment agencies from nothing and made a fortune, left school at 16 etc etc Do you need a degree to become an MP? Probably not. A vicar? No. So I suppose it just depends what career you pick.

vicars need to do at least 2 years' study of theology don't they?

of course anyone can start their own business if they've got the right skills, but if you're asking someone to employ you, you have to have some kind of independent proof of what you can do.

Mummydear, people are already trying to put themselves above the 'average' graduate by doing postgraduate studies, even while working.

I did a Masters over 2 years while working as a solicitor (as did several of my colleagues) and a few of my client contacts at the time were studying for MBAs, paid for by their employers.

CM - I'm in telecomms, but the IT side. It's quite a niche where you have to understand telecomms - v.engineering but also do IT - unix, linux etc.

A graduate who can talk to me about erlangs in a given situation might be well educated, but is still no use to me when I tell him to improve performance on a network on the basis of his erlang calculation.

NB. Just for the neeks (and men, who are lurking) erlangs are a measure of measurement of traffic density in a telephone network. It's useful say in situations where you might expect the phone network to be swamped - such as on BB voting nights.

.

what's a 'neek'??

am I being a bit naive? I though IT graduates would have learned how to solve problems like that (practical-type ones).

Am a bit distressed that they can't tbh (do they just sit in libraries writing essays about networks? ).

I think it's the same as a geek

A nerdy geek?

Mummydear raises a good point, and I think it goes even further than that. The educated (as opposed to skilled) competitors for our kids is increasing rapidly. Not just home produced graduates, but the global pool is vastly greater.

The Daily Mail et al may like to pretend that we can keep them out, but that means they are going to be competing against the UK, not for it.

India produces more useful graduates than the whole of Europe already. Whereas "universities" like Reading are giving up physics to concentrate on it's core competencies like folk singing and crochet.

mummydear - it's not at all uncommon to see jobs advertised expressing a preference for post graduate degrees. imho they're the new degrees. The main thing required in my job is the ability to think, analyse and write. At one time, and perhaps still with certain universities, a degree would be evidence of this. However I am constantly stunned by people with degrees who can't string a decent sentence together. And if they can't marshall their thoughts into a coherent sentence then I think that 9/10 their thoughts are not worth sharing. DC - dh has worked in the city for about 8 years and in that time he's recruited 1 or 2 Brits. There are people from all over the world who, frankly, piss on our graduates.

I think there's already a two (or more) tier system in higher education. When my dh recruits (engineering) he often screens based on which university the applicant studied at and the name of the degree. It sounds wrong, but having interviewed people who have very little understanding of what should be pretty basic engineering principles, he finds it does save some time.

becky - i know what you mean by it sounding wrong, but when you have a system that tries to make 50 per cent of us(or however many) look the same on paper, people who recruit simply have to find ways of distinguishing them. If they interviewed everyone people would spend more time recruiting than getting on with their jobs...

CM - I find that they have no practical experience at all. I would take somebody with a years experience over somebody with a degree and no experience.

In fairness though, a lot of telco equipment is very specialised and so everybody has to be trained again regardless of their education.

Some IT fields of course, such as programming, are great for degrees & the knowledge can be applied straight away in real-life.

thewomanwhothoughtshewasahat is absolutely right.
MSc's are increasingly asked for, indeed we don't deal at all with people who only have undgrad degrees.
The record (so far) is a client who treated "associate professor" as a type of qualification they could ask for.
Wish I could aregue about the low quality of Brit graduates. The artsgrads who run the system have dumbed the system down so far that banks openly ask for foreign grads.

The Blairite model for university education focuses upon quantity, not quality. Sadly there is simply no market for a lot of the output.

I was lunching with the editor of a successful magazine last week, and she commented upon the horde of Media Studies grads, and the catastrophic effect it had on mid level salaries in the media.
We spent a little time working out uses for them.
It's a bizarre effect that a MS grad is much much cheaper than a call centre worker in India.

hmmm every time I hear about someone wanting to do media studies I want to shake them (hard) by teh shoulders and tell them to do history, politics, English, foreign languages - virtually anything but media studies...

What do they do in Media Studies when they study the media ?