I just enrolled for my final semester of college...
- Thread starter Clockwork
- Start date
Clockwork
Well-known member
Probably not. At least not unless I leave my current company or jump into an entirely different department. I've been there 18 years and some of my coworkers in the same role have their juris doctorate.
Ah okay. I had a co-worker where the lack of Bachelors was sorta holding him back from going into management. As soon as he got it he was promoted and got around a 10k a year salary improvement. Honestly I thought most of that was optics, having folk with degrees work under someone with no degree at all was not a good look.
SubCog
Radeon 8500 64mb
imo, the big differentiator between someone with a degree, is not that they're necessarily smarter, but that they've proven they can persevere and push through exhausting challenges to accomplish a goal.
For me, most of college was really fun. I enjoyed attending classes, participating in discussions, and even doing the reading & assignments. The challenge really happens in mid-terms & finals, where you have 5 research papers all due in the same week. There comes a point where you're just exhausted and it's not fun anymore, and many people can't hack it. Finishing college proves that you can punch through to the goal, even when the work is no longer fun. That's an important skill in a professional workplace.
Not saying that college is the only place to get that kind of experience. I expect that military service will do that too.
Oh yeah, and then there's technical fields where it just really helps to have gone to school for that thing. I like to hire devs who have software engineering degrees, designers out of design school, etc. Duh. Because there are some fields where that specialized knowledge is important.
I totally get it SubCog but me and this co-worker had already worked at the company a number of years which sounds like Clock's situation. He was already a team lead for 2 years and I think it was his boss that pushed him to finish out the degree. Guy was talented and folk could see that but without a degree it was a hinderance. I lost track of him soon afterwards, his promotion was to a totally different product line and well being a manager is busy. I would bump into him sometimes on campus but that product line got consolidated to another location and that was the last I saw of him.
SubCog
Radeon 8500 64mb
True. I guess I'm just opining on a tangential topic... sometimes you'll hear discussion about whether college graduates are actually better performers than non-college graduates... and it's a funny event when you have somebody already employed in a particular role but is blocked because they don't have a degree, but suddenly can get promotions after they earn a degree. They're still the same person, and crossing that finish-line doesn't suddenly make them a better person. So yeah, alot of the difference is superficial and dumb. I'm just trying to tease out where there's actually a difference that justifies the way we treat people.
btw, my dad went through this in his career. His career had stalled out without a degree, so he went to night school to earn a bachelors in business administration. I think I was 15 when he graduated, so he was prolly ~45. That unblocked his career, he started getting promotions, and became a manager, then later a director. But I don't think he ever used any of his degree in his work. It really was just a superficial certification that signaled that the's the kind of person who can be promoted.
So yeah, ideally you'd finish school in your early 20s. I went back to school later, and finished my masters at 29. But there's clearly value in people finishing degrees later in life. Heck, my mom went back to school in her 50s, got her masters & teaching credential at 55, and then worked as a teacher for a decade before retiring.
Geez, that's alot of random rambling from SubCog.
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