(This article was originally published at Musing About Tech, which I’m closing down.)
Introduction
When I was 16 or thereabouts (around 1989 or 1990), and having grown up in a small country town, I innocently wrote to IBM Australia and asked for career guidance. Specifically, I asked: would I really have to get a university degree before they’d consider employing me?
On reflection, I’m grateful they replied that I would indeed need to get a degree because I subsequently read IBM and the Holocaust when it first came out and made IBM the inaugural member of a small but select list of Companies I Would Never Work For.
Whether or not you need a degree to make it in IT is a contentious issue that regularly resurfaces, and I think longer-term members of the industry need to be more vocal with our thoughts on it.
I personally think degrees are nowhere near as essential in IT as some make them out to be. So I want to step through the arguments for and against.
Why they say you should have a degree to work in IT
Boiling everything down, I believe there are 8 fundamental arguments behind the “why you should have a degree to work in IT” viewpoint. The first half are what people and businesses tend to say. The second half are what we’d collectively call the “inner voice” reasons.
The Published Reasons
A degree can provide you thinking tools
While it’s not a guaranteed outcome from earning a degree, one thing that universities and other places of higher education try to train people in is thinking. Or perhaps, more correctly, thinking about thinking. How do you approach learning, and how do you approach unlearning things you may currently think, but be incorrect about?
A degree can’t teach you everything you need for your career, but it can help train you to keep learning, analysing and processing information you come across to progress your career.
Such techniques aren’t exclusive to higher education. Also, the fact that some people who have degrees fall into crazy conspiracy theories like the Q-rubbish shows a degree isn’t impermeable protection against poor analytical skills.
A degree shows you have discipline
This argument reminds me of the one regarding home loans. Banks not only look at a deposit as a way of you having skin in the game at the start of the process, but they also claim that saving up for that deposit demonstrates that you have discipline with money. On that front, I call rubbish: if that were the case, people who are gifted a deposit from their parents shouldn’t be given a loan as they haven’t shown discipline. (Equally, people who haven’t missed a rent payment in 10 years shouldn’t need a deposit.)
I personally believe the same holds true with degrees in IT. A degree is not some iron-clad proof of self-discipline. There is more to a degree than just setting aside large blocks of time and working hard. Luck, knowledge, natural talent and a host of other attributes – as well as a broad spectrum of personal circumstances go into whether or not you get a degree.
We want the smartest people
IT departments and technology companies always look for smart people. In an industry built around knowledge and continuous advancement of tech, you need to have smart people working for you. So, one way some businesses will try to measure smartness of applicants is whether they have a tertiary education.
The ironic thing about this is that you’ll see we want the smartest people creeping in as a rationale for degrees even in companies that were started by University drop-outs.
There is another class of person who’ll make this argument: the education snob. People who measure their worth or order in the pecking chain by what their level of tertiary education is (rarely ‘just’ an undergraduate), what university they attended, and even what subjects they took or marks they got. (It’s worth noting that education snobs aren’t going to change their views unless they develop an appropriate level of self-reflection.)
The complexity of this position demands a degree
This can be a tricky one. There may be some areas where a degree gives you a leg up. May. But that leg-up could also come from an affinity towards certain skill-sets. For example: if you’re a developer who primarily works on advanced data structures – trying to produce something that performs better than red-black binary trees or is more robust than Merkle trees, do you need to have studied advanced algorithms in a bachelor of computer or data science, or do you just need an affinity for data structures and maths, and a willingness to learn?
The Inner-Voice Reasons
I had to/you should have to, as well
Has anyone in a pool ever shouted to you, “Come on in, the water’s fine!”? Sometimes they’re telling the truth, and sometimes when you leap in the water is freezing, but they figured since they’ve had to do it, so should you.
A lot of humans seem to resent someone having a different path, or one they perceive as easier than they walked. While I don’t share that perspective, I see people in positions of influence and power practice it regularly.
It’s always been done this way
The enemy of change is it’s always been done this way. That attitude has plagued humanity for hundreds – if not thousands of years.
Once routines are established, breaking them can be challenging. Older businesses may have been advertising for decades that a degree is required, and they’ll keep doing so, regardless of what individuals or teams within the company might think until some revolutionary intervention happens within their hierarchy.
Someone mandated it
Years ago, I had a customer who kept on moving stale, archived home directory data from one fileserver to another, through multiple storage platform refreshes. Why? Because no storage manager would put their name to the instruction to delete the data. Someone who had come before them had required an archive of the data kept, and even though no reasons were ever recorded for the order, none of their successors had been willing to undo it.
It’s a variation of the “it’s always been done this way” issue, but it’s indicative of some challenges we run into: people know it’s probably not needed, but following a rule set ages ago has less resistance than fighting for change.
Recruitment is blind
When I was a people manager in the early 00s, for every technical job I advertised, I received at least 150 applications. Sometimes a lot more. My personal ethics meant that every single one of those people got a response, no matter how poorly their application was written. (A fact I reflected upon quite a lot the next time I was looking for a job and it felt at times that my applications were just falling into a black hole.)
Regardless of whether a company uses recruiters or its own staff to manage the process of finding a short-list of people to be interviewed, those people get inundated with applications. Eventually, the people processing those applications start blindly reviewing applications and merely act as gatekeepers. If anything, this process is now getting more challenging, as relatively inflexible software is making inroads into recruitment systems, allowing a more forceful matching of keywords to applicant CVs. (As you might expect, this has led to people finding ways of embedding likely keywords into their CVs as invisible text to help them make it through a gatekeeping process.)
Why they say you don’t need a degree to work in IT
A degree is not a guarantee of success
“All knowledge, no sense” is how you may sometimes hear people described. Just because someone has tertiary qualifications doesn’t guarantee they’re going to succeed in a job – and it’s probably fair to say that many of us have met well-educated people who are somewhat or even completely unsuitable for the role they’re in.
On the flip-side, I’ve worked with some exceptionally talented people in my career who haven’t had degrees. Some of those people ‘grew up’ in the IT industry – starting before a particular field required a degree, building up seniority and expertise. Others just managed to convince someone to read their CV and interview them even though the application criteria said, tertiary qualification required. In fact, back when I was a people manager, I hired both of those types of people, and they were decisions I’ve always been proud of.
Accepting alternate degrees
Some jobs will advertise a specific degree for the criteria. For example, “Required: Bachelor of Computer or Information Science”. That’s reasonably specific at least. Others will append preferred to that criteria. But just as often in a job advertisement, you’ll see “Tertiary qualifications preferred” or “Tertiary qualifications required”.
So this creates a prickly problem: if the job application asks for a computer or information science degree, but someone gets into it with a bachelor of arts and solid industry experience, doesn’t that mean the experience is just as valuable as the degree?
The degree or lack thereof may change some paths
While people who have degrees might land a graduate position in their preferred area of expertise, there are a lot of people who work in areas sometimes considered “less skilled” who don’t have degrees. Help-desk staff are a classic example of this. (Mind you, I’d argue that good help-desk staff are highly skilled, just in different areas of focus.)
The rationale here is that work environments and teams can be richer by having a diversity of talent and background. A professional services engineer with a degree might have started as a graduate engineer, then risen through the ranks of engineer, senior engineer and so on. A co-worker on the other hand might have started as a level-1 help-desk worker, then moved to back-end support, then to datacenter operations, before moving into a professional services engineer role via a sideways transfer in the business.
We should accept that career paths don’t have to be linear – that they can jump around as people progress through different branches but still end up in the same role.
This is important, because it also lets us set boundaries that help the business. If you throw away the “tertiary education required” criteria, you’re not obligated to consider someone who has just finished secondary education for a principal engineer role. Rather, throwing away the degree requirement allows you to actually evaluate the real skills you need in a role. The benefit of that should be obvious: you’ll get smarter people.
Degrees and competency aren’t the same
If you think back to the introduction, my point of writing to IBM at the time was I was just keen to get into the industry. Even at a young age, I was an über-techo. I was writing a tape-based database on a Vic-20, and writing reasonably complex Pascal programs on a Commodore-64 for instance. I was champing at the bit to get into the industry and start working, and if I could do that without putting my parents through the financial challenges of supporting me through University, I’d do it.
My bachelor of computer science is a stamp on my CV, and I’ve not been asked to show a copy of my testamur in probably 15 years. Even when having a degree has been a requirement, I’ve not been asked to submit the actual evidence. While I majored in computer science, every elective I did at University was in philosophy, and I’d argue that my philosophy education has played a bigger part in my career than my computer science education. My degree was a foot in the door. And while I’m not saying everyone would give the same description, a lot of people will.
Sometimes you’ll hear stories of companies seeking programmers with 10 years experience in a programming language that’s only existed for 5 years. In such cases, people have mistaken years of experience with competency.
Likewise, a degree doesn’t guarantee competency. If you want to measure competency, make sure the people who would be co-workers of someone you’re going to hire get involved in the review panel for applicants. There are more qualitative ways of measuring someone’s likely competency – and perhaps more important: speed to competency, than a degree.
So what is the solution?
For those of us in IT already
If you’re already working in IT, you have to ask yourself: do you think people should have a degree in order to work in IT?
If you think people do need a degree, I’d invite you to seriously ask yourself the following questions:
- Do you know people working in similar roles to you who don’t have tertiary qualifications? How have they been successful?
- Do you know of people working in similar roles to you who have different tertiary qualifications than yourself? How have they been successful?
- Do you have any IT certifications? If so, how does a single, complex certification differ in terms of study requirements from say, a single subject you did for your degree?
- If you don’t have a tertiary qualification but you think they’re required, how are you different?
- Go back and re-read the inner-voice reasons. Challenge yourself and think whether those reasons might be biasing your belief system.
Yes, there may be niche jobs where a majority of sampled IT workers might agree a degree is essential, but that criteria is stamped on job ads far too cavalierly.
If you’re in the IT industry and think people don’t need a degree, you need to speak up. You need to advocate for change within the industry. Things won’t change unless people make their thoughts known and advocate for others to be given a chance.
For people wanting to get into IT
What if you’re someone who wants to work in IT without getting a degree? I have a few thoughts and suggestions.
Walk the different path: if necessary, be prepared to get a job in some other part of IT. Don’t wait for the right company-paid training to come. If you want to jump from help-desk to information security for instance, build up some skills and a certification or two independently, and then keep driving for that area. If you’re working in IT it’s easier to bump into people who work in the field you’d like to work in. Get their tips on how to gain and demonstrate competency without that stamp on your CV.
Flowing from the point above, be prepared to network. Don’t just ask for tips, look for mentors and learn how to position yourself as having the skills you know businesses will look for. And don’t just apply for jobs with recruiters – contact them, ask for a meeting or a even a phone call, and sell yourself. In short, develop relationships with people who will champion you. Develop, as we’d call in sales, an elevator pitch – not for a product, but for yourself. Hone a message about your skills, eagerness and passion that you can deliver in a minute or two.
Research the field you want to get into beyond the pure technology. Of course, grow your skills in the field you want to get into, but know the background to the field as well. If you can articulate some details about the field (e.g., how long it’s been around for, experts who don’t have tertiary qualifications, etc.), then you can prove to people your passion goes beyond hey-cool-tech.
Develop mappings from things you do now to job requirements. They may not be direct mapping, but practice drawing equivalencies. Maybe working on a help-desk you’ve never made a “pitch” to a customer, but did you pitch an idea to your manager? Or did you, during a support issue, convince a customer that some upgrade or change of process would solve a problem? Of course, to do this you’ll probably want to take notes. Build up some evidence and don’t be afraid to cite it.
And finally: good luck. After all, I can practically guarantee you that everyone who succeeds – degree or not – could cite at least one instance in their career where they’ve just been lucky.