…and how it impacts the publishing industry, the economy, and the rest of the world in general.
Okay, I swear, I am so not cyberstalking Cedar even though whenever I see that she’s posted something I drop whatever I’m doing and go read it because I’m beginning to wonder if she and I get messages from the same s00per s3kr3t radio station or something. We’re both evil unicorns (which is cool) and we’re both writers (though I think she’s more experienced than I am since I’ve only been in the game a few years) and we’re both nerds so there’s going to be some overlap. But when I read her post on the topic of credentialing, I had the strangest physical reaction (think full-body shiver and skin crawling) because I was thinking about this exact topic last night.
Eerie.
So, without further ado…
We live in interesting times. Really interesting times. In the past two hundred years, the world has flipped around in a lot of ways and some groups haven’t quite had a chance to catch up. The rate of change isn’t going to slow down anytime soon (if anything, the rate of acceleration is increasing) and it’s created rather a lot of chaos that makes it difficult for everyone. This started back with the Industrial Revolution but has really kicked into high gear with the Digital Revolution. However, for now, I want to focus in on one particular trend that’s been a particular nuisance in recent years and that’s the vicious hamster wheel of the credential chase.
Long ago, a young man would purchase an apprenticeship, serve a set number of years under a master craftsman, become a journeyman, then prove his skill as a master and be free to set up his own shop and take on apprentices himself. Credentials were reserved for things like the clergy (and thus controlled by the Church) or the universities (which meant they were for the aristocrats’ second or third sons). Very few people had them or needed them and thus, they were quite valuable. Then along came the Industrial Revolution and the modern education system with its assembly-line cookie-cutter approach and, for a short time, a high school diploma was sufficient for entry into the modern work force and could get a person a job at a factory or as a teacher, secretary, bank teller, or other office worker. College was for those who were going into more advanced fields.
But when everyone could get a high school diploma easily, the value of having one was lower and the credential was less valuable. Factor in that unions with their work rules, refusal to consider the impact of their demands on the business’s bottom line, and refusal to police their members and maintain high standards in work ethic to justify wage and benefit increases helped drive manufacturing jobs overseas; that globalization came in and cut out a lot of the protectionism the Industrial Era institutions relied on; and that things like the G.I. Bill started a very perverse incentive for colleges, lenders, and the government to feed off each other (and the taxpayer) and the credentialing hamster wheel started spinning. Suddenly jobs that once barely needed a high school diploma to be done now require a Bachelor’s degree. There are hundreds of professions that people used to freelance out of their homes that now require expensive (and extensive) licenses to perform (hairstylist, barber, masseuse, babysitting, tutoring, music lessons…) I’ve worked in the tech world for over a decade now and credentialing there is getting insane. Techies like to pride themselves on valuing knowledge over shiny badges but it is very hard to break into different fields without certain credentials these days and it’s very hard to obtain those credentials without already being in those fields because the certification tests are expensive.
I’m waiting for the day when the Bachelor’s degree I worked my butt off to get (I did a four-year in three) is as worthless as a high school diploma because everyone is required to have one. I’ve looked into getting a Masters degree but can’t afford one. And, to be honest, none of the jobs I’ve ever held have required me to use any of the crap I learned in college. I’m not saying that college was useless for me; I enjoyed it and learned a lot of valuable research information. I’ve just never really used any of it professionally. No, all of the skills I’ve used professionally are things I’ve either taught myself, learned on the job, or learned in high school and built upon in college.
Frankly, in the constant chase after credentials, the only ones coming out ahead are those who grant the credentials. Employers can’t be happy with it because the greater a credential they require for a job, the more they’re going to have to pay that person (and that’s another vicious cycle all its own). Regular folks aren’t happy with it because it gets tiring having to chase credential after credential just so we can check off boxes from an HR flunky who doesn’t know what she’s doing (really — I filled out an application a week ago that had listed as a requirement for the job “10+ years experience in PHP5 and HTML5” when PHP5 just celebrated a decade this year and HTML5 isn’t even a year old. Topping that, I’ve seen requirements for “At least 10+ years development in Ruby on Rails” when the framework is only nine years old!)
So, what is to be done about it? Well, first of all, fire all the HR departments. Then fire all of the politicians. Maybe consider setting them on fire while firing them? Or fire them into an orbital trajectory or something. Regardless — fire them a lot. Then shut down the entire education system, redesign it so that it actually creates a literate society instead of turning out factory workers, re-instate vo-tech-like schools for skilled trades and quit looking down on people who do that work because they’re cool people and smart as hell. They’re just smart in a different way like we’re smart in a different way, okay? To them, I’m as dumb as a box of rocks because I can’t unstop a toilet and I’m weird because I remember a particular cardio-arrhythmia that I read about and was able to deduce someone’s wife had based on a conversation they were having with the check-out clerk when they were at the grocery store the line ahead of me.
Not everyone needs to go to college. Not everyone is smart the way I’m smart and that’s okay. But we’ve really got to end the constant credential chase because, if we don’t, eventually Ph.D.s are going to be required to work the drive-thru at McDonalds. Unless, of course, we’ve replaced the entirety of the McDonalds staff with a robotic restaurant and the drive-thru is a voice-activated kiosk with a debit/credit card reader which is a distinct possibility.
— G.K.
‘Fire them a lot’ made me laugh out loud.
As for credentialing… I’m in school, working on a degree. I’m doing that in large part because I discovered that despite having run a successful small business for ten years, when I re-entered the job force it didn’t count. Without a piece of paper I was virtually unhireable – no paper, for high-paying jobs, and ‘can you take orders after being the boss?’ for low-paying jobs. So going to school for the paper made good sense. Me being me – and I know you understand – I wasn’t going to opt out with an easy degree like business or English. Instead, I’m taking a BS, maybe a dual BS, and in hard science with lots of Math. There are days I look at the last three semesters and wonder what I was thinking. I’m a professional artist, I write and sell my work, I have… no, I need this. For me, not for the piece of paper any longer. But I know how much it’s been diluted, and it makes me angry that even after I’ve fought so hard for it, my paper won’t be worth much on the job market, because everyone else has one, too. When everyone is special, no one is.
My Bachelor’s is a BA in History (minor in Classical Languages) because when I went to college, degrees in web design or web programming (or programming) didn’t exist and I’d had one terrible teacher in high school who managed to convince me I wasn’t good at math (I actually am and I *love* algebra and calculus; I have trouble with geometry and trig, though) that kept me from getting a BS like I wanted to (I wanted to go into computer science).
Now, if I had an endless supply of money, I’d do a degree in CS, physics (astro and high energy), economics, and library/archival science. However, lacking that, I’m just going to settle for getting an LPI 1 and 2 cert (because I’ve been doing Linux systems work since I was in college back in the late 90s), then scraping up the funds to get the Oracle SQL DB certs (because yes, I do know SQL), and then look into the various Microsoft certifications. Why don’t I have them if I have all this experience in these areas? Because my experience was never crucial to the job and was something I developed on my own. Oh, over time it came in handy and made me very valuable (up until some HR person somewhere decided I wasn’t) but since my primary job was “marketing and communications,” there was no way my boss was going to convince the company to pay for me to get actual training or certification in SQL or other technical areas or languages because they weren’t required for my job.
Kinda makes your head want to meet your desk at a high rate of speed, doesn’t it?
— G.K.
It’s not quite as bad as it seems. I dropped out of college and the last certification I got was for Windows NT 3.5 and just had to find a new job. I had far less trouble than I expected.
You have to largely ignore what the job postings say, and I took that attitude that if a company opted to filter me out because I didn’t meet their silly requirements, it’s probably a questionable company to work for 🙂
I ended up getting a job with a company who’s job listing was bad enough that I didn’t apply (and ‘surprisingly’ they had the position open for over a year before hiring me, with almost no applicants), but they had a new recruiter who ignored what the job listing said and went looking for people who matched that description.
Unfortunately the best way to get a job is to have an insider recommend you for a position, bypassing the HR sillyness.
When trying to get into a new field, look for places that you can start doing the work (volunteering at a non-profit got me in at my first job). For a lot of areas, you can setup your own systems on your own (but then you need to convince your interviewers that you are doing more than just “Hello World” work on them, working for a non-profit doesn’t have this problem and you can usually wrangle an impressive sounding job title if you want one)
Here is the classic 1996 article that outlined America’s three types of career paths: talent, lifer, and mandarin http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,135534,00.html
The trouble with evaluating a “talent” is that the evaluator has to know their own derriere from a hole in the ground on the subject. The typical HR drone isn’t able to do so on ANY subject, so uses credentials as a proxy. As more and more managers are business school types with zero technical hands-on experience, this only gets worse.
I just finished reading that article and all I can say is “OMG THIS.” Also, I wish I had some kind of voting or comment-liking thing now because yes, the problem with so many HR departments is that they don’t know what they’re doing or how to evaluate anything and they don’t trust the hiring manager (who does know what they’re looking for) so they demand a lot of credentials, inflate the requirements, ignore work experience, and over-rely on filtering software (that they’ve not configured properly) to sift candidates for them instead of reviewing resumes.
— G.K.