Jobs & Careers >
Getting Ahead
RSS FeedWill higher education or work experience get you ahead faster in your career?
Results so far:
| Education | 47% | 133 votes | Total: 281 votes | |
| Experience | 53% | 148 votes |
Education
Write now
Print
Invite a writer™
Add to FavoritesA higher education is a key to success both within and outside of the corporate world. Some qualifications are highly sought after and rewarded. A professional degree is particularly valuable. An accounting degree leading to the professional chartered accountant qualification is particularly valuable. An MBA degree has been known to propel individuals from middle management to executive level in record time.
Work experience can and does help to move a career forward. Sometimes it is highly recognised, and there are times when an academic institution will award a degree for work experience. We've all heard about the office-boy that makes it to CEO, but this is the exception that proves the rule.
Education has almost become a necessity to advance a career. A bachelors degree, masters degree or MBA have become prerequisites for a range of jobs or occupations. A hundred years of working in the medical field is not enough to make you a doctor.
A friend and colleague worked his way through the corporate ladder to a position of Assistant General Manager over the course of twenty years. Once the company showed signs of being in trouble he was one of the first to be retrenched. He struggled to find alternative employment.
By contrast, an actuarial student entered the same business and even before completing the qualification began a rapid career rise. Within a year of qualifying, he was a general manager.
Of course a qualification in itself is no guarantee of career success. The corporate world is a very political place and you need to be a political player to climb the ladder. Other factors are at play. Performance on the job is crucial. But as a rule, those that are able to use their education effectively in their work are more successful than people that simply rely on work experience.
The value of education as a key to success is sharply evident when we look at the various professions - accountancy, law, actuarial science. A newly qualified chartered accountant can earn double the national average salary within two years of qualifying. Actuaries are amongst the highest earners in the world.
Perhaps the most important consideration is in the transferability of the skills. Twenty years experience and climbing the corporate ladder in one country does not make it easy to obtain another job. A professional qualification is a much greater help.
Learn more about this author, Barry Marcus.
Click here to send Author comments or questions.
Experience
Education has its benefits in teaching and reinforcing good work habits, such as organization, meeting deadlines and processing information. However, education is a weak substitute for experience in obtaining jobs and career advancement. College coursework entails listening to a teacher in order to feed back the learned information on an examination. or handing in a research paper that required weeks of preparation. As beneficial as this might be, it does not adequately prepare future breadwinners for the work world.
Many entry-level employers are fair enough to allow college coursework to substitute to some extent for experience. It gives some opportunity to apply what was learned. But new hires soon find out that the work environment requires much more than was ever seen in college classes. The best teacher is on-the-job training, and that is why internships and volunteer experiences look the best on a resume and application for advancement.
Interns and volunteers will see first-hand that there is no longer a week or more to turn in assignments. Reports must be prepared, typed, proofread for errors, and submitted to bosses in a day or two in addition to other daily tasks to be completed. One cannot take incomplete evaluations (as a student can get an incomplete grade) to turn in the work at a future date. The company's success depends on these reports, and insufficient submission affects day to day operations on all levels. It also reflects poorly on the employee and the department.
Most workplaces require dress codes and professional standards of conduct unlike any regulations set by college administrators. With the pressures of deadlines there is very often little time for socializing and partying until the end of the workweek. It is imperative to learn time management and professional etiquette not inherent in college class requirements.
Only when this professionalism is learned under working conditions can the employee expect to get ahead in his or her career. Classroom learning is only the very beginning. The key is to apply what one has learned in the workplace when the pressure is on to perform at a high standard.
Learn more about this author, Lisa Kooper.
Click here to send Author comments or questions.
