I've just endured one of those conversations that really annoys me (Caution, Rant)An agent rang me and wanted to quiz me about my academic qualifications. "Do you have any?" she asked. "Yes", I replied, "I have an HND". Now, of course, this was rather confusing as I didn't say "Degree", "Masters", "PhD" or "Overlord of the known Universe". "So you don't have a degree?" she retorted. "No", I curtly replied, "Why not?" she asked.
At this point I attempted to explain what a totally pointless question this was. I have 20 years of experience, 20 years since I left a Midlands-based Polytechnic after only 2 years instead of 3, 20 years of actually learning something useful rather than the strange fixation my course had with Cobol (if you don't know what that is, be glad), 20 years of solving real-world problems, learning things the hard way, finding out for myself rather than being spoon fed, sorting out other people's mistakes and chasing impossible deadlines. But this means nothing, because it's an agent and agents don't understand these things, agents always say "I don't really understand that, I'm not very technical", they say "But you don't have experience with version 2.716, only version 2.715" ... it's a wonder anyone ever gets a job!
As you can tell, that touched a nerve. In fact it touched nerves on a number of levels and made me quite cross.
So, after my short outburst (somewhat shorter than recorded here, as you can imagine), she refused to take that as an answer and I had to admit, rather lamely, "I didn't get a grant", which was true - in my second year the local authority did not pay me a single penny in grant money (in those far off days when they generally used to do things like that), and if I'd decided to go on to a post-diploma course, I would have received a similar amount.
I didn't, however, mention that the reason I took a 2 year course in the first place was my dramatically bad A level results, or that these could probably be attributed to the amount of time I spent in the Red Lion or any number of other fine public houses in the area, or the fact that on a Friday afternoon I really didn't give two hoots about Physics and would much rather be playing some nerdy role playing game.
How is this at all relevant now?
We shall see, I'm still waiting to hear if they are going to interview me for the job.
It annoys me most because about 90% of what I learned on my course has been totally useless, I've never used Cobol, or SSADM, or used structure diagrams, or programmed a 6809, and I only spent 6 months writing commercial Pascal. The most useful thing my course taught me was the C programming language, and that was just 6 months out of the 2 years - I learnt far more in the folloing 6 months in a real job. But the academic standard makes it easy for people to put you in a box. It's easy to rank people based on 1st, 2:1 2:2, how "good" the University was, and so on. It's more difficult to look at experience and decide how relevant it is, and that is all, I believe, there is to it.
3 comments:
I've had a few discussions like this myself, and fortunately, most places treat grads and experienced hires differently, so the older you get the easier it becomes.
Still very frustrating when ignorant agents get in the way though :(
That's my experience too ... once you've got experience, most people aren't really interested in your academics. Normally it's just an HR thing to cut down the number of CVs.
That was a small rant, considering! Don't get me started on agents, or for that matter stupid employers who don't understand what actually defines a good employee. I especially despise the 'at least 3 years C+#Jscript+ experience' requirement. I remember screaming down the phone that it's only been available for 18 months. How can I have 3 years experience? I guess one should just lie like everyone else :-o But you are right, qualifications are tangible and easy to understand, so that's as far as agents can go, however long ago it was. My previous employer, in an attempt to avoid the scumbags, placed a small advert in the local paper asking for quality software engineers. The emphasis was on quality, and it specifically said that language experience wasn't an issue. A bit of a long shot, but they did end up with 2 high quality software engineers very cheaply! Mind you, they did also have to interview a lot of dross, including a Spanish girl who didn't speak English! They did say language wasn't important.
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