The Degree Question Is Getting Weirder And Nobody Told The People Currently Panicking About It

There is a particular kind of dread which sets in after a while, usually around when people begin asking you what you're going to be doing next year, and tends to come out as something like: I don't have a degree, or I've half way through one of these but don't really know what the point is, or I've got a degree but it's in the wrong subject entirely, and pretty much every job I read requires either an qualification that I don't have or two years doing the job before I'm allowed to do the job.

I remember the exact nature of that feeling well, and unpleasantly so; I remember spending one Sunday applying for roughly forty jobs which all said no experience necessary, and having three reply: which works out as, I've just calculated this, 7.5%; and of the three, two were rejections.

This is what I actually know about it now, some of which is genuinely useful, and some of which probably would have made me furious.

The degree requirement is being quietly stripped out all over the place, not heralded from the rooftops

And this is really real, and has happened extraordinarily quickly.

Most of the biggest, most recognizable employers, including such giants as Google, Accenture, and IBM, and a raft of British government agencies have shed the requirement in huge numbers of roles in the last few years.

Its colloquial description is 'skills-based hiring,' which, in truth, is rather a chilling turn of phrase, but conceptually sound: they’ve realized that the degree wasn't actually much of a measure of suitability for the job so much as a test of `probably alright' and has cut out hordes of qualified applicants.

And what all this hasn’t yet filtered into the jargon employed by the job ad writers is how many companies write "degree preferred" purely from force of habit of someone drafting the text eight years ago who hasn't amended it since.

Preferred, not required, that's a real clue; and it's also not actually a requirement, more a suggested bonus point if you can provide it as well as pretty much everything else they asked for.

What I’m trying to say is: apply anyway.

I know exactly how annoying that advice sounds, and how unconvincing.

I understand.

It seems you're damned either way; and the more specific truth is simply this: you are probably going to be successful writing the thirty-seven less convincing applications instead of the one or two convincing ones, and then the sheer volume of people who automatically disqualify themselves at that point is why everyone else looks competent.

Which roles actually can't care less?

There are some that really, truly, don't care; starting most obviously with those in trade, electrician, plumber, AC, welding.

There are paid apprenticeships for all these.

You do the same basic qualification regardless of if it’s something to do, and after a short apprenticeship you’re earning what a lot of graduates working as PAs or in marketing make before paying off student debt or the pension gap.

This fact continues to surprise most people who know it, despite it being true.

Sales roles, particularly tech sales, SDR roles.

They are in no way degree barriers.

The best jobs will provide you training which leads toward some form of professional advancement, but be wary of the ones offering nothing more than a commission in return for you covering their travel expenses.

Support, customer service and early years and teaching is similarly relaxed: these areas face massive shortages of people.

The latter category has a degree requirement although there seem to be training routes emerging there too; anything that fits under it could almost employ you and guarantee to do so at least until pension age if you can cope reasonably well with people-calling or teaching.

Warehousing or, really, any part of logistics, regardless of scale, anyone will literally throw trucks at you to learn how to drive them in weeks so it does not really matter in these instances if it doesn’t truly do any harm if it's sitting there unused.

And there's a category that overlaps with tech called something akin to ‘tech adjacent,’ QA testers, front end and junior level programmers and other such roles: they are extremely competitive at entry level, that much I know, but if you have a portfolio of projects you have actually built that will see you through that door in a lot of cases over a piece of paper.

Build the damn thing.

That way they can say, ‘Oh actually, he probably will be capable of doing this.

I’ll ring him later on,' if they see that you’ve actually put together more than some words about learning a new skill.

If it promises unlimited cash, the offer, for the most part, lies.

So, real employers rarely try very hard: that’s it, the truth of the matter really; what you need is someone with average interest; which is the most that you are likely to get out of anyone concerned with how long the conversation has taken and whether there is someone outside the interview room that’s got a bigger, longer queue.

Any company in receipt of your CV within an hour, or so complimentary, and more interested in a call about an informal chat, and this is from the time you spent putting one of the paragraphs into the application together, can be assumed to be a rip-off, MLM business or equivalent in that you'll be given absolutely nothing and left to cope for yourself completely.

The most important giveaways to identify one of these schemes are: anything suggesting huge success without revealing details of how it would be earned, "unlimited earning potential", anything about being self employed without specifying if you actually stand to profit at all after running costs, "self-employed", and most importantly anything which implies that you would be working at least three hundred and eighty five hour weeks, "we are expanding rapidly."

Actually, none of that needs any experience at all!

None of the most recent twenty jobs that failed to provide me any remuneration either offered my skills to me or any chance at them either but I'd rather have stayed a year without an income and without one thousand jobs which would try to trick me into believing I'm about to make a vast amount of money.

I remember applying for about forty jobs and having most of the applications for the most relevant ones for my field, i.e. those that promised not to trick me with some kind of MLM scheme and that could actually provide value, all coming back with: we cannot hire you at this stage, but will keep you in mind in the future.

I suspect they threw the thirty-seven most relevant ones, however, into a circular file and then discarded it, and threw the rest into another one for future training, then threw that file into another one, which they threw into an incinerator or recycling bin or put onto the street.

You know the drill.

And I haven't given out a CV or a job application form ever since.

What can I say: I simply was not looking for just any old job, and nobody was expecting me to fill out forty forms when my ability for any sort of real responsibility ended where the contract terminated.

Yet a couple of individuals have gone from zero to one hundred percent success when sending fifty relevant, detailed forms rather than a multitude of empty ones, and have managed to convince any employer it's not a job description.

At any rate they've figured that if anything that will have the capacity of doing one task on behalf of a company and nothing more and nothing less will get him accepted.

Then I have probably been wrong all along.

The jobs that offered actual professional skills, that paid out something, that were not jobs for a career but which would pay you to learn new skills, these seem to exist already and it's only my mind that refuses to accept it is not the way that it is.

What is actually missing here is the sense that actual ability is what you will be measured by?

I was sure my five-a-side soccer league running for three years where I chased unpaid subs and argued about fixtures must have been some form of relevant job, after all, who else would have known how to sort out problems that could occur mid-game?

I’d been a volunteer for a few months at a soup kitchen when I’d first lost my actual job, which was paid work and was paying a decent salary, and had realized the value of things I'd once regarded as totally informal work, even while at the same time ignoring the skills I already knew I possessed.