My career coaching work provides me with plenty of opportunities to meet highly talented people, across a wide range of industries and occupations. Most of the clients I see are dedicated and hard working with a fantastic array of skills that are in hot demand, demonstrated by their high incomes and excellent appraisals. Not one of the people I have seen over the past two years has taken their career for granted, using every opportunity to increase their employability along the way.
I can easily see that these people have been assets to their employers in the past, and are respected in their current workplace. They will have no trouble getting a new job when they are ready to move on in their career - or will they?
Well, they shouldn't. But something quite strange has happened over the past two to three years. Subtle developments in thinking have caused a mindshift about what makes a candidate worthwhile, with the result that a university qualification is now viewed as a baseline requirement. This phenomenon may have been instigated by recruiters, desperate to find a surefire shortlisting mechanism. It may well be driven by new leaders who have all emerged from tertiary studies and can't imagine why anyone would dare step out in the world of work without at least an honours degree. Perhaps companies are sensing that they need to gear up to meet global workforce expectations. Certainly the universities themselves, hungry to fill their places and obtain their government funding, are getting the message out that you are nobody without an alumni pin to call your own.
So where does this leave my wonderful clients, some of whom have TAFE diplomas, others have clocked up twenty or more years in the workplace, many of whom have mortgages, families and other general living expenses? They would love to be able to fit in time to study, but a university degree takes quite a lot of time and effort to achieve.
There have been moves to address this perceived inadequacy in our over-thirties workforce. Universities have begun offering postgraduate vocational qualifications to assist people with work experience to obtain higher degrees, and to eliminate the need to obtain a Bachelor's degree before doing so. However, those who have a Graduate Certificate in something wonderful are still being told that these qualifications don't count for an awful lot if there is no undergraduate degree behind it.
This worries me on a number of levels.The first relates to advising my clients. Do I tell them to drop their wage to that of a casual waitperson like those who are twenty years younger are doing? Is this even feasible? What may happen at the end of a three or four year degree? Will creeping credentialism attack again and place them in the position of needing a Masters qualification?
My second level of concern relates to the obvious repercussions on our society as a whole when we no longer value what people have to offer in the workplace. Apart from the obvious economic and social implications, and the demoralisation that goes with rejection upon rejection in the job application process, there is a lack of fundamental commonsense about what makes the world turn.
I have a number of university qualifications, including an arts degree, and I am happy to have these achievements behind me. But they don't make me better at what I do, they are just one form of learning that make up my work intelligence.
I wonder just how realistic it is to expect a person who works a 60 hour week to add a study program into the mix. What are the damaging effects of having overworked, overstressed, underconfident workers who feel that nothing they have done or can do will be good enough.
It is definitely time for a rethink. If society at large is going to insist that everyone needs a degree, then we need to make it possible for them to get one. If we decide it really isn't that important, we need to rethink the messages we are telling ourselves and others.
