Re: Advanced Degrees

["Wayne J. Douglass" <wayned -at- VERITY -dot- COM>]

At 11:00 AM 11/26/96 -0700, Alisa Dean wrote:
>To be honest, the lack of degree has been an obstacle to me, even now.
>I have lost at least 5 major opportunities, two in the last 3 years,
>because I did not have a degree.  It seems that HR will set this as
>an absolute minimum in some places, and it doesn't matter my knowledge
>and experience base.  I was once told at a job fair that even if I had
>a liberal arts degree, I would have been hired.  Or the interviewer
>had a snobbish opinion that anyone without a degree is inherently inferior.

Anyone who has worked for a big company knows that HR departments exist to
reduce a list of possible applicants for hiring managers. They usually do it
by using the most unimaginative process - sorting out those applicants who
have the fewest matches for the "criteria" fed to them by hiring managers.
If that means eliminating very skilled people because they don't have
college degrees, so be it.

As a pubs manager in a previous life, I always wondered about the fine
candidates who were eliminated in any stack of resumes I received by
mindless HR clerical workers. I even dreamed up a kind of ombudsman function
in HR that would go through the rejected resumes and unearth the gems that
would inevitably be found there. An interesting idea that would never be
implemented in the "real" world.

--Wayne Douglass
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