Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

How Much Does That Institutional Degree Really Mean?

“If we were both competing for that position, you’d get it and I wouldn’t because you have a degree and I don’t.”  I overheard that little nugget at the divisional Christmas party, and it struck me as  a little odd because that was shared between two young admin assistants.  What the hell does any university degree have to do with how well you do the job in a clerical role?

One of my favorite cookbook authors is Anthony Bourdain.  The man has attitude and he speaks his mind.  I may not always agree with his point of view, but by golly there’s no mistaking what his point of view is.  I read a short biography of the man and he states over and over that the most important thing in a line kitchen is dependability.

“In this business, it doesn’t matter if you are a fire-starter, bed-wetter, drug addict, or psychopath, as long as you show up at work on time.”

No matter where he’s working, his rules for hiring are simple: you can play as hard as you like when you’re off duty, but when you’re on duty, you must first and foremost be reliable.  Whether or not you’re trustworthy is more important than where or even if you went to cooking school.

[from If You Can Stand the Heat by Dawn Davis]

The piece of paper that an institution gives you says, “This person whose name is indicated here knows something about ____.  He/She has basic competency in this field up to the standard you would expect from this institution.”

That’s really all it says.  It doesn’t say “This person will produce for you!” or “This person will stick through the thick and thin in your business!”, much less, “This person has the right mix of skills and character to strengthen your team, not weaken it.”

There is nothing about that piece of paper that says anything about a person’s character, values, motivations, ability to work with others, and all the other things outside of the world of academia that matter when you’re looking for someone to recruit onto your team.

A very good friend of mine is working hard as a dental resident at a Toronto hospital’s emergency department.  It’s a very prestigious team that he’s with, and he got the spot not because he was the best in the class with top marks – he got it because the interviewer and the “tour guides” (the previous year’s residents) saw something in his character and his manner that they liked and figured would match what the team wanted and needed.

To take another quote from Anthony Bourdain:

“Who do you want in your kitchen, when push comes to shove, and you’re in danger of falling in the weeds and the orders are pouring in and the number-one oven just went down and the host just sat a twelve-top and there’s a bad case of the flu that’s been tearing through the staff like the Vandals through Rome?  Do you want an educated, CIA (Culinary Institute of America) trained American know-it-all like I was early in my career?  A guy who’s certain there’s a job waiting for him somewhere else?  Or some resume-building aspiring chef?

To graduate from the CIA – or any other major culinary school – ensures basic, standardized knowledge of history, terminology, and procedures of our trade.  A CIA diploma should, and does, mean a lot to potential employers; it represents the accumulation of valuable classroom experience and impeccable standards.  But it is no guarantee of character.  It speaks nothing of one’s heart and soul and willingness to work, to learn, to grow – or one’s ability to endure.

As I’ve said many times, I can teach people to cook.  I can’t teach character.”

[from The Nasty Bits by Anthony Bourdain]

That is the bottom line.  In any business, you can teach the newbie how to do something, but you cannot teach character and you cannot change a person’s motivations.

What the hell does a university degree have to do with clerical work?  If there’s analytical work to be done later on when the person might advance to a different position, then you can help the person prepare for that new position.  But the skills one associates with a university degree have no bearing on the admin position in question.

Be honest with yourself when you’re recruiting people and evaluating your candidates.  What is the bare minimum level of competency a candidate must have, that you simply cannot teach or cannot afford the time to teach?  Anything above that ought to be taken with a grain of salt and be subordinated to an evaluation of the person’s character, values, and motivation.

In order to get there, you’ll have to trust your gut instincts.  You’ll have to structure the assessment process to tease out and give weight to subjective evidence about what each candidate is like as a person.

Paper only tells you so much.  And an institutional degree, that coveted piece of paper that says this or that person is a hotshot, only tells you so much.  But from the way HR departments tend to design hiring processes, and from my conversations in the past with HR majors, you’d never know it.