Bells and Whistles

It's the usual routine: a young person graduates from college with a four-year degree and goes on a job hunt. When they get hired, the first thing their new employer does is put them through a long training period before they're turned loose on unsuspecting co-workers.

Even then, they require a seasoned employee to shepherd them along and answer their panicked queries when a customer dares to request something that wasn't covered by their professors.

Why is this necessary? Shouldn't a "degreed professional" have the skills necessary to slide right into a job in their field with a minimum of orientation?

It's necessary because college graduates, by and large, do not enter the working world with the skills and knowledge necessary to actually perform the tasks for which they're hired. Accounting exercises done in a class, where the student doesn't have to attend meetings, field calls and work on other duties while trying to complete them, do not prepare the graduate for the ugly truth of the real world, where no matter what the task is, it's highly unlikely that it will be completed in peace and quiet. It just doesn't happen that way.

So companies spend millions of dollars training newly degreed employees to do the jobs that their degrees say they should already know how to do. How does this make sense?

A life-experience degree, however, guarantees that the person holding it has tangible experience in the field covered. Give a life-experience degreed accountant a tax audit to do, and he or she will get it done and handle multiple other projects simultaneously in the time it takes the new college grad to finish showing off his Excel skills making charts and graphs that the client will never pay attention to.

That's another thing companies have to get their new hires to unlearn: Colleges are obsessed with teaching all the "bells and whistles," all the chart-making and other arts that pad out reports without adding any actual value to what's presented.

The new grad may fail to complete a project, but he's sure to be able to make you a nifty pie chart showing how his time was broken down while he was failing. That will make the boss feel ever so much better when the company's client moves his business elsewhere.

Think of the money that could go into capital improvements, dividends and good old-fashioned profit if training budgets could be slashed. If all the qualified people in the talent pool got life-experience or other nontraditional degrees and started taking jobs and being able to do them from day one, rather than after a two-month training and six-month probation period, productivity would skyrocket, customer satisfaction would rise and stockholders would eagerly await each annual report.

It can happen, but first there has to be a complete paradigm shift in the way human resources departments do business, and in the way those doing the hiring regard nontraditional degrees

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Bells and Whistles - It's the usual routine: a young person graduates from college with a four-year degree and goes on a job hunt. When they get hired, the first thing their new employer does is put them through a long training period before they're turned loose on unsuspecting co-workers. Read More