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I disagree with other posters. I don't think your degree ever goes stale. If that were true, degrees wouldn't be required after jobs that require 2+ years of experience. You would only need them for entry level jobs. Not having a job or working in a field for years can cause SOME of your experience to go stale IMO.
When people say degrees go stale, they are actually saying degrees will go stale after certain time limit without relevant experience. This is true.
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Originally Posted by jman07
I disagree with other posters. I don't think your degree ever goes stale. If that were true, degrees wouldn't be required after jobs that require 2+ years of experience. You would only need them for entry level jobs. Not having a job or working in a field for years can cause SOME of your experience to go stale IMO.
I agree, on the degree, the problem is that since your degree, many others competing with you for jobs HAVE gotten experience, and are looking for better opportunities. As long as there are esperienced applicants available, the person without it doesn't have much chance. About 6 years ago I hired a woman with an economics degree age 54, her degree was over 30 years old, but she had over 25 years experience.
If you've had your degree for 3 years and no relevant job experience, you do look less attractive with someone graduating with a degree now or someone who has work experience. Your degree is a few years out of date, and you don't have the experience that will keep you up to speed. It isn't a big deal in some fields (where the knowledge doesn't change much), but it is in others. Any course work or volunteer/intern experience you can get that gets you recent knowledge/experience in this field?
No. I don't think a degree ever goes bad. Maybe ten or twenty years ago, that was true. But not now. Many employers now will still give first look to someone with a degree but with little or no experience over someone who may have years or decades of experience but no degree.
No. I don't think a degree ever goes bad. Maybe ten or twenty years ago, that was true. But not now. Many employers now will still give first look to someone with a degree but with little or no experience over someone who may have years or decades of experience but no degree.
Yes, but nowadays everyone and their grandmother have a degree.
So I graduated with a bachelor's in economics in December of 2014 and I was in the job market for a few months, couldn't find anything good so I've been working pretty random jobs intermittently and travelling since then. I am fine with this for the time being, but I am just wondering if employers find it weird or undesirable if they get an applicant who graduated let's say 3-4 years ago and doesn't really have any relevant experience? If it matters, I would primarily be talking about research and financial jobs. I apologize if this has been answered already, I searched and didn't find anything.
My thoughts if looking at a resume indicating the above would be "how the heck has this guy been surviving for 2 years? What has he been doing and why?"
I would want to see those questions addressed in the cover letter.
1) Education doesn't end. In many cases there are professions that require various forms of licensing and training that once obtained also requires continued education.
2) Adding onto #2 there are some jobs where generally it is expected that you get another degree. If you want to teach public school in the northeast and have just a bachelors there's only so far you can go. Pay is tiered to longevity and degrees. If you want to max out you have to have both.
3) Experience is relative, not absolute. After awhile there is a plateau effect. What makes 20 years better than 15? What makes 15 years better than 10? Some industries move so fast that experience in the past doesn't matter as much as experience today. For example manufacturing totally changed in the 1980's with Six Sigma. Prior to that the mentality was just bulk scale with no attention to quality (unless it was recalled). So if someone tells me they have experience of twenty years in manufacturing from the 1960's to 1970's then they really have no clue what it is like today. The IT industry changes probably twice as fast as every other. What is hot one year might be dead in two. Remember Flash? Now that's practically a virus due to the lack of security. Voice XML? Maybe 16 years ago but not today.
I work in government and lately I've found a few embarrassing things in other communities. One procurement officer spent about 45 years on the job. Well he never went for state training and as a result the standards he imposed on the city were on the same level that the state had in the early 1990s! Another one hired a town administrator that on paper seemed like he ran some chain of stores. Until I looked it up and frankly he's been running radioshacks since 1985! He has jobs on his resume from 1977! He does have a fair amount of board work which is fine and all. However, it is more than obvious why he wants the job. His stock options dropped to zero.
There's many more factors to consider experience and an education. How much of the experience is quantified. I know some that have plenty but there's a huge difference between what you think you did and what you actually did relative to the organization. There's a huge difference between saying "Sorted papers for the finance department" and "Tabulated 10K, 10Q and proxy votes for finance under FINRA xyz/123". People see things in terms of time and size. It makes a huge difference.
Both education and experience can be good but if you can't say specifically what you bring then you won't last long. Study the organization before going out and applying let alone with an interview.
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