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Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
44,580 posts, read 81,186,228 times
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If I get resumes showing a degree Accounting plus some with a CPA, I'm not at all likely to consider someone whose resume shows "learned accounting on YouTube." Same for auto mechanics, programmers, planners, economists and everything else. First, you have to realize that not everything on the internet (or Youtube) is accurate. Most of the Youtube videos are meant for the casual, home chore education, not career training.
You know, there's just the tiniest chance that the job market for IT might have evolved a teeny bit since 1989 (32 years ago).
Sure but my last jobs as a contractor were from 2006 to 2008. And when I retired a very bright young man who got a BS and MS in computer science in four years with a 4.0 GPA got my job and learned it in about a half hour. The job at Johnson and Johnson was shipped to India where I am sure their top Oracle University graduates applied for it. But back to the OP, there's many fields today where you can start from scratch and learn on the job like EMT, Parks Dept. worker, Sanitation Man, Fireman, construction worker, welder, many civil service and public utility desk and field positions, apprenticeships in the trades like electrician, hvac, plumbing, carpenter, driver, etc. And starting at the bottom in any of these positions offers the possibility of advancing on the job to higher positions or related fields. I never met anyone without a degree who was making good money at a job they enjoyed complain that a lack of a degree held them back. I do know several degreed persons who either succeeded or failed based on their own ambition and drive. Most people have a hard time finding their niche in life. The lucky ones do. It took me 20 years of doing whatever paid the bills for me to get my shot.
I have a degree in marketing already. If I wanted to go back for one of the fields I mentioned , there would be no way for me to go to school, continue my full time job AND intern so I don’t even know how I would be competitive with other applicants
A marketing degree is a business degree. You can do a lot with that already. You can get a few certs to boost things. After working so many years, an internship will be elusive as well as not needed for an experienced hire.
OP, I've seen your other posts. You seem to making this whole process a bit more difficult than it needs to be.
A marketing degree is a business degree. You can do a lot with that already. You can get a few certs to boost things. After working so many years, an internship will be elusive as well as not needed for an experienced hire.
OP, I've seen your other posts. You seem to making this whole process a bit more difficult than it needs to be.
You might be right. I just don’t know how to go about getting those certs and proving I can do the job without relevant experience
If people can learn almost any job skill or gain knowledge to do a job from going online or watching youtube videos, then what is the point of college? I never see job ads where employers say they are looking for someone who is self taught. I just don't understand how you can learn a bunch of stuff from online and then use it in your resume to get you a job. I mean, are employers really supposed to believe you are competent enough to do a job that requires a degree when you don't have one?
Because that is not true
I certainly wouldn’t trust a doctor, plumber or mechanic...a babysitter even could be hit or miss
And I don’t know that employers are hiring people who credit YouTube on their resume
If people can learn almost any job skill or gain knowledge to do a job from going online or watching youtube videos, then what is the point of college? I never see job ads where employers say they are looking for someone who is self taught. I just don't understand how you can learn a bunch of stuff from online and then use it in your resume to get you a job. I mean, are employers really supposed to believe you are competent enough to do a job that requires a degree when you don't have one?
Seriously? You can't learn "almost any job skill" on Youtube or online. Most well paying jobs with a future, require college.
-Because they want a demonstration of cognitive ability and "grit." If you have the intelligence and perseverance to get that engineering degree, you can be trained and you have demonstrated that you can succeed.
-It's an easy way to legally filter and reject applicants.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
44,580 posts, read 81,186,228 times
Reputation: 57818
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dingo Gibby
Exactly. The "wild west" days of IT of the 1980s and early/mid 1990s when you could get a few credit hours of computer courses and a lucky break and land a career are long done. My first supervisor as a new programmer only had a HS diploma. She started as a clerk and worked herself up the career ladder taking OJT and night courses. She eventually got her BS, but it was only a few years before she retired.
More importantly, even years ago, employers were NOT hiring "self taught" programmers. People changing careers to become programmers took programming courses at their local colleges, frequently while working full time.
Today you need a degree to get an IT job. That's reality.
On the other hand, once you have a job, you can learn from the internet or self-training and expand your duties, perhaps get an increase in pay. For example, as a manager in charge of a database management/billing system in commercial/industrial real estate, I learned enough SQL on my own to join tables and do reports without having to depend on our IT people. In time that resulted in a good pay increase due to the expanded duties, and being able to provide data a lot faster.
I never had a degree in computer science. When I graduated college that wasn't even a major. As an adult I tried to go for a computer science degree in night school and took a programming course, but I quit because the professor made it too difficult. But I loved computers. I had one at home and I was a member of various message boards (pre-internet) and learned to program in Basic on my own. At work I was an internal audit manager, and the Division VP wanted an info system to keep up with key goals. I volunteered and learned a database language called Paradox on my own, and provided him with updates every morning on his computer. I hired someone who was also a computer hobbyist to gather all the info daily and use a floppy disk to update the VP's computer every morning. I was then referred by this boss to a couple of his outside organizations to install computerized bookkeeping systems which I did as a sideline for several years. I even created a 100+ page directory for one of the organizations using a database and desktop publishing tools, which was professionally published and sold by the organization (the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce). When he decided to implement a computerized drafting system in house in the engineering department he gave me the job. We purchased a turnkey system (a Sun Sever and Sun workstations) from Xerox Corp and I was designated the Sys Admin. It's true I went to a couple of one week courses on system administration and one on data bases, but I was on my own at work, a one man department, so I guess I learned it on my own on the job. I read manuals and reached out to Sun Micro Systems when I got stuck as our servers and workstations were from Sun. A few years later I decided to have the system reprogrammed in house and cut ties with Xerox who all the software and hardware was purchased from, and hired a few in house programmers assigned to the task and switched to a HP unix enterprise server and PC workstations. We switched from Sybase to Oracle and I designed the new Oracle Database. When the internet became available I developed unix scripts to make the drafting output available on the intranet throughout the division. I also handled all the server and user hardware and software problems. It was very much like working for myself as no one else knew what I did or how I did it. The bosses were happy that everything ran without problems. When I retired I got bored after a year and applied to a contract agency online who got me an interview at Johnson and Johnson's IT headquarters in Raritan, NJ and I maintained their business to business Sun and HP servers from 7PM to 7AM on my own, a one man desk. I monitored the server traffic, installed Oracle database updates, gathered statistics, and handled crashes, software and hardware. I had a staff of database programmers I could call at home at night, and also could get a delivery of a hard drives in about 15 minutes. Those servers processed about a million dollars an hour in wholesale online sales. I learned that on the job, but only because of my previous background as a unix sys admin and dba on my own for 16 years.
TLDR.
None of that matters. The point I was making (and therefore my reply to the OP) has nothing to do with your situation. I too have a long LONG (38 years ago I was in Guam at SRF, hiring the team that would remain after I left). My degree was not exactly what I wound up doing. That is BESIDE THE POINT.
I was not self-taught, and neither were you.
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