dal wheeler wrote:

> Maybe I'm impatient, but why should an employer be concerned with 
> interviewing non-degreed people for a degreed position?  

I don't think they should be concerned with that, and I don't think anybody
really said that they should. You may be barking up the wrong tree... :)

I don't think we are talking about "degreed positions" in the sense that a
degree is required. This are a few, and usually it's required by law. I
think those positions were meant to be excluded from the discussion. 

This is about positions that require adequate knowledge, and are more
"knowledge positions" than "degreed positions". I think in general,
requiring a specific degree is not a good way to filter people for a job.
(This may be tainted by working a lot in software development, where it's
more common than in other areas to find good people that don't have a
degree of the correct type.) Knowledge and experience are better criteria;
the degree is one indication towards knowledge, but as pretty much all
agree, not a good one, and certainly not a specific one. At least for me, I
can say that my working knowledge for the type of work I generally do is
probably around 90% post-degree. If I had studied biology and then done the
same jobs I did, I'd probably be just as good (well, or bad :) as I am now.
And my EE degree could have just as well been in HVAC design, which
possibly would have helped less in many of my jobs than a degree in math,
tilted towards computing.

I think the thing is that if you have an applicant that strikes you as
interesting, discarding that person for the lack of the specific required
degree may not be a wise choice.


> There are enough applicants these days to find good candidates among
> those that have enough drive to (at the very least) complete the
> educational requirement.  

I'm not so sure. There may be many applicants, but I think finding the
"right" person is still not easy. And as the first article cited in this
thread explains, there are many other criteria besides the degree. You
(almost) never get the ideal candidate, so you have to prioritize. And here
comes the question: say you have two top candidates, one with and one
without degree. The one without degree can show that she has the required
knowledge, maybe the one with degree can't show that otherwise. And the one
without degree seems to be a much better team player. So should it be the
degree?

I think the discussion was more along these lines. Of course, once you get
into HR departments that receive thousands of applications for a single
job, they'll probably do a pre-filtering based on formal criteria like a
degree. And they don't care whether they miss out on the "right" applicant,
because in such an organization, it's not about the "right" person, it's
about reaching efficiently a sufficient average. 


> Thats all well and good, but it bugs me that there seems to be an
> expectation that employers should automatically "grandfather in"
> non-degreed people into engineers.  "Engineer" suggests a level of
> formal education, not just technical abilities.  

Since you seem to be from the US... It seems there are some (not usually
enforced state) laws that restrict the term "engineer" to people who passed
the PE exam. I think they are the minority among the "engineers". So in the
same way that you get angry when someone who doesn't have a college degree
in engineering calls himself engineer, a PE could get angry when someone
with just a college degree calls himself engineer...

At the informal end (of what is an engineer) are the criteria of knowledge
and experience, at the formal end is the law. Most use the term somewhere
in between...


> I know it's weird to suggest, but those that want to be called an
> "Engineer" could actually pursue a degree in it.  

I don't think the discussion was about people who "want to be called an
engineer"; it was about applicants for jobs that are usually held by people
with a degree who don't have one. Or who have the wrong one.

My father doesn't have an engineering degree. Nevertheless he worked the
latter two thirds of his working life in engineering positions. Not because
he thought to "shortcut" any engineers (IMO he has even too high an opinion
about what a degree really means), but because he believed in doing things
well, and wanted the job. I think that was always a win-win situation for
him and his employers, and it would have been sad if both had to miss out
on this because of them (stupidly) insisting on a degree in a situation
where really knowledge, experience and all the other qualities already
mentioned count.

Gerhard

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