I think college can be valuable.

Now with that out of the way, let’s go on to the meat of this post.

I was recently recalling my education journey to a friend and they expressed shock that I had not gone to college and have the role I do today.

This is not an uncommon reaction.

However, I find this shock to be misplaced.

Companies hire based on if they think you will add more value than you will cost them.

End of story.

(Note: if a company doesn’t hire this way, it will soon be the end of their story)

A degree is one way of evaluating if a candidate has completed something and maybe if they have some of the skills needed for the role.

However, the core reason a company extends an offer hardly ever boils down to if the candidate had a degree or not. (I could be wrong on this but from what my friends say in recruiting, that’s not the case.)

Sure a degree may play a part, sometimes more than others depending on the role, but I think at its core it’s so much more important to show  you have a genuine interest in the job, some ideas for how you’re going to improve the process, and can learn quickly.

To be frank, both companies I most recently received job offers from had a college degree as a requirement. And even with that as a requirement, they still hired based on what they thought would be the biggest value add, which happened to be someone who did not have a college degree.

(Although, I think that sales is a unique field, where so much of your ability to perform is simply captured in experience and personality, there’s definitely room for skipping college in various career paths. It just might be more difficult to show you have the skills needed, but if you take the challenge to showcase that you do have the skills, you got it.)

To summarize, companies hire based on if you add more value than you take. Often, a degree showing you were in a classroom for 4 years does not show lot of more efficient, tailored and proven ways to show you can do the task than to pull out .

Which is why we see a growing list of companies who dropped a college degree as a requirement. I wonder how this list will continue to grow in the next 5 years.