The Graduate or the Grafter? Who Makes a Better Employee?

A perspective on how much a university qualification really tells us about a candidate’s worth

Photo by Navid Abedi on Unsplash

I need to hire a Spanish-English translator for a new project, and I’ve got two CVs in front of me.

One of them is a recently qualified Oxford graduate, which sounds quite impressive, right? He must know his stuff after four years studying amid those [checks catechism of cliché…] dreaming spires, in one-to-one tutorials with some of the finest professors in global academia. Tempting.

The other guy is self-taught. Twenty years’ experience, it says here. Commercial and legal translations for end clients including half the companies on the blue-chip Ibex 35. Cultural and academic texts for leading public institutions. Which also ticks the right boxes. Not the same academic credentials, but the nous and stamina of the corporate coalface.

Who to pick?

The unsurprising plot twist: they’re both the same person. They’re both me. But which me is the valuable one in professional, practical terms? No one ever needs to answer that question, as they will always see the whole package, which seems (I hope) neatly balanced.

But what if I were two separate people: one with a fancy degree from a prestigious seat of scholarship, and another who had learned the trade on the job? Which would a recruitment manager find more appealing? And would they be right in their judgment?

In my own case, looking at myself the graduate and myself the grizzled pro, I know the answer. Oxford gave me none of the skills I use in my daily job. The Modern Languages department had no interest in teaching students about the techniques required to deal with the kind of texts that clients actually pay money to have translated in the real world, nor the software and online skills needed to resolve the problems that come up, or to optimise your workflow.

Even if they had wanted to do so (quod non, as they might say, with a haughty sniff, and a snifter of port), those skills and tools didn’t even exist in my day. Although the poorly photocopied and archaically phrased deeds and contracts, and interminably circumlocutious high court judgments, would have been more familiar and available, if a ‘Commercial Translation’ option had been on offer.

In truth, what I bring to the table, as I would tell my interviewer (while gagging just a little), is what I have learnt the hard way, from being confronted time and again with texts that had me scratching my head and tearing my hair out. By now – famous last words – I’ve seen it all. It’s the self-taught guy that gets the job done. Sure, formal qualifications are still important. ISO quality certification requires that there be a stamped and countersigned piece of paper issued by an authoritative institution to vouch for the story I tell on my CV.

And self-taught me has that as well: a Diploma in Translation from the Chartered Institute of Linguists in London. But there is a huge difference between that and my degree. To take the Diploma exam, you simply register, turn up, and get the job done to the required standard. No admissions process or structured course. So in practical terms it’s both easier to obtain, and more useful.

My suspicion, though, is that when a potential employer or client looks at my application, they are swayed more by the Oxford degree than the CIOL diploma. And I know they’re wrong. I could do the job – and satisfy the ISO 9001 requirements – without the former, but not without the latter.

As I say, they get both anyway, so are able to hedge their bets as to which best vouches for my competency, and in any event, those decisions as to paths in life are in the past for me.

But not for my kids. They are now at the age when they need to decide whether to opt for an academic or vocational course, or simply to plunge into the world of employment and work their way up from the shopfloor. What should they do on the current occupational landscape? Or rather, what is the best bet, crystal ball firmly in hand, as to what they will want to have done five years down the line, in a world that will undoubtedly have changed even more radically than it has over the past half-decade?

The inability of an academic institution to prepare them for their future workplace is now a given. University curriculums and exam content are devised and approved years in advance, and can’t easily be adjusted on the fly. What today’s first-year students are covering will have been decided maybe a decade ago, but even if it had just been comprehensively rejigged in light of recent technological developments, by the time they graduate in another three years.

In the case of Oxford, it was a conscious decision not to venture into the modern world or address such humdrum matters as the everyday use of language for global communication and commerce, and that was the reality they sold and we bought. For any university today, it’s an inevitable fact of life that their system can’t move fast enough to keep up with the disrupters and breakers of things that swarm like midnight-snacking gremlins across every aspect of our culture and society.

So is it even worth getting a university degree?

Those same tech disruptors are increasingly saying “maybe not”, and including the phrase “or equivalent practical experience” in their Silicon Valley job offers (after all, they call their workplaces ‘campuses’), rather than insisting on the graduate status that, after all, neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg ended up attaining.

As with any decision in life it’s a trade-off, and one that our liquid world with its shifting demands, and the rise in the cost of higher education versus the decline in graduate job security and conditions, would seem to be pushing very much against the value of a degree. In purely economic terms, at least.

When it comes to prestige, it will remain far harder to judge the extent to which - all other factors being equal – that embossed sheet of parchment from an alma mater might prove. The change is likely to be generational, at least – for as long as the manager heading a department has, and was expected on first being hired to have, a degree, they will be prejudiced towards those in the same club.

Here in Spain, the scales hang rather differently from in the UK and US. University education here is relatively inexpensive, around €4,000 for a four-year degree, less with means-tested grants. Two-year vocational courses, meanwhile, which are gaining in social acceptance as being practically equivalent, are free of charge.

Young people are not being priced out of an education, and to an extent are still being pushed by a traditionally minded and qualifications-obsessed culture into signing up for a course of study. When you move to a new town in Spain, you have to register on the municipal census roll, a process known as empadronamiento.

One of the few questions they ask, aside from name and ID document number, is ‘level of education’, with boxes for ‘Secondary’, ‘Bachelor’s degree’, ‘Master’s/Doctorate’. There is no practical purpose to this, other than that Spanish society sees it as very important to keep tabs on an individual’s formal academic attainments.

So what is my advice to my own children, and why? (Whether they choose to pay the blindest bit of notice is another matter.) I say “Go for it!” Choose a subject that inspires you, and study that for a few years, while you are young and societal constructs willingly encourage that option.

Not to get the piece of paper that comes with it. Not to impress the clerk at the Ayuntamiento when you check your box. Not even in case the job you choose to do makes it a precondition ten years down the line.

Do it to give yourself time to hang out with like-minded people, free of the constraints of the workplace. Do it to explore ideas, society, the world. To explore and discover yourself.

That is the value I placed on my own university education, rather than what it might teach me in vocational terms. And that is the value I might still place on it if I were looking at a job candidate’s CV, because that relative freedom from outside pressure for a precious few years as you become an adult (18-year-old me is furiously rolling his eyes at the idea he isn’t an adult already, but what would he know?) is your best chance to make increasingly informed decisions about what you do and don’t want to do, who you do and don’t want to be.

And only once you’ve done that can you set about getting the experience and skills you will really need in life.