The Insider Guide to Careers
Insider information, secrets and tips about getting hired and building careers. For employees and job candidates.
There have been dramatic changes to work and immigration prospects over the last couple of years. There have been both supply and demand side factors. The lottery-based US H1B visas, which typically have 85000 slots, saw a dramatic increase in applications. While the slots have remained the same, the applicant pool has increased ninefold to 780,000 applicants in 2023. Recently, UK work visas have banned international students from bringing dependents into the country. The situation is the same when it comes to supply factors like the cost of tuition. The average yearly cost of an MBA degree has gone up to 66,000 USD, and the cost of an MS program is 62,000 USD. Multiplying the price by 2 gives the cost for two years.
Adding to the crushing student debt is the recent news of the Supreme Court quashing any attempt at student debt relief. As President Biden noted, there would be more indebtedness, decreased marriages, and delayed family formation. Guess what? Corporate America will gain inordinately. When students are more indebted, they would have less bargaining power. This inequality means that they would work more, demand less, and be frightened to leave their jobs.
Companies realize that the best students don’t always come from reputed top-ranked universities. As college expenses increase, students are getting wise and applying to colleges that make financial sense. For example, when it comes to engineering, there is little to no difference in placements in the top 20 engineering programs. Most companies realize this and recruit from multiple programs. Even if a company doesn’t explicitly visit a campus, top talent is encouraged to network using Linkedin and apply on the corporate career website. Slowly but surely, most companies realize that degrees and grades don’t count, but skills do.
Unfortunately, resumes are very fallible. Anybody can write whatever they want on a resume to be called for an interview. To be noticed by the applicant tracking system (ATS), applicants are smart enough to look at the Job descriptions (JDs) and insert keywords from the JD into the resume. Most of the ATS are stupid enough to do a simple keyword match between JD and resume, and the cheaters do very well at this level of shortlisting. I know senior directors in corporate strategy and consulting in top companies who would spend more than 50% of their time recruiting because the resumes sent to them by their recruiter were a bad match. Imagine a highly-paid leader doing the work of a recruiter – What a waste of salary and resources this is. This paradox is what recruiting in many companies has become.
Grades are also an imperfect way to gauge the skills and competency of an individual. For example, Google People Analytics did a lot of research on the connection between applicant capabilities and job performance. Their famous HR head Laszlo Bock pointed out that “GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless.” He also noted, “What we find is the best people from places like (state schools in New York and California) that are just as good if not better as anybody you can get from any Ivy League school.”
Companies are clear about what they want in the job. The JD lists the expectations and skills in a lot of detail. The problem is the student attends school hoping to gain the right skills to make themselves employable. The student, many a time, has no idea of what job they want, but want the college to make themself job ready magically. Skills also come in three buckets – Technical, Business, and People skills. If you observe carefully, the entire purpose of interviews is to gauge if you really have the skills to perform in the job. This happens because recruiters want to cross-check the resume.
Universities are good at teaching technical skills. At the same time, this knowledge can be learned from online courses, books, and free online material. Business skills are learned through internships, managing college events, or having some work experience. I strongly recommend real full-time work experience, irrespective of prestige, to become streetsmart and gain the right business skills. When it comes to people and communication, traditional classrooms have no idea how to teach these skills, other than creaing a short course around it. Since many of these skills are innate or require extensive personal preparation, colleges cannot help. Only time, dedication, and perseverance can help one with communication skills. In a place like Google, 14% of employees have no college degree. These people have the passion to bridge any gap. To help show the path, I am working on a portal, Careerbolt, that will help people assess their technical, business, and people skills for free and even judge how much of a fit they are for their dream jobs.
In this brave new world, even if you attend a top-ranked university and have done well academically, you must network using Linkedin and bridge your skill gaps to find your dream jobs. Universities cannot guarantee jobs anymore, irrespective of how much one is willing to pay for tuition. In the new world, strength assessments (through websites like Careerbolt), skill assessments, and bridging the skill gaps will ensure success. Your future lies in your hands, not with a university.
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