Do qualifications necessarily mean better in a work environment? It’s something I’ve pondered for a while, I guess it depends on what industry you’re in.

It also depends on what kind of work ethic your boss/employer has and if they praise people with a piece of paper or they praise someone for their hard work, initiative and loyalty to a company. If I was running a company I’d take the latter. I’d prefer someone who’s willing to work hard, and are loyal to the job. Even if they take an initiative to go ahead with something and make a mistake, they are going to learn from that mistake and not make it again.

I’ve always had the thought, whether someone is qualified or not, so long as they can do the job to the best of their ability then they deserve to be employed for it. A while back a friend of mine was made redundant by a design company in Adelaide after working there for 9 years. His brother who is another friend of mine said he used to cop flack endlessly because he wasn’t fully qualified. If he’s been there for 9 years, obviously he’s doing his job well enough, and it aggravates me that companies lay off people who have been loyal.

After working at a newspaper for 3 years, I came to the conclusion that if you can do your job as expected, and do it to what’s needed. Then does it really matter if you are qualified? I had about 6 staff members in my department to manage. I didn’t mind if they took an extra 10 minutes at lunch time to go to the post office and do things. So long as they worked hard, and got all the jobs done for the day. Read news articles or listen to music. It’s more productive to have a happy work environment.

If we put it into an example, If a job for a designer was advertised and 10 people applied. Say 9 of those were university qualified but no experience, and the final person had no tertiary qualifications, but 3 years working in the business. I’d most likely take the one with experience. Why? They don’t need to adapt to the job, they already know what they are doing in a real working environment. You don’t need to train them, they end up with the same work adaptations as any other person of getting to know their work colleagues and getting to know how things work. It will give them an upper edge, and also they won’t cost the company with mistakes because they’ve learnt from them before.

It all comes down to good management, and who’s managing. I’d be interested to hear some peoples thoughts on this too.