Performia Australia – Is Education Necessary?

IS EDUCATION NECESSARY?

In our current business environment education is promoted as an important ingredient to create success.

Many people advertise jobs insisting on a degree or some sort of qualification to be able to get the job.

It sounds like a nice thing to have the person qualified for the job , as it might mean you won’t have to spend so much time training them and you would then expect to have someone ready to do the job from the first day.

In this article I want to look at two aspects of this argument though, 1) what is the real value of education to the workforce and 2) how important is education to the job you are advertising, is it the most important thing; in fact is it actually irrelevant.

1)      A couple of months ago I was sent an article by James Thomson who did some interesting research into the most successful business people in Australia and looked at their educational history  and found the following points of interest;

1. Of the top 30 rich people in Australia only 16 completed University.
2. Out of the sixteen that completed University degrees he points out that four of those went onto success in completely unrelated fields.
3. For example Billionaires James Packer, Kerry Stokes and Lindsay Fox not only did not attend University of the three only James Packer completed High School.
4. Kerry Packer famously remarked about sending James to University; “Why would he want to go there?  To learn to smoke marijuana?”

Before people write and comment in defence of education I should point out that I myself have a University degree and learnt a lot from it that I apply, and certainly the other fourteen were successful in the fields that they studied and like me probably found a lot of value in the effort.

My simple observation though is that whilst it helps some people become successful a degree or advanced education alone is not a recipe to success.

2)      Throughout the world we have noticed that a lot of jobs are advertised with the educational requirements of the job included in the “job advertisement” as a prerequisite to apply.  Obviously it would be nice to have someone come along qualified to start the job straight away but we have seen above that education is no sure-fire requisite to success in the role.  In fact I am sure that you have met educated people who were lazy, unproductive and possibly didn’t even really understand what they had studied.  Then what is important in finding the right person for the job; Productivity – someone who is going to get a lot of work done that is valuable to you as a business owner or manager – yes there are some jobs that require a certain level of education to be able to do the job at all such as a lawyer or a commercial pilot.  If you really look at the job that you are advertising though you will often find if you examine the person’s results in the past and find the most productive person to be able to do the job that the qualifications that you need are easily obtained in a few days or maybe a few short weeks::

1. For example the main financial planning certification required in Australia for a financial planner required about two to three weeks of full time study.
2. Full training on Quicken or MYOB – the main accounting software packages used in Australia can be done in two to three days for someone with no experience, and just a short correspondence course to be approved to submit GST compliance to the tax office.
3. A couple of weeks will train someone fully in Microsoft Office as an expert.

SO WHAT DO YOU DO?

Well, put simply, when you look at hiring someone there are four factors that we would recommend as the important ones to base building your team on;

1)      Productivity – Can you clearly see that the candidate has been able to add value to the organisations they have worked for in the past?

2)      Personality – Does the person fit, will they stay and how will they get along with others?

3)      Motivation – Is the person motivated by the challenge of the job or are they mostly motivated by the pay, conditions and status?

4)      Knowledge – Does the person actually knowledge that leads to increasing their value to the organization, or do they have education that just makes their resume and interview skills look better?

Productivity is the key to selecting who you should bring into your organisation, and if the first three points above are good, the fourth, knowledge, can usually, as we have seen, be easily picked up by the productive and willing new employee.  With knowledge though the best thing to do is ask the person questions about the job that will give you an idea of whether they know what they are talking about or not.  Especially questions about doing the job are a lot more valuable than whether the person has an education or not.

Greg Paul
Business Development Executive
Performia Australia
greg@performia.com.au
Ph: 1800 603 023

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