On Formal Credentials vs Experience-based Education
blogs.zoho.com
blogs.zoho.com
1) Formal credentials don't exist in a vacuum. They're meant to signal that you've done something.
2) OTJ training will be very effective for teaching someone the job. In fact there was a time when it was expected that college grads would get OTJ training. With that said, OTJ may not teach fundamentals applicable to many different jobs.
3) The argument of vocational training applies even earlier than college. I'd argue that starting at age 14 it would yield practical results for the company. But I think its even less of a good idea for the student at that age. And note, although you earn a lot less money in college, there's something about college that multiplies the value of a dollar.
4) I'd argue that unless you're starting your own company, the ages from 17-21 are more enjoyable and reap greater benefit at most colleges than working. Unless you truly dislike school or have a great idea, I'd put off working (and honestly, even if you had a great idea -- it's probably better working on that while in school, rather than employed).
In summary, I think Zoho's recruitment plan works well for the company, but less well for a fairly large class of students.
Meta data analysis from thousands of studies shows that there is essentially 0 correlation between where someone went to school (or their GPA) and how well they perform on the job once hired. See https://skitch.com/andyparkinson/reqfj/emotional-intelligenc... for a table of methods of selection and their respective validities.
As you can see, the best thing you can do pre-hire is to have someone complete a work-simulation. If you're hiring a mechanic to fix transmissions, give them a broken transmission and a set time period to fix it. If you're hiring a rails developer, give them a small project that takes a few hours to do and see what happens. It is amazing how much you'll learn about that person in those few hours. You'll see how he codes, communicates, etc. The more you can try before you commit the better.
Here's a simple example... When we hire front-end developers, we have a standard PSD file that we hand applicants and give them 2 hours to slice using tableless html/css. No matter how much I fall in love someone when I interview them, the results of this simple exercise will always sober me up (or throw me head over heals). Its gotten to the point where I don't even want to spend more than a few minutes talking front-end developers until I see the results of this exercise.
Its not perfect. The correlation between results and success is still very weak, but its the best we have.
The data may say that, but it likely omits a lot.
For example, if I have a candidate with straight A's from MIT, but I hire someone else who had a 1.2 from Podunk State instead, I supsect that the candidate from Podunk State had some other qualification that offset their school and GPA.
This is the same effect that Google sees when their best employees don't ace their interview loop. They actually have one person give them a very low score. This tends to correlate to high performers, because it meant that someone else fought for this candidate, which is a signal of something else compelling about the candidate.
To put it another way, I suspect that if you randomly selected straight A students from MIT versus D students from local community college, the MIT students will outperform for a wide variety of professional jobs.
I strongly suspect that those are the correlation coefficients from a linear regression model. That would make a lot of sense to me. In that case the numbers are saying that once you know other factors, such as someone's IQ and work history, there is no useful additional information to be gained from where they want to school and their GPA. However GPA and where you went to school would still have a correlation with job performance.
I do? I don't remember having said that, at least not in those words.
1. You read it by chance and found it?
2. Someone notified you?
3. Some software scans every article/comment submitted searching for "Paul" and you review it later? :)
I certainly don't have the time to read every semi-interesting article, and I suspect you don't either, so I'm curious about this finding.
In order to draw a fully qualified conclusion from the article I'd say, 'A specially selected group of students, formally educated up to an A Level standard [0] were able to equal the job performance of general university educated students after being put through a University specializing in the work that we do.'
I'm frankly surprised that the candidates who were put through this specialist university weren't able to massively outperform those from more general schools. Of course I don't really know how long Advent University lasts for, or the extent to which you teach specialist skills or transferable skills.
It is a strange situation though - I've got a PhD and I know some friends who have mediocre undergraduate grades, say 2.2s or 3s. They'd make great hires and doing really well in their jobs. It would really be interesting to see if anyone particularly targets this group in their hiring.
[0] UK qualification at pre Uni-age - I haven't enough idea how the education in different countries compares are this age really to compare US/UK systems.
If the job requires execution of a known process – automotive repair or neurosurgery I’d want to make sure I’d hire someone who went to the school that had the best experiential training (i.e. residency with lots of hands-on training.)
If the job requires knowledge of specialized science or engineering computations, I’d select students that have gone through a rigorous curriculum in these subjects.
However, if the job requires creative thinking and searching for unknowns, it’s not clear that a brand name school adds any value. I’d be looking for individuals that are curious, agile, relentless, etc.