Here’s My Papers. Now What?

Raven Blackhart
Sep 4, 2018 · 6 min read

Are paper qualifications really that important in the grand scheme of things when hiring? Or are we just missing out on even better candidates?

Here’s a thing about me — I boast 15 years of experience running my own design firm, and a few years more learning the ropes of the industry. In total, I’ve spent 17 years running my outfit, and more than a decade of that happened before I got the right paper qualifications. In that time, I completed my secondary school education focusing on sciences and literature, my GCE ‘A’ levels in sciences, and a Diploma in Radiation Therapy. Yup, you read that right. That whole time I was building up my portfolio, I did not one module related to my work these days. And that has made all the difference in how I see the world.

But there’s a catch — it made me unemployable as far as the traditional companies were concerned. You see, I was missing a crucial piece of the puzzle. Although by the time I was ready to join the work force I could manage all of the Adobe suite tools and write a website on Notepad, I “did not have the right qualifications” to be hired by any web design firm, or a graphic design house. Advertising agencies wouldn’t take me either, because I did not have the right “experience”. And a grand total of no-one would even consider looking at the portfolio of works I had brought with me to everyone of these interviews.

And that’s the ones that just called everyone up for interviews. For the most of it, I never even got a callback, just a email or letter saying they were sorry but I did not fulfill their criteria.

So, at the age of 22, after having decided I didn’t really want to work in a hospital after a traumatizing 12 months (spread over the 3 years of my studies), I went off to acquire that apparently extremely important piece of paper that said “Hey! I’m an art school grad! I can work for you now!”

Fast-forward 3 years. This time, armed with the “right” piece of paper, I found myself in that all-too-familiar situation again. I finally had a Bachelor of Fine Arts… and I was all ready to join the workforce, again. This time with 13 years of experience. I had been busy during my university days, and had continued running the design firm and providing web hosting and design services during those years. So now, with more experience and a stronger portfolio, I tried to get a job I thought was more suitable for me than an internship. And — lo and behold — get the job I did. I was hired as a UX Designer and was miserable for 3 whole months, but the source of the misery is a whole different story. The truth was, I was treated like I was an intern fresh out of school with no experience, regardless of how fat and substantial my experience was. And of course, that meant I got discredited and talked over constantly while things failed around me, even though I had already been through those problems and crafted solutions to those problems that were popping up around them. And then I made a mistake — I dared bring up to a senior staff member that they were doing things in a round about way and I have this solution that works…which somehow resulted in a meeting with the boss regarding my lack of “team work”.


Now, I’m pretty sure this narrative is familiar to a number of people. Might be even more dramatic, might be less. But it’s a common one, and one that should not exist. So why are we still dealing with this?

Let’s go back a couple hundred years to the days when bakers did not need a degree from culinary school, when blacksmiths did not spend years studying books to be a blacksmith, where the tailors learnt their crafts from other tailors. Did that make them any less of a tailor? Or did that make the swords smithed any less powerful? Or did the breads taste any worse? So why are we being judged based on our paper qualifications, especially when the job at hand requires skills that are not necessarily taught in school?

Educational institutions have not necessarily caught up to what the workforce requires, but we are still basing our hiring decisions on the papers issued by them. They don’t teach an artist how best to talk to a client — neither do they teach a marketing executive how to use social media and forums to further their purposes. Even when the course modules have caught up, a straight As student in marketing and communications may not necessarily be a good marketer for a startup, even though they might be good for a traditional corporation. At the same time, a student who had managed to just barely scrape through high school might be a great talker, and so be a good marketer, or someone studying to be a doctor might have a great flare for cooking. So if all we’re looking at when hiring for a position is their paper qualification, we may not always be hiring the best fit candidate for the job.

Now, I’m not saying that we should all ignore the certifications and papers a candidate may present, but it should definitely be only a part of how we judge the candidate. Sure, you may have a Masters in Fine Arts in Film & TV, but, since you are applying for a position as a senior producer in a film crew, have you actually ever worked on set before? Okay, so you are a high-school drop-out looking to work as a junior programmer, but you seem to have brought with you 5 years of development portfolio — would you care to show it to us? And would you want to have a mid-level position instead?

Just because someone has certain paper qualifications does not necessarily mean they are more capable as someone who doesn’t — all it really means is this candidate might have had an easier time getting into the school due to any number of reasons. And the lack of the “right” paper qualification should not even exist in the narrative for most jobs, because in truth, it is mostly irrelevant. Sure, if you’re applying to be a doctor or a nurse, you’re going to need to go through the right courses, and if you wish to be a mechanical engineer, you definitely need to have physics in your educational history…but for the most part? The majority of today’s jobs are in the digital realm and, really, paper qualifications aren’t really important if the candidate has the right experience. There’s no “project management” degree, but that does not mean there are no real project managers, does it? And there isn’t exactly a “financial management” degree either, but you do trust your financial advisor, don’t you?

Experience cannot be gained through books and education — experience is, well, something much more visceral. Being told that a method is best practice is not necessarily going to help you understand why it is so, and it definitely is not going to help you innovate and come up with an even better solution.

Take all the “sayings from Grandma”. One thing I was told as a kid helping out in the kitchen, was to never use the food processor to mince garlic. Always chop it with a good sharp knife. But I was never told why. Most people would just follow blindly, except, well, I was a kid, and I wanted to play, not stand at the kitchen counter chopping a kilogram of garlic. So out came the food processor…and then I got a scolding. But how did mum know I did not chop the garlic like she asked? Well, the outcome was that the blended garlic was super sticky, and that was how she knew. So I tried to figure out why when I chopped it, it never got tacky. Turns out the blunt force trauma on the cloves resulted in the sap leaking out of the cells, which made it stick — and bitter as well. Solution? A food processor with extremely sharp blades. Problem solved! And so now the best practice is to use a really good and sharp-bladed food processor. New best practice!

So, dear employers out there, don’t just look at the paper qualifications. Ask questions, review portfolios if there are any to be reviewed. Talk to the candidate, let them share their experiences with you. Give them a chance, and you might find even better fits for that job you are hiring for.

Raven Blackhart

Written by

Raven is the CEO of Cafiend Studios and has worked in the field of visual design, user experience design and biomedical devices for over a decade.

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