Who’s better equipped for work? Self taught or degree educated?

An answer to a question on Quora

The original question on Quora:

Do self-taught programmers struggle more than those with undergrad or graduate degrees at work?

An interesting question. I don’t have any quantitative data to inform a statistical answer to this question, but I can certainly share my experiential knowledge.

First of all, a little about me in order to give some context:

I have a BSc 1:1 degree in Computer Science and I am a self-taught PHP developer. (We weren’t taught PHP as part of my degree.) I’m also a senior lecturer in computing and web at degree level so I come at this question from all kinds of confusing angles.

First off, you can easily have a degree these days and still easily be unemployable if you haven’t taken your studies seriously or bothered to apply anything you’ve learnt. Sad to say, I see a lot of this.

Conversely, I’ve seen first year dropouts who are incredibly talented coders. I employed one.

That said, a degree has the benefit of filling gaps in your knowledge, widening your experience, and exposing you to inter-related disciplines. This encourages empathy towards different standpoints in computing and software engineering. This is vital if you are to thrive in a team environment.

The advice I give to all of my students is to read around each topic they study to get the most benefit from the degree programme they are on. Find what you’re interested in and dig deep until you live and breath it.

Self-teaching is, in fact, an important part of a degree learning. The same is the case with the new degree level apprenticeships being rolled out in the UK. (I’m rolling out a new three-year Software Engineering degree apprenticeship programme from September 2018 as part of Bucks New Uni.)

Self-appraisal, self-learning and practical application of theory are huge.

Both normal degrees and apprenticeships give the learner a framework. It is down to the learner to make the most of it.

To circle back to your original question, I think the key factor is really around whether a person has the ability to self-learn, regardless of whether they have a degree or not. If you can’t figure out problems and self-learn “on the job”, then you’re really going to struggle.

Originally posted here:

Want to keep up to date with my ramblings? Subscribe to my updates…