Proving You’re Qualified: Strategies for Competent People Without College Degrees

Proving You’re Qualified: Strategies for Competent People without College Degrees
By Charles D. Hayes
Published by Autodidactic Press

Ask a random sampling of people who are in successful careers how they learned to do their current job and a large percentage of them will say “I learned on the job.” I hear it all the time and I bet you do too.

If you’ve learned a lot on the job, or through other self-directed means, how do you “prove” to an employer or manager that you’re qualified to do something? All too often when someone is truly qualified from a knowledge, skill and experience perspective, but lacks a college degree, they’re passed over for a job, promotion or important project. Such situations are ridiculous and Charles D. Hayes knows it too. So he wrote this excellent book.

Proving You’re Qualified is less a set of guidelines and suggestions on proving your competency than it is a superb analysis of the illogical environment and attitudes that pervade the business community. Too often businesses elevate those with degrees over those without, even when someone without the degree is clearly more competent. It’s a stupid approach to managing a workforce and ultimately a bad business decision, but it’s a common reality.

It turns out the insightful analysis Hayes presents is great fodder for coming up with your own approaches to prove your competency for a job. And Hayes does offer some helpful strategies that you can use and that I think will prompt you to naturally think of additional strategies relevant to your own situation.

I’ll present some of my own ideas about proving your competency (and your self education) in my next few blog postings.