What Are Qualifications For?

Post Reply New Topic

To me it is all about learning things. The qualifications are just those odd bits of paper which don't actually prove anything as one can pass things by repeating things but not actually knowing the subject in some subjects.
But my point is, qualifications can act for or against you depending on the job and the employer. In themselves they are meaningless. (I have seen more people cheat to pass their qualifications when I was in college then I have seen those who genuinely pass).
So just what are qualifications for? My mother did not get certain jobs she wanted because they said she was overqualified to take on the positions. What does this actually mean? As she is a very hard worker.

Anyway. I find wen I look back to jobs I have done, my qualifications (I have some that very few others have though they are not at degree level as I could not afford to do that) were ardly looked at and it was my work experience they all wanted to see.

I am thinking that to get these qualifications I was wasting my time. I did not waste my time when it came to some of what I learned though but most of it was meaningless in the various jobs I have done. It has meant more to me to know things at home.

Qualifications are a waste of time. Knowing the right people is all the qualifications a person needs. If I'd known this at school, I wouldn't have bothered to turn up to any of my exams.

I have this mindset because I know 3 people (all siblings) who were high school dropouts. They got into sex and drugs and didn't bother sitting their exams and they don't have any grades or qualifications at all. But now they are all successful and none of them are 30 yet. They all got their first jobs as soon as they left school, and now one owns a restaurant, one is training to be a doctor, and one is a builder. So they're all earning good money and are doing well, despite not having any grades from school. And I assume it's because their parents knew the right people who gave them their first jobs and got them on to the career ladder without having to earn it. And it's not like their family is rich, if anything their dad is just an average working class man and their mother has often been unemployed and in and out of menial jobs.

So it's not about how rich you are or how many qualifications you have, it's the confidence you are given from your genes and the sort of people you know.

How important qualifications are depends upon what you are trying to do with your life. As a scientist, qualifications are very important. For example, I had to spend a week and a half in training at the manufacturing facility for the NMR instrument that I manage as part of my job. This piece of equipment cost $750,000 in grant money to buy. Would you trust something so expensive to just anybody off of the street to be able to maintain and run the instrument? It can shut off pacemakers just by entering the room due to the strong magnetic field surrounding it.

I would hope you would rather go with the person who has been trained to do the job rather than someone who has not. There are even professors that I have had to kick off the instrument because they were operating it wrong. One brought a electric water bath into the room and plugged it into the wall near the control unit. Ahh, so many wrongs in one instant. The NMR has a magnetic field strength of 5 Tesla, so magnetic devices such as electric motors are a no-no around the instrument, let alone the issue with spilled water and powered up electrical devices. This was a PhD graduate that thought it was a good idea. He got banned from using the instrument by me until he learned proper usage.

Qualifications do have their place, but not everyone needs them. If you want to play with the big expensive toys in science, they are required.

I was in charge of trains. Qualifications did not come i to it, though once every two years we had a test to pass where there are 500 questions and we had to get 98% right or we were out of a job. But apart from that which is not a qualification as such, qualifications are meaningless, especially when I went to college, when the whole class apart from myself and another who was exceptionally tallented (I failed) cheated to pass their exams. Aparently this is normal practice in British colleges and universities, because lecturers are under a system that if they get a certain number of pupils fail, they are out of a job, so the lecturers themselves encourage cheating. This was the case on the course I went on which used to be a 5 year course, but was reduced to 2 years when I did it, and this meant that the 40% practical was more like 10% and the rest was so squashed in, no sooner as one subject was taught we hardly grasped it before the next was placed in front of us. Dictation was so fast that I ended up with huge gaps in my work because I can't get my mind to think fast enough to do that. School was like that as well or copying from the blackboards. I would have whole pages worth of work missing as I could not get my body to write faster then I could think, as I am a slow but deep thinker.