What Did You Study?
There’s a tendency in
some businesses to recruit people who have a “relevant” degree. Is this always a good thing?
In some professions, yes.
Accountants, lawyers, doctors, engineers and dentists (amongst others) need
the appropriate degree. What about
others?
Interestingly, there seems to be a trend amongst UK legal
firms to prefer candidates who study another degree subject at university and
then do a law conversion course as they perceive that this results in a more
“rounded” candidate.
What happens when you get a bank, which graduates in
economics, finance or other “relevant” subject only? A problem that you may face is that everyone
will tend to think in the same way.
They’ve all been trained to do
so. MBAs are perhaps part of this
category. Do we risk limiting peoples’
ability to be creative or innovative by hiring only similarly trained
individuals?
When I started my career as a banker, I had a degree in French
and Russian. I went on to pass the
Chartered Institute of Bankers’ (now the “Institute of Financial Services”)
exams. These were held to be the only globally recognised banking
qualification. It didn’t matter whether
you were a linguist, chemist, geographer, economist, physicist, mathematician
or any other. Whether you lived in
Britain, Bahrain or Bangladesh was irrelevant.
If you wanted a career in banking, you passed the exams.
Many of us worked in the evenings after a day at the office,
cramming for our exams. We learned by
talking to others, going though past papers and working things out for
ourselves. We had already proven that we
were intelligent (I think) - we had degrees, after all!
The point is, when I joined my first bank, my six colleagues
were from a variety of academic disciplines.
We all had different approaches (which made for some interesting
team-building exercises). The great
thing was, we could look at things as bankers and as linguists, chemists, geographers etc. None of us thought in quite the same way. Would this have been the case if we were all
economists (with all respect to economists the world over)?
My father, who chartered tankers for one of the world’s major
oil companies, liked to hire biologists because he said that they understood systems.
He didn't always hire engineers. He saw the value that someone with, what at
first sight might be an “unrelated” degree, could add.
Too many problems may be caused precisely by “like-minded
thinkers” (the banking crisis of 2008 is a fine example). Perhaps if more “discordant voices” could be
heard, businesses might not march towards disaster in such a lemming-like
fashion.
I have spent more than half my life delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With more than 20 years in international financial services around the world running different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to offer solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk management. I work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email . My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services. For strategic questions that you should be asking yourself, follow me at @wkm610.
posted by William Martin @ 11:11
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