Contrary to a widely held belief, jumpstarting a career in one of the many Information Technology or IT branches does not necessarily require a university degree. Besides, many students who register for degree programmes complain that they cannot connect the dots between some of the courses they learn in the university and their desired IT career.
In the changing IT market, employers worldwide are turning to people with professional certifications, internships, and apprenticeships in place of a university degree.
Despite this shift in employment requirements, many students, and their parents cling to outdated views of the industry and overemphasise the importance of a university degree. In Kenya, the last 15 years have seen universities mushroom in every corner of the country in their quest to quench the thirst for a degree certificate, a model that has proven financially impotent.
Having a university degree is not, in many cases, a predictor for success in a career or life in general. Bill Gates of Microsoft, Steve Jobs, the brains behind the Apple suite of products, and Larry Ellison of Oracle are just a few in the long list of tech luminaries without degrees.
Globally, the tech industry's giants, Google and Apple, have a penchant for professionals without a degree. They instead go for the necessary sector skills and experience. A report from LinkedIn, the leading social media platform for professionals, shows that some of the hottest tech companies do not require degrees for most of their employees, among them their top-shelf tech experts.
Take web developers, the people who create websites. They do not need to spend many years in college nor burn tonnes of cash to attain a university degree. What is required to excel in this job are soft skills such as good communication and project planning skills, and technical acumens such as the working knowledge of HTML programming language and proficiency in publishing tools.
Web design is another tech career that, just like a web developer, does not have set-in-stone education requirements that call for a four-year degree.
Likewise, Help Desk professionals, the people we run to when we have a computer problem, do not need a university degree to troubleshoot client's tech problems.
Many other jobs, including social media management specialists, can be carried out effectively by someone with the right mix of tech and social skills attainable in a few years of post-secondary education.
These focused, relatively short-term skills-based courses come at a lower price than the price you pay at a university. Showcasing these qualifications on a resume makes it easier for hiring managers to match their needs against applicants' skills and experiences. Whereas in many fields a university degree or degrees are a must-have, the right combination of certifications and hands-on experience shine bright in many IT fields. They have better returns for your investment.
