Degrees Or No Degrees What Do They Mean To The Employer

I have an extensive background in Electronics and an Associate of Science Degree to go with it. Normally job postings have in the past been very stringent on whether you had a Bachelors Degree or Masters Degree in order to be hired.

It seems that that was relaxed to the point of adding in an equivalent number of years worth of work experience if you did not have a degree.

Now in these economic times we find that both people with degrees and without are in the same unemployment line because of the lack of jobs.

Recently I heard that companies like UPS or FEDEX were hiring people with Bachelors degrees to just deliver boxes. The company's reasoning was that those kinds of people had a lot at stake between student loans, mortgages and families and were more likely to do their best to work hard and keep their jobs. The companies also realize that if the job market changes, those are also the first workers that will leave for better jobs.

I look at the down turn in the job market and economy as a time when getting an education is not only important, but crucial. This is the time when financially it is hard to go out and earn a degree, but with the Government incentives and the Colleges looking for serious students that are willing to put their time in, a degree can be had in a shorter period of time.

Often Colleges give credit towards experience and so a shortened educational time is required and therefore it is less expensive to get a degree.

Whether a degree will matter as much later on remains to be seen, but I am also seeing where some jobs are requiring both the experience AND the degree.

So if you have time, even a few hours a week and access to a computer, talk to some of the Universities and you might be pleasantly surprised to find out that you can get that degree now and be ready if it is needed in the future.

I started requesting information on a Bachelors degree and have been deluged by Universities that are hungry to get serious students. It doesn't cost anything except your time to find out more. It could be time well spent.

Jobs Wanted- Workers Needed-Who Will Do The Jobs?

As a career Electronics Technician, although I would say Electronics Technologist is a better word for us now, I have been working in a utility and working within a section that is the closest to implementing SmartGrid technology and yet I have had to spend thousands of dollars, vacation and my own time to educate myself on the Smart Grid.

With the up-coming retirement of the work force in place and the new workers looking for more glamorous private employment other than utilities, the utilities will find themselves in serious trouble without training existing personnel, nor creating positions for people directly related to this very important field of the industry.

With the release of funding by the government specifically for training in the Smart Grid field field and so many IT savvy people in the colleges, having already graduated, they should be the people encouraged to be working with the existing workforce in order to obtain the practical knowledge and skills needed.

You don't just stick a computer IT person in a high voltage substation to work on the equipment running thousands of volts and controlling thousands of people's electric needs and hundreds of electrical workers lives.

I am doing what I can on my own to advance my education If some money was thrown behind mine and my fellow employees efforts, it would be very possible to move towards a SmartGrid system.

Our utility is ahead of the game, but only because we did it out of necessity. With only a few people in our section and three islands to work with, this was quite a feat.

I really hope that stimulus money is made available for the right purposes and not eaten away by studies or consultants on what should be done.
It seems fairly cut and dry as to what kind of information needs to be gathered to start moving in the right direction.
Just getting the speeches out of the way and allowing the real workers the space they need to accomplish this task would be the best approach.

Being a Union member, I would like to see the work stay within the Union and American people, but if resources are kept minimized and giant companies with big budgets come in with "demo" programs, the inevitable outcome is outsourcing the work to others and probably with no real plan or standards in place. The resulting outcome will just cost the consumers more in the end.

For more on this subject refer to these articles:

http://www.plantengineering.com/article/357358-Aging_workforce_How_will_companies_workers_cope_.php?rssid=20202&q=michael+V.+Brown

http://www.nutsandboltsfoundation.org/About-NBT.cfm

http://www.plantengineering.com/blog/Five_Fast_Things/11618-Getting_Linked_in_to_the_manufacturing_jobs_issue.php

http://www.hudson.org/files/publications/21st_Century_Workforce.pdf

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