I was checking out a company’s website today and came across the management section where it profiles the senior managers who work there. I was reading over their bios and was checking out each person’s education to see what schooling they had.
I came across one profile that mentioned that the manager held a degree from a school I’d never heard of so I did a quick Google search and found that according to the website I visited, this school was no longer accredited. This is a polite way of saying that the degree is useless and probably not worth the paper it’s printed on.
Again, this took me 1 Google search which was completed in about 15 seconds including the time to read the article I found.
As a recruiter, I’m always skeptical when I read a person’s degree when it comes form a school I haven’t heard of. Certainly, if the person is from another country, that’s one thing. I certainly haven’t heard of every legitimate school on the planet.
But I seem to have a pretty good ability to quickly determine whether or not a school (and by extension its diploma/degree) is worthless just by looking at the name of the school and also its location. When you see a resume of a person who (for example) lives in the US and has a consistent track record of working in the US with no gaps in employment but who lists that they hold a recently-completed degree from a far off country in Europe or elsewhere, it’s usually a given that the degree was completed online which immediately causes a red flag to go up in my mind since online institutions are notorious for scams.
That’s not to say all online degrees are questionable but many of them are.
These days many “degrees” can be “earned” online and as mentioned above the value is often suspect to say the least.
With the Internet it also doesn’t take long to figure this stuff out so before you sign up and give you money to a diploma mill that cranks out degrees that might not be worth anything, ask yourself what it is that you’re trying to accomplish and then ask yourself how much value it really adds to your resume.
