I read a good online article today on Yahoo! that asked the question “does your college reputation matter?” In other words, are you better off graduating from one school over another?

The short answer is yes.

The longer answer is maybe.

It often depends what your major is, where you go to school (i.e. state, province, country) among other things.

I went to a business school that while I was attending it, was widely considered to be the best one in Canada. When you mentioned the name to someone, they tended to know the quality of the school so attending this school came with some prestige.

Conversely, there are colleges who don’t necessarily have a great reputation where graduating from this school may put you at a disadvantage when compared to a job applicant who graduated from a more prestigious school.

In recruitment, I can guarantee that this sort of thinking does happen and I also know that hiring managers are capable of thinking this way too. I’ve seen it happen in many instances. I’ve seen cases where hiring managers specifically want to hire people who have graduated from a specific school, often the same one they graduated from.

Certainly, in many if not most cases, once you’re out in the work world and gaining experience, your actual experience will outweigh the specific degree and/or school that you graduated from but at the same time, there are often specific cases and job types where graduating from the “right” school does matter.

To read the Yahoo article I referred to above, click here.

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.

Can your level of education hurt your chances at a job?

As a recruiter, I’ve seen instances where:

1. A person is considered to be under educated: I’ve dealt with several companies who won’t consider a candidate unless they have a certain level of education ie. a university or college degree. In some cases a certain level of education might be absolutely necessary (ie. if you’re an accountant, the company might require you to be certified) but in other cases it might simply be company policy that every employee needs a minimum level of education. I’ve even seen cases where hiring managers want to see candidates who have attended a specific school(s).

2. A person is considered to be over educated: I can recall several instances when a hiring manager declined to interview a candidate because they felt that the candidate was “too” educated or looking at it another way, too theoretical and not hands-on enough. Often, it’s when the person holds a PhD or multiple degrees and perhaps have more education than they do actual hands-on experience.

How can you strike a balance between the two?

To be honest, it really depends on your specific situation and the job you are pursuing.

While you don’t want to leave out your educational achievements, the truth is that how you present your scholastic achievements can effect your ability to get interviews and get jobs.

I’ve spoken with hiring managers who I’ve had to convince to interview excellent job candidates because at a first glance, the person’s resume appeared to the hiring manager to be too school-centric with not enough “real life” work experience on it.

When you’re putting your resume together, you really need to tailor it to the specific job you are applying for. Obviously if you are applying for a job in the education industry, listing all of your publications, papers and other similar items makes sense.

If you are applying for a job where your education is a “nice to have” or just a simple requirement, you need to focus on highlighting your real life work experience and use your educational achievements as something that might help to distinguish you from other candidates, not as the main selling feature.

In other words, you need to ensure you focus your resume to truthfully and accurately highlight what the employer needs based on what they are asking for.

I recently read an online story about an investigation going on in British Columbia, Canada about the head of a local health clinic who is being accused of exaggerating and possibly outright lying about his scholastic achievements and is facing possible criminal charges as a result.

Specifically, police aren’t sure that he has all the degrees – including several doctorates – that he claims he has. He’s facing criminal charges based on the fact that he had been hired numerous times to provide testimony in court as an “expert witness” where his scholastic credentials were at least partially responsible for the court and his clients viewing him as an expert who was qualified to act in this capacity.

In essence, the qualifications and degrees that he allegedly holds were largely responsible (along with his actual experience presumably) of helping to establish himself in the minds of other people as an expert. If in fact he doesn’t hold all of these designations, he will have only established himself as a liar and fraud.

Oddly but perhaps not surprisingly, some of the organizations who have used his services never checked to see that he actually held the designations he claimed. As a recruiter, I can’t think of too many occasions where a person was asked by the hiring company to actually produce school transcripts or a copy of their degree although I have seen this happen a few times.

I suspect as time goes on, this level of fact-checking will probably increase as the incidents of fake degrees, resume mills and falsely-claimed designations increases.

Certainly, in cases where a person is being hired for their expertise involving medical, legal, security, financial, health or other important sectors, you’d expect (and hope) that these industries would be more likely to properly vet their potential staff just to be safe.

I recall one of my former recruitment colleagues telling me of an incident last year where a contractor lost out on a 1 year contract when he couldn’t produce evidence that he actually held the Masters degree shown in his resume.

Moral of the story: If you’re an employer, do your due diligence and don’t take shortcuts. If you’re an employee, don’t lie or embellish in your resume.

As the health clinic “professional” in BC is finding out, lying about your achievements can involve more than just getting fired.

…they can’t replace hands-on experience.

Last week we spoke about the value of courses and certifications and what they add to your resume.

One thing that job searchers often seem to overestimate in my opinion is the issue of certifications, certificates and other achievements that they list on their resume. It’s not that certifications and certificates are unnecessary or irrelevant but in my experience, hiring managers tend to value actual hands-on experience over scholastic achievements more often than not.

In a perfect situation, I suspect most hiring managers would like to hire a skilled, experienced person who might also have a relevant certification or two but too often I see candidates who keep stressing their certifications without realizing that they seem to be more impressed with them than anyone else.

In my experience – I’m using IT as a specific example – certifications rarely make up for actual hands-on experience. I can’t recall when a hiring manager picked an inexperienced person with a certification over an experienced person with no certification.

This is especially true when the economy is like it is today with numerous people laid off (ie. available to start a new job) and employers can often have the pick of the crop.

Having a certification or some other designation can certainly help to distinguish you from your competitors for a job and in some cases might actually be a prerequisite for applying but they tend to only take you so far. At the end of the day, people want qualified, skilled people that can communicate – among other things.

Plus with the rise of fake diplomas, degrees and other useless designations that can essentially be bought, hiring managers are becoming more aware of what scholastic achievements are real and which ones aren’t.

We discussed this issue a few months back when we talked about background checks.