floppybootstomp said:
I left school with one GCE O Level in English.
From the very first interview I told the prospective employers I had five O levels.
Nobody disbelieved me, nobody checked, I got jobs.
Taught me a valuable lesson, that the world is full of bulls******s and it's a dog eat dog world.
You get by on your wits, who you know and not what you know and what you can actually do, not what that piece of paper says you can do.
And, most importantly, how you interact with your work colleagues and how well you suss who's out to get you in the workplace.
Sad but true.
At my age though I haven't had to lie for quite some time
I find it terribly sad that so much weight is given to those annoying bits of paper.
The point is 'do you know your stuff?' & a degree (or not) is no indicator of that.
My 8yo dyslexic son knows more biology than i did at the end of my 7th form (final) year because he loves to watch David Attenbourough documentaries.
He enjoyed learning it more too.
It's the same info, so why is it that this manner of learning it is dismissed & discredited?
Because someone went to the trouble to try & make it interesting?
& then there's the university degree vs experience...
What's the beef... if you can do the job how does it matter how you learned it?
It's mostly snobbery as far as I can tell.
My answer...
No, I haven't. Don't think I could.
But my Father did many times.
Whatever he may have lacked as a human being
He was definitely a very intelligent man.
But he had no school qualifications & couldn't be bothered with university.
He would just teach himself (he was a ferocious reader, practical experimenter & inventor)
When he was interested in something he would learn everything there was available to know about it.
Then he'd get bored... & move on to the next thing.
He had some very interesting careers over time though (Not to mention an assortment of names over the years)
He was head computer engineer on the Wanganui computer (NZ'ds primary govt intelligence database of the time) In the
eighties, during the cold war, using a fake qualification.
He worked there several years before he got caught.
So much for our govt's intelligence
Whenever I would watch the series "The Pretender" I would always think of him
Although generally intellectual curiosity was his motivation.
Empathy & compassion were not my father's strong points.
