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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Big Bucks who wrote (25045)	10/8/1998 2:09:00 PM
From: BelowTheCrowd	Respond to of 70976

BB, That's mostly becuase the hiring system in Europe favors "formal" qualifications reviews. So everybody with an equivalent degree is considered more or less equal. That tends to hold some people back, and pushes some people along more than their real-world abilities would tend to support. In my mind, education (and I don't mean PhD level), is simply the "entrance ticket" to the game. If you don't have the ability to deal with some levels of complexity and decision making, you're qualified for that $.50 job stiching Nikes. (Or bolting together car parts, etc.) Note that this doesn't mean everybody needs to be a college grad. A high-rise steelworker may barely have a high-school education, but he got to where he is because he is able to think, make decisions, and keep things moving even when his life is on the line 500 feet in the air. It's not -- to my mind -- a brainless job. Even being a factory worker today requires literacy. Being a foreman probably requires computer skills. Being a manager requires more than that. So it's not that we don't need a mix of skills, it's that the elements of the appropriate mix have changed significantly over the past 20 years. "Capable of working with tools" no longer cuts it above the $.50 per day level. At that point, your only source of competive advantage is that you're cheaper than a robot. And robotics somewhat follows Moore's Law... But as you point out, having too many PhD's doesn't help either. mg