You don't need a degree to get a nice job

You have probably heard that you need a good university degree to get a nice job. This statement usually comes from concerned parents that want to feel safe about their son’s or daughter’s future. I agree that graduating from a good university is a huge plus and in some specific cases, mandatory. But let me tell you something, just keep it between us since it is a secret: A university degree does not secure a nice job for you. Nothing in the world does this for you. Unless your dad is the company’s owner, in that very specific case, I think you’re fine. For the others that are not so lucky, you might be thinking: Then, how do I get a nice job if not even a good university degree does that for me?

Well, there are a bunch of different things that affect this process aside from your degree, some of them are:

• Experience in the field.
• How you market yourself.
• Your soft skills.
• Your motivations for getting that job.
• The impression that you give to the person in charge of your admission.

When I say “experience” I don’t mean that you need to have had a job in a similar position for 5 years (which I understand is too much asking if you’re a young adult probably looking for the perfect position to start your professional career), I mean that any professional experience that you had before counts. You’ve probably worked as a secretary or an assistant, maybe as warehouse staff or a seller. Here is when the point “how you market yourself” becomes super important because if you, for example, worked as warehouse staff before, instead of saying “I learned how to count products and put them on shelves” try saying “I learned how to work with a team and optimize processes since we had to organize and dispatch over 5,000 products a day with only a few hours for each part of the process.”

Maybe you were an assistant and did not work at a warehouse, then you can say “During my time working at X company, I learned about the importance of communication and being organized since you can’t help managing something that you don’t understand. It helps to be open about learning new things and asking the proper questions.” Can you see the difference? It is not the job that you perform but the way that you describe it. Let’s say that you don’t have any previous professional experience, you may have gone through courses where you have learned and developed profitable skills. That’s knowledge, use it!