Do you need that Master’s degree or experience?

You have hardly been a year out of university after a three or four-year Bachelor’s program. In these times I suspect most of the year has been spent enjoying your new found freedom from academic study, course tests and exams. After a few months of rest, the race to find work begins.  If you have found a job or started your own small business (as a sole service provider), you are now trying to stabilize in that new undertaking. In the case of those looking for employment, the search continues.

Hardly a year or two after leaving university there will be cries for you to acquire new qualifications. This is made to appear even more urgent for those who have no work or are in employment that they do not find fulfilling. You have been told that there are so many people ready to present a Bachelor’s certificate with their next job application. It will be at least a second class computer science, engineering, social science or physics degree. So yours is not that special.

It is true a Master’s degree may give you an edge at the job interview following elimination of many others. But this is not always the case.

I argue here that the best approach to the decision to advance to a Master’s degree is to consider what the extra credential will contribute to your productive ability. Furthermore, that the best measure of one’s productive ability is in what they can do with what they know (not just what they know). The best way to improve your productive ability is by obtaining work experience.

One is better off spending two or three years working full-time in a busy finance department of a large corporation than a year or so on a MBA program straight after a bachelor’s degree. If a Master’s degree does not offer you the possibility of working on real products or services for real clients (say with a semester of internship), you really have to think twice about spending money or time on it. Besides, working with real clients solving real problems gives you a wide range of experiences to take to graduate lecture discussions.

Should it matter if I’m offered a Masters scholarship? Yes. Time spent shuffling more pages in text books and solving structured problems keeps you behind colleagues who learn from performance challenges at the frontlines on the job.

Another way of looking at the decision is to consider what material rewards a promotion (resulting from a new Masters qualification) will bring or the intellectual rewards of advanced study in your discipline that gives you the capacity for deeper analysis of workplace problems.

I would definitely discourage young people fresh from university from advancing to Masters study just to fill time without employment.

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