Certificates are valuable; showcasing your work is priceless!
Students pursue a University degree with the objective that they will get jobs. In reality any student who has earned a college degree is no different from 60 others in the same class. The only differentiator being the marks they have secured. Higher marks or scores help a student to be the first in line to attend an interview. Nothing more.
With a vanilla college degree, getting a job in today’s market conditions is difficult. So, students take up some specialized skill courses from training institutes to earn a certificate. All students are required to execute a project in partial completion of the course and these projects are mostly generic in nature. Again, the students find themselves in a situation where their marks or grades are the only differentiator. Even after being certified, the students find themselves in the same situation that they were in right after they graduated.
A decade or two ago certified professionals were few and jobs many. Certification in a certain skill was the fastest way to grab an employer’s attention. Today there are hundreds of certified professionals but few jobs. So, Certificates can only get one so far. Owing to this, there is a dire need for a student to do something more to stand apart from the crowd.
In this era of high competition, employers are more interested in knowing what a candidate has done with the knowledge that he/she is certified for! The power of knowledge lies in its application. To apply any skill, the student needs to understand the area of application or the domain. When one knows the domain, he/she understands the realities of how a business is run. When the student knows how a business runs, he/she can apply the acquired skill to innovate.
Let me give you an example: You take up a certification in web development. You might want to go right out into the market and look for a Web Developer’s job. What may happen is that you will get a few opportunities and when you attend the interview, chances are that you may not be offered the position. That is because the interviewer has discovered that you have theoretical knowledge only and no practical experience to back up your certification. To overcome this situation you must acquire some real-life experience before attending interviews.
The conventional thinking governs that one must get paid for doing work. I can say with a reasonable amount of confidence that over 99% of the people think this way.
People expect two outcomes of acquiring a skill or a degree or a certificate –
If we step out of conventional thinking for a short while and then take off the second outcome from the mix (which is getting compensated), the whole situation changes. Now the focus is only on doing some valuable work. This opens many doors of opportunity which were previously closed – you can build your own website, you can approach someone you know and offer them to create a website for them for free or you can approach a company and offer to work for free for a fixed duration of time. Remember that you are not asking to be compensated with money for your efforts, instead you must ask your employer for a Letter of Recommendation or a Reference for the work you have done. You can add that they can issue the letter or provide a reference only if they are satisfied with your work. This approach is very likely to work because who does not want an extra pair of hands to do the work and that too for free?
This way, you can gain valuable experience in a short span of time. What you have sacrificed in this duration is a little bit of money, that’s all.
Now if you go out and apply for jobs, you will be certainly be called for an interview. This is because now, you are different from all your competitors – you have experience! This time around you will find that you know much more than what you did the first time around, you have experience to show the interviewer and then they have the option to call up your earlier employer and ask for a reference if they like. In this situation it is very likely that you will be offered the job and at a salary that is likely to be more than what you would have earned had you got the job in the first attempt.
Hence the title of my blog-post – Certificates are valuable; showcasing your work is priceless!
With a vanilla college degree, getting a job in today’s market conditions is difficult. So, students take up some specialized skill courses from training institutes to earn a certificate. All students are required to execute a project in partial completion of the course and these projects are mostly generic in nature. Again, the students find themselves in a situation where their marks or grades are the only differentiator. Even after being certified, the students find themselves in the same situation that they were in right after they graduated.
A decade or two ago certified professionals were few and jobs many. Certification in a certain skill was the fastest way to grab an employer’s attention. Today there are hundreds of certified professionals but few jobs. So, Certificates can only get one so far. Owing to this, there is a dire need for a student to do something more to stand apart from the crowd.
In this era of high competition, employers are more interested in knowing what a candidate has done with the knowledge that he/she is certified for! The power of knowledge lies in its application. To apply any skill, the student needs to understand the area of application or the domain. When one knows the domain, he/she understands the realities of how a business is run. When the student knows how a business runs, he/she can apply the acquired skill to innovate.
Let me give you an example: You take up a certification in web development. You might want to go right out into the market and look for a Web Developer’s job. What may happen is that you will get a few opportunities and when you attend the interview, chances are that you may not be offered the position. That is because the interviewer has discovered that you have theoretical knowledge only and no practical experience to back up your certification. To overcome this situation you must acquire some real-life experience before attending interviews.
The conventional thinking governs that one must get paid for doing work. I can say with a reasonable amount of confidence that over 99% of the people think this way.
People expect two outcomes of acquiring a skill or a degree or a certificate –
- getting a job and
- getting compensated for performing the job.
If we step out of conventional thinking for a short while and then take off the second outcome from the mix (which is getting compensated), the whole situation changes. Now the focus is only on doing some valuable work. This opens many doors of opportunity which were previously closed – you can build your own website, you can approach someone you know and offer them to create a website for them for free or you can approach a company and offer to work for free for a fixed duration of time. Remember that you are not asking to be compensated with money for your efforts, instead you must ask your employer for a Letter of Recommendation or a Reference for the work you have done. You can add that they can issue the letter or provide a reference only if they are satisfied with your work. This approach is very likely to work because who does not want an extra pair of hands to do the work and that too for free?
This way, you can gain valuable experience in a short span of time. What you have sacrificed in this duration is a little bit of money, that’s all.
Now if you go out and apply for jobs, you will be certainly be called for an interview. This is because now, you are different from all your competitors – you have experience! This time around you will find that you know much more than what you did the first time around, you have experience to show the interviewer and then they have the option to call up your earlier employer and ask for a reference if they like. In this situation it is very likely that you will be offered the job and at a salary that is likely to be more than what you would have earned had you got the job in the first attempt.
Hence the title of my blog-post – Certificates are valuable; showcasing your work is priceless!
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