I was contacted by a staff writer for Entrepreneur Magazine this week. She is doing a piece on distance education in conjunction with certain jobs. In my case, it was management. She has allowed me to post the interview in my eLearners.com blog. I thought it would be fun to share it with you.
The article should be printed in any of several online publications. When I find out more, I will share with everyone.
The Interview:
Your age:
I turned 37 in October.
I know that you're in management. Can you give me your exact job title and tell me a bit about your job responsibilities?
I am the Manager of Support Operations for a Fortune 50 company in Austin, Texas. My function is to manage a very large call center that is staffed with people who are tasked with troubleshooting our product line. My responsibilities are vast, and include every aspect of staffing, forecasting, making strategic decisions that impact the organization on multiple levels, ensuring a high quality of service for our customer base, and more. I am a jack of all trades and my job description includes "other duties as assigned". They tend to take advantage of that as needed. :)
I focus a lot on team-building, policy, and statistics. I want to make sure our customer base gets the support they deserve. I have 7 direct reports and over 100 indirect reports in my department. I am responsible for all of them, however. When I first started in 2001, I had one direct report and about 20 indirect reports. So we've grown the business a little since then.
How long have you been in management at this company?
I have been with this company for 6½ years now. It's the longest I've ever been with a company. I've been very happy thus far.
How did you first get this position?
This was the first job that I've had where I didn't have help from friends in order to get hired or recommended. To tell you how I got this job in the most effective way, I have to go back to my history. Since 1990, I've held engineering, management, and support positions with NASA contractors, Dell Computer Corporation, UUNET Technologies (The world's first commercial ISP), Wayport, Inc., and my current employer.
All of the experience I obtained through those positions helped me get this job. From what I understand, several hundred people applied when I did, so there was a lot of luck involved as well.
I was laid off from Wayport in March of 2001. I shopped around for a good job for a few months, and this one pretty much fell into my lap.
What level of education did you have when you first started the position in management?
I did not start college until 2003. I had already been in my current position for about two years. I had made it to a management position with a Fortune 50 company by the age of 30 without an hour of college to my name. So up until that time, I had a high school diploma.
Do you find that your colleagues who are managers have a variety of different levels of education?
Actually, there are not as many people in management with degrees as you might think. Sure, there are differing levels of education, but very rarely will you see anything above a bachelor's degree.
A lot of the people in management and supervisory positions that I know are there because they were veterans of the Internet boom in the 1990's. In some situations, a few years of experience during that time frame and with certain skill sets can be the equivalent to an advanced college degree.
Some people do have degrees, and more people are coming into the company with degrees as the value and lifespan of business experience obtained in the 1990's has just about run it's course. I actually have some people who work for me in a supervisory role that are attending school now.
Did it help you that you were able to enter into a management position without extensive education? If so, could you elaborate on how it has helped?
It did help a lot. As I said, on top of the experience I had, there was a lot of luck involved. Not having a college degree when I came into this role did help in the sense that it eventually motivated me. Furthermore, I was not jaded with any particular management style. I was able to develop my own and learn what I could about managing people and processes along the way.
Being able to enter this particular position without the education that most people would have also prepared me for a lot of things that I would encounter when I finally did go to school. By the time I started college, I had an understanding of how things actually worked to some degree. This helped me to understand some of the things that were taught in school a lot better.
I was in this job for a couple of years and began to reflect how far I had come without any college credit. I then came to the realization that I probably wasn't going any further without a degree.
What degree are you working on obtaining?
I graduated from Kaplan University in December 2005 with my Associates of Applied Science in Information Technology, and I earned my Bachelors of Science in Management with a minor in e-Business in October 2007. I am now knee-deep in my MBA program at Norwich University.
Why did you decide to go back to school/How will this help you in your career?
I had eventually realized that luck can only take a person so far. At the same time, shortly after I started going to school, my daughter was born. Children are a great motivator. Not only did I need to go back to school in order to advance my career and earning potential, but I want to set a good example for my daughter. She loves to read and learn new things, and I can only hope that those characteristics carry over into her teen and adult years.
As far as my career goes, I am still waiting on the impact. I don't need a new job since I have one that is very rewarding and pays very well. I do look for opportunities that might have a better fit for my skill set, but it's not like I am unemployed and desperate. In the mean time, I take what I've learned in school and do my best to apply it in my current job.
At a minimum, I will be able to apply a lot of things I have learned at school in my present situation and make myself more valuable to the company. I didn't go to school specifically to change jobs strictly for a higher salary, but if that opportunity were to come along, I would consider it. Until then, I will continue learning and applying.
Eventually, the time to leave will come, and I want to make sure I leave my current position and my direct reports in a situation where they can continue to grow and succeed.
What are your ultimate career goals?
I would like to be in a Director or Vice President position for a technology company. Anything but sales! I couldn't sell a glass of hot chocolate to a naked Eskimo. But I love managing technology and people. I love to lead people and projects, and any opportunity would have to be in the Austin, Texas area, however. I don't want to have to relocate unless the offer is absolutely spectacular.
When I finish my MBA, I want to be a part-time adjunct instructor for an online college. I decided that way back when I was a sophomore. There is just something that hooked me on distance education, and I think it would be very difficult to just walk away from it when I am done with the MBA. Hopefully someone out there will hire me to be an instructor in mid-2009.
Why did you decide to get your degree online? What has the experience been like so far?
I decided to get my degree online because it was pretty much the only way I could make it happen based on my responsibilities at work and home. Our business has grown by leaps and bounds since I started here. We're 15 times bigger in terms of head count, and the responsibilities for me and my staff has increased tremendously. There is no practical way I could have done well at work had I been forced to attend an on-campus school. Plus, the birth of my daughter put the idea of brick and mortar education to rest for good. So being able to accomplish this (now going on my third college degree) online has been awesome.
My experience thus far has been overwhelmingly positive. My professors have been very good. They have been flexible and understanding. I have really learned a lot, and can apply that in the environment where I work now. My issues and concerns have always been addressed in a timely and effective manner.
Distance education is not always cheap, but ultimately, I think I am getting what I paid for. The convenience of getting an accredited degree online is fantastic.
Since you are now in charge of hiring managers, can you tell me what qualities you look for in a candidate and what role education plays in your decision. Also, do you have any thoughts on what the job outlook in management positions will be like in the coming years?
Before I got my degrees, I didn't put much weight into potential candidates who had gone to college. It's not that I didn't respect it, but I looked for experience over anything else. That's how I got to where I was. I guess you could say that while I respected the fact that someone had a college degree, I didn't totally appreciate what that accomplishment could bring into the organization. Now that I have two degrees, and I'm currently working on my MBA, a candidate with a degree is of much higher value to me because I know that if nothing else, a degree has provided that candidate with a perspective that non-degreed people don't have.
I tend to balance the degree and work experience now when I am interviewing. I would like for a candidate to how me what they learned by going to school, and how it has been applied in their work history. Someone with a degree and no work experience is sometimes less valuable than someone with a lot of experience. So there is a fine line that needs to be addressed, and common sense needs to be applied when deciding who to hire.
As far as the job outlook in management goes, I think that there will be an increase in the need for managers. Furthermore, a college degree will be an absolute minimum requirement for any management job that is worth having. There are still people who are better "workers" than they are "managers". They will need people to lead them. There is also a large (and growing) pool of unskilled and semi-skilled people in this country who will need supervision and management. The best way for a person to set themselves apart from that pool is through education and experience.
I honestly think that a majority of the management jobs you see today with a bachelors degree as a minimum requirement will transition over the next 10 years to require a MBA as a minimum. The bar will be raised to a higher level and organizations will want the best people to fill those positions.