Formal academic qualifications, life experience and personal qualities

Nowadays, some employers think that formal academic qualifications are more important than life experience or personal qualities when they look for new employees. Why is it the case? Is it a positive or negative development?

Today, employees are required to have academic degrees more than their experience in life and how fascinating they are, so that they can successfully apply for a job. There are some reasons leading to this thought and this tendency is seemingly not favorable at all.

It is indeed clear that these days, academic requirements are generally more necessary and useful in workplace than life skills and characteristics since workers obviously have to cope with complicated and long-lasting figures, calculations, papers and tasks which they mostly need to be logical, intelligent, sharp and tech-savvy. Accordingly, such practical experiences such as how t be fashionably well-dressed or how to start a conversation are not as essential as academic ones.

Otherwise, the development still does more harm than good regarding individuals, notwithstanding that academic qualifications are necessarily helpful to people. Firstly, sometimes, experiences in reality can help people to escape from emergencies and unexpected problems, even save their lives. For instance, each individual still has to know how to keep calm and quickly find a fire extinguisher to stop a fire if their office is suddenly burnt. Therefore, were they not to know how to react in this situation, they would be dead. Secondly, nice qualities are also important because they enable employees to be in a good relationship with colleagues. To explain, should a person be well-behaved, humorous and likable, his co-workers will certainly enjoy working with him rather than a person who is self-absorbed and grumpy despite his academic abilities.

On the whole, bosses’ heavy emphasis on academic knowledge is the main reason for this trend. As reasonable it is, however, this trend brings more drawbacks because of the equal importance of personalities and reality knowledge.

Thank you!!!