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Ask Slashdot: Best Degree For a Late Career Boost?
Qbertino writes "I'm in my early 40s, and after a little more than 10 years of web, scripting and software development as a freelancer and some gigs as a regular, full-time employee, I'm seriously considering giving my IT career a boost by getting a degree. I'm your regular 1980s computer kid and made a career switch to IT during the dot-bomb days. I have quite a bit of programming and project experience, but no degree. I find myself hitting somewhat of a glass ceiling (with maybe a little age discrimination thrown in there). Since I'm in Germany, degrees count for a lot (70% of IT staff have a degree) so getting one seems fitting and a nice addition to my portfolio. However, I'm pondering wether I should go for Computer Science or Business Informatics. I'd like to move into Project Management or Technical Account Management, which causes my dilemma: CS gives me the pro credibility and proves my knowledge with low-level and technical stuff, and I'd be honing my C/C++ and *nix skills. Business Informatics would teach me some bean-counting skills; I'd be doing modelling, ERP with Java or .NET all day. It would give me some BA cred, but I'd lose karma with the T-shirt wearing crew and the decision-makers in that camp. I'm leaning toward Business Informatics because I suspect that's where the money is, but I'm not quite sure wether a classic CS degree wouldn't still be better — even if I'm wearing a suit. Any suggestions?"
I'm curious when people find the glass ceiling beginning to show it's face in their respective countries. The age discrimination the poster hints are starts pretty early in the USA, I've seen it start in as early as one's late 20s (though usually it seems to pick up in the early 30s).
Wait.. wait.. hear me out. The MBA will give you insight into how those who are MBAs think (and therefore, most of management). Also, your experience will say "I can do IT/CS", while the degree will say "I can do business". Which means you're more likely to be able to make a jump to management if you find your career options topping out on the IT/CS end.
And you'd be following in the footsteps of Alan Cox.
I put on my robe and wizard hat..
Since you're doing this for the money, and hitting the "glass ceiling", honing your business skills will give you the best chance of moving into a position where you can make significantly more money. You say that you want to go into project management, and having business skills in achieving the trifecta of a successful project (scope, schedule, and budget) will go far. Since you've spent a significant part of your career in deep technical fields, it will also give you a different perspective on what your employer thinks is important. It will also give you a hand-up on your peer competition, because being able to tell when the tech folks are bullshitting the "suits" is extremely valuable.
OK...
I can do this. I am, after all,
a superhero!
Age discrimination must be the government's fault since no business would ever discriminate against any particular group of people for fear of going instantly bust due to the magic market fairy [/libertarian]
I'm pretty sure that any limits are really ageism and not related to whether you have a degree or not. It's all about how many hours-per-week they can get out of you for $X per month. The older you are the fewer those hours are.
Even if the hours you do provide are really worth more in terms of productivity because your experience means that you do not go off on unproductive tangents.
But just in case the limit really is the degree .... get the fastest cheapest degree you can. It does NOT matter what the subject is. As long as it is fast and cheap. It is just the first step and at this point you really aren't concerned about making the correct relationships with the other kids in the frats.
THEN start working on an advanced degree in the subject that you really want. Such as computer science. Or whatever.
I don't know how it is in Germany, but here in the USA (especially in the Silicon Valley) if you want a late career boost, go get an MBA. Having an MBA isn't a four-letter word around here, especially if you get one from a good program. MIT has an excellent executive MBA program that can be done remotely, and everyone I've encountered with one has been top-notch. Same goes for an MBA from Stanford or even the other colleges local to the area.
Having an MBA opens a lot more doors for you. If you already have a good amount of experience in IT and Software Development, go get a degree in something outside of those fields to help expand your options.
You could also get a degree in something you enjoy personally but won't directly get you a job. Education doesn't just have to be for professional development.
"They told me it was impossible. I replied with maniacal laughter." http://www.mydailyrant.com/
Anything you go for will take time and put you into debt. What are the odds you will make enough money so that the degree pays for itself? It's something I've thought of myself. I'd rather plug along and slowly build or maintain what I have rather than incur a great deal of debt. Maybe a cert here and there, but that's it.
Where do you want to be 10-15 years from now? Aim towards that.
. . .my bachelor's dates to 1983. Lot of been-there-done-that IT engineering since then.
2006, got TOLD that if I wanted to advance, I'd need a Masters' and at least one advanced certification. I went and got a Masters' in Management Information Systems online (fairly painless, other than writing 20-30 pages every weekend) and followed it with a CISSP cert and a CEH cert.
Income is up 50% since I started the Master's program. Except for a few things, like an introduction to Forensics, and crawling into database theory, it wasn't anything new and/or hard. And most of my fellow students (who were either just out of undergrad, or late 20s) weren't much competition. The few that WERE, I'm still in contact with: their inputs and opinions are as valuable as anything I'd learned in the classes.
Mind you. my employer paid for most of it, I had (at max point) about 7K in student loans. But considering the uptick in salary, even doing it ALL on student loans would probably have been somewhere between a good and very-good investment.
Your mileage may. of course, vary: I was a security geek BEFORE my Masters', CISSP, and CEH. . . but all three combined opened doors and definitely raised compensation. . . .
Stop working for Faceless Corps and switch to a smaller company where you rub elbows with the Owners daily. They are not stupid and do the "only youngsters here" stupidity. They realize the older worker is a pro in the field they have been in for the past 20 years and use them to compete with the morons that have MBA's
I'll never work for another Fortune 500 company again. I prefer having beers at the end of the day with the guys that own the business.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The submitter's not in America, he's in Germany, so ranting about US attitudes is off-topic. I don't know much about the German market, but having a BA is pretty commonly useful in business, and if you're thinking about doing project management professionally, here in the US it helps to have some professional certification in that. Also, I don't know how much college you have taken already; whether you're looking for two years or four can make a big difference in your plans.
If you haven't had a good course in algorithms and data structures, you'll benefit from that, and you're going to need math if you don't have that, but you can take those along with the Business Informatics, and if you're thinking about going into management, you're not going to be doing compiler design or operating system development yourself anyway.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Degree may not boost your career, do you see so many jobless PhDs around ? Take some risk to start up your own company may give you a boost.
Because you posted AC, I'm going to assume that you don't realize that a Ph.D can take, on average, between 6 and 10 years, lacking any undergraduate work. Also, starting your own company may give a boost - but that's not really answering the question.
There is one thing that the AC/OP got right - the type degree doesn't matter nearly so much (notice: I qualified that with "nearly") as the fact that you hold a degree. What I'd suggest, is to get a degree in the type of management that you'd like to be - If you're planning on overseeing a bunch of programmers, figure out what they would have, and try for that. In other words - your "promotability" doesn't depend on your degree, it depends on the success of your direct reports (your area of responsibility).
If you connect with your direct reports in a way that makes them more productive (and it sounds as if you plan to use the degree to do this), then going "higher" will happen. You'll be a top performer, as a manager, and in most companies, performance is the #1 factor in promotion. Isn't that your goal?
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
Try telling any libertarian that logical and realistic piece of common sense.
I'm in my 40's and just completed a Masters degree in IT Management from Brandeis University, I already had a Bachelors in both Business and Computer Science. The degree spanned two employers, both of which offered employee education reimbursement.
I guess you could say that I am now three degrees above zero... ; - )
A Masters degree is 10 courses and can be completed in 3 to 5 years when going part-time. For most Master's programs, if not all, you first need a Bachelors degree. Some educational institutions will recognize work experience as an equivalent.
It sounds like you have not completed a Bachelors degree. A Bachelors degree takes 120 credit hours or 30 per year over 4 years. It's a lot of work and time which is why most students go full time. Basically, you wouldn't be completed in time for it to help your career.
The first step to get a Masters degree, assuming you are working full time and are not a contractor, is to determine if your employer has an education reimbursement program, what their limits are per year, and what you need to do to apply. If they do, you next need to research the type of Masters degree you want and the schools. Narrow down the schools to your top 5 and begin calling their Admissions department to determine if you can use your work experience and what, if any, additional courses you will need to take. While doing this, talk to your manager and let him/her know that you are interested in advancing your career by taking a Masters degree. Go into how it will prepare you to take on a greater leadership role, in project management and as team lead. Once you have all of the information about the school, put it together in a package with your employer education application and begin the employer approval process. Once approved at work, you then need to apply to the school and get accepted. The rest is just a lot of hard work...
David
Yah, about that lawyer thing. I have a degree in CS. IAAL and got my degree from a decent Florida Law School. However, I just started medical school to get out of the legal field. Law is an odd field. There are many states where there are actually too many lawyers. You can make a respectable living as a lawyer, but it won't be doing the "cool" stuff you normally think of. If you are not in the top 10% of your law class, many of those "cool" jobs will not be even an option until you get 2-5 years of experience doing something horribly boring for very little pay. Also coming from an IT field you may undervalue yourself in the work that you do, I know I did. Also, whatever you do, don't do family law. Please I did, and it was what turned me off of the legal profession completely. That is my 2 cents.
Mr. Plow, that's his name, his name again is Mr. Plow.
Program Intellivision!
Libertarians are perfectly aware that people have prejudices and do not recognize the need to do anything about it.
If a "prejudiced" employer only hires young people and an "enlightened" employer only hires experienced people, and the "prejudiced" employer outperforms the "enlightened" employer, then he has proven that his "prejudice" is a correct reflection of reality. Results speak for themselves. If the "enlightened" employer wins, than kudos to him.
You don't get magical treatment just because you are old. Why don't we force the NBA to hire 50 year old to play basketball?
Here is what I did, last year I came off a really good year, 6 figure income from my personal consulting business so I took a year off, and went back to UW-Madison to finish my foreign language requirements and took one advanced course towards degree CS credit.
I however, am back to work full time with my business and am making Bioinformatics tool sets for the mobile genomic researcher.
Now, if you can take a year off an pay for cash all of your expenses, plusd have a independant income like I have then you can do what you want.
However, even I would never consider taking all the time off to get a CS degree. That would be nuts and too costly.
So I do it when I have the time and money.
If you are thinking about taking off, or quitting your job, and taking out loans, you should see a doctor and have your head looked at to insure you haven't had a recent stroke or something.
-Hack
PS: It was a nice vacation too. The student lifestyle is pretty nice. Most of my friend at my age (47) look at me in wonder because they have no independent income, have a huge mortgage, and are in my view no better off than I am with thier degrees in hand. (Certainly far more stressed out it would seem.)
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
You have SO no idea what the working environment in Europe is, especially in Germany. A university degree is the entry card to a very invisible club. I work in a Telco, and that sector has had many lateral recruits in the 90s. One of my colleagues is a journeyman pastry chef. Another one is a licensed railway train driver. We have tons of physicists, electrical engineers, a few engineers of other disciplines, chemicists, a few MBAs, even a Master of Divinity, all doing IT and network engineering work.
Those without a university degree usually don't play in the same level though (exceptions do exist, but are rare). And even among those - Germany has an extensive sub-university education system. Folks with a technical journeyman qualification can easily find a job elsewhere. Those without have a very very hard time. They are chained to their current job - because to the HR dept in another company they are just a guy without papers.
I agree with much of what you said here. But the problem I've always had with the idea that a "good" I.T. worker being one who is constantly learning new things and adding items to a resume is, it's not that realistic when one works for a small to mid-sized company. (Even more unrealistic given a slow economy.)
I've been pretty much self-taught and self-motivated to try out new technologies and computer solutions since I got into this stuff in the mid 1980's, but I've never been the type to hop around from job to job. Most of my job changes actually came about only because the place I worked for closed up. (I started out working for several "mom and pop" type computer stores, for example, all of whom eventually went out of business.)
The problem is, my peers in I.T. who were basically "in it for themselves" without much regard for their employers racked up more impressive resumes than me, especially in the dot com boom days, when it was possible to accept a position, stay JUST long enough to claim you were responsible for X,Y and Z (cool new technologies of whatever type the place happened to be using), and then jump ship in the middle of a project for better pay at the next place needing someone who used those same technologies before. Lots of burnt bridges behind them? Sure -- but there are plenty of companies out there, especially for the young and single who can move from city to city if and when it's needed.
I, on the other hand, honestly hated the stress and uncertainty of job interviews ... and just wanted a stable job doing what I enjoy.
So where did that get me? Well, I was able to ride out much of the commotion from all the failed start-ups when the dot com era went bust, so that was a plus I guess. But the places I've worked for 5+ years in a row always stuck with the same "tried and true" technology. Sure, we'd do incremental upgrades on such things as Microsoft Office, or migrate Windows Server to newer versions eventually. But there's really only so much "resume building" one can do by staying at the same company, when their budget doesn't allow for buying lots of new software or hardware -- and they're (rightly, IMO!) trying to avoid high costs of re-training people on all new ways of doing things, once they've got something in place that's effective.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is -- it's not necessarily "resting on one's laurels", just because one hasn't added all sorts of new products to a resume. But I really do think recruiters and hiring managers look at it that way, most of the time. If a business paid me for 5-6 years to take care of the same set of technologies for them, that likely means those were good, solid choices that really got them their money's worth. There's no negative in having a deep familiarity with such solutions, vs. the next guy who can list of 5x as many technologies -- most of which were failures, so got removed after money was WASTED on them.