​January/ February/ March​

Experience VS Education

Over the years I have learned that you can’t have experience without a level of education and you can’t have education without experience. However, what I have come to discover is that experience can sometimes trump formal education. Now the keyword is formal because I am truly an advocate of education but education comes in many different forms. On the other hand, experience only comes from experience.

For instance, you can have a double masters degree even a Ph.D. and instead of it taking you 8 years it took you 4 years ( need to get normal time to go straight through college for these degrees, and the years for an accelerated course). Many would believe that taking these accelerated courses and receiving these extra degrees in four years would allow you to get all of your education out the way so that when you get out of school you can move forward in your career. However, I’ve learned that in completing accelerated education, one is actually skipping out on valuable education that would have come from more experiences over time.

It is best practice to get your fundamental education and even an additional degree while still making sure you have internships and jobs in between for you to gain the experience needed to be successful in your field. There are many situations where people who have less formal education, however, have many more years of experience, get jobs because they are best suited for the culture of a workplace do to that experience coupled with any formal education that they have received. However, the flip side to this is when large corporations are ready to trim the fat, they will reassign position requirements to trim the fat. This is the difference between entrepreneurship and working in a corporate structure.

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