what is the key to sucess??? Education or experience

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wat is da key to success experience or education..??

 

I don't mean to be picky, Arro - but it's actually 'Gangsta'.

 

Kissing Ass, or being good at your job and making good contacts.

 

Actually, its 'Gangxxxta' I believe. But I am in full agreement with Arro. Its really f*cking annoying.

 

Of a choice between the two, experience will always trump "education" if it is a choice between one or the other. Being able to do it, and having proven that you have done it is always going to be preferable to having read about how to do it.

I agree, however, with Kev. Networking is just as important in a lot of cases unfortunately. Its not so much what you know, but who you know.

 

As the resident youngster here. I have not the foggiest what you are all talking about. You are all too "sick" for me.

It's a mixture of both Education and Experience. You should always be looking to improve not just your industry/job specific education and knowledge base, but your general one as well. Learning lessons and being able to cookie cut past experiences into the current is pretty critical too.

On another note, I am interested in what coolCs opinion is!

 

I can speak from personal experience in saying that experience definitely trumps education. I left the military back in '09 with no degree and zero certs. Within two months I landed a temporary role that I ended up turning down for permanent upon an offer from another company. What got me the job was my experience and my personal skills (i.e. communication, work-ethic, professionalism, etc.). I made it clear to them in the interviews how I was the best candidate, and the fact that I had no degree or cert did not stop them from hiring me.

That being said, education can take the experience you already have and make you MORE valuable to prospective employers and set you up for success. It won't guarantee success, but make it more likely with you have a good combination of the two.

 

Nerd Speak ITT

 

Neither or both.

You cant have one without the other. Think of Dune. The worm is the spice, the spice is the worm.

Education is experience, experience is education.

 

what nugget said.

Also be aware that there are many people on here who are employers and you may get a chance with them if you are lucky so typing in text speak wont do you any good.

Text speak is for mobile phones not typing on a public forum, it just makes you look lazy and a bit of a tool.

Sorry if that sounds harsh but it's a fact.

 

Experience is education.
To be successful, you have to continually educate yourself. Not just in techy stuff but all the ins and outs of working life.

 

Text speak can be very annoying even on a mobile phone. I may only resort to this if 160 characters is simple not enough, but nevertheless try to avoid it as it's common courtesy to give others the respect of speaking (typing) to them doesn't drive them down to a lower level.

Maybe I'm just getting old as I violated that very rule back when I was ~15 and hang out on bulletin boards...

 

This.

I wholeheartedly believe in education. If I did not, I wouldn't be in the IT certification training field. But experience will always trump education. In truth, experience IS a form of education... it's education on how to do things in a real-world environment. Education on its own, without any real-world experience behind it, is simply theoretical and unapplied knowledge.

All that said... I don't think either one of these is "THE KEY TO SUCCESS", because I don't think that there's just one key. There are many keys that will increase the chances of success, of which experience and education are only two. But there are certain keys which, if missing, can absolutely derail your chance of success. These "vital" keys include drive/motivation, determination/willpower, and mindset/attitude. Lacking any of these can cause a career to stagnate or fail, no matter how much experience or education you have.

 

I think that this is what really takes people to success in this job market. Many are so focused on certs and CVs that they are forgetting that at the end of the day the employer wants someone who will be a good all-around employee. Especially in the IT world where more times than not you are having to communicate with users and managers about the service that is being provided. The things BosonMichael has said are what will set you apart from the regular breed of job seekers in that it shows the employer that you truly do have more to offer than just being the "computer guy". I'm of the belief that if you know your stuff AND possess these "soft" skills, you will have a much EASIER (not easy) time getting by in these tough times.

 

As Ken says education covers a lot more than just formal education, and does not mean you 'just read about it' or 'just watched someone else do it'.

Even if we are just talking about formal education, what about people with Physics PhD's ? You think none of them do any groundbreaking work or experiments during their years at college ? What about professional researchers / professors at educational establishments ?

Agreed many routes to success and many factors, there is no one answer, 'there is no silver bullet', looking for one merely shows that the person has no real understanding of the world or the industry or solving problems in general.

 

As someone who holds a Chemistry degree (minor in Physics) and has seen that research in action, comparing science research to IT study is apples to oranges.

 

It was in response to Fergals general remarks on education, people seem to assume that everything on the forum relates to IT support, the terms education and IT both cover huge areas. People can and do take advanced computer science education courses, at various levels including post doc, IT vs hard science education, while different does not have to be apples to oranges. Some people do make real breakthoughs while on such courses. To infer otherwise is rather disingenuous, not all of IT is turning something 'on and off' again, somebody has to design the hardware, OS's, algorithms, etc.

I know people with Chemistry degrees and PhD's, they made the same arguments that you have made, that they needed a PhD to do more than wash test tubes, so you could argue that lower level chemistry grads are just like techs anyway, they become lab technicians.

As to IT vs Science, well Tim Berners Lee pretty much invented the internet while at CERN, Googles creators pretty much invented Google at Stanford, etc. There can be overlap between science and IT, generally I'd have to agree that the average science PhD is going to discover more than the average Computer Science Phd. The point is there is good and bad research, as well as good and bad degrees as well as good and bad work experience, none of them automagically prove anything without some further 'qualification' as in the measurement sense.