In the future, perhaps decades from now, perhaps centuries from now, we will never need to convince anyone of our worth. They will simply see into our minds (with the help of some new machine or technology) and understand both what we have done and, far more important, what we might one day be capable of. Pure potential will be visible, and therefore there will be a lot less anxiety around qualifications.
But right now, potential employers are more or less blind to what is “inside” us. We can tell them that we are eminently capable, but they won’t be convinced unless we have something primal and large to wave before them: a CV adorned with the big blunt titles of modern higher education. Names like “Harvard” and “Wharton” are highly prized badges that promise nervous potential employers that they have landed upon people with competence, drive, common sense, and brilliance. That’s why so many of us are willing to do pretty much anything to ensure that we can wear such badges to interviews.
However, the badges are also remarkably crude. In the day-to-day operations of a modern organization, it quickly becomes more or less irrelevant what fancy university someone went to. There are far more fine-grained and important skills that make the difference between a nightmarish employee and a great one. What might count, for example, is whether someone is defensive or open-minded, rivalrous or cooperative, able to take chances or timid to a fault. As yet we have no “badges” that can show whether people are going to fall on the right side of those equations. Therefore most employers are still, to a large extent, hiring blind.
This anxiety helps explain the highly legitimate search for the “microcredential,” which documents competence in a specific skill. Microcredentials matter because a successful career depends on a range of narrow skills working in concert. It isn’t a degree in economics that makes a great employee in a bank; it’s skills such as “assessing risk” and “grasping the needs of your team.” As yet the prestigious badge-givers of the world haven’t looked in a granular enough way at the component parts of the successful employee. They are happy to give credentials like the M.A. and Ph.D., but we need those monoliths to be broken down — and continually improved upon — to reduce the risk of buyer’s remorse.
The current university system, with its four-year degree program leading to a one-badge qualification, is a result of an older, more naïve world. Our era needs people with a long list of nameable skills that can be added to over time and recognized by strangers, so that everyone can be sure what it means that we have taken a microcredit in public speaking or Turkish business law.
It is, of course, much more convenient to sell students one large qualification rather than offer an array of mini ones. But from an employer’s point of view, it is far better to have a person with numerous mini qualifications that can be inspected carefully — rather than risk the hire of an expensive “genius” on the basis of nothing more examined than that she has graduated with honors from Stanford.
Mini-qualifications arm us against snobbery in all its forms. They allow us all to hone our talents in supposedly “small” areas and thereby become more effective and fruitful employees and humans. In the future, we won’t study for a B.A. for four years; we’ll repeatedly study for a beautifully formed microcredit for four hours at a time.
Alain de Botton is a writer and philosopher whose books — which include Status Anxiety, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, and volumes on sex, art, and other topics — have been described as offering a philosophy of everyday life. He lives in London.
