Amerika

This came up on our most recent and yet still unreleased podcast: many of, if not the majority of, the superstars in information technology are not people who went through the educational system to get STEM degrees.

In the UK, at least, 41% of IT pros did not go through the formal credentialing process:

A new report from Spiceworks, entitled A Portrait of IT Workers, says 41 per cent of IT pros in the UK consider themselves “accidental” — and that they ended up in their career via a “non-traditional” route. The report, which covers areas including the career plans and education levels of IT professionals, found that a third (33 per cent) of the UK’s IT job force don’t have a college or a university degree.

This follows what we know of modern education, which is that it rewards people who are good at school — memorization and reconfiguring that information in a test environment — and not those who are good at applying the knowledge, which consists of innate ability for logical analysis partnered with real-world wisdom.

Tags: education, information technology, STEM