For anyone not catching the Office Space reference, the joke in the movie was that Joanna (Jennifer Anniston) was told that she needed to attach a minimum of 15 pieces of flair to her uniform as part of company policy, however, she is later pulled aside and reprimanded for not going "above and beyond" like one of her co-workers with his 37 pieces of flair. She simply asks if she then needs to wear 37 pieces, but the manager dodges giving her a straight answer and implies that it is a reflection of her work ethic to chase these moving goal posts.

Granted, there is a lot to unpack about the many toxic elements of corporate culture being lampooned here, but let's focus for now on the idea that we have this vending machine approach to proving competence that lazy HR has inflicted upon us for far too long.

So, you have to finish high school, right? If you didn't, run back and get your GED-- which of course carries all kinds of stigma.  But then you're done, right? You have met minimal competence as a mindful citizen to enter the work force.  No, get a degree you bum!

You mean associates, right? No, I'll just stop you right there and tell you the answer is: bachelors.  No HR person will come right out and say that an associates will barely carry any weight out there, but you'll figure it out for yourself if you try to go that route.

So, bachelors and I'm queued up in the resume stack, right? If you want to be an underemployed barista, maybe.  Do you want to make decisions about your life or have them made for you? Well, that seems a bit harsh, but what does that mean? Do I go to grad school? That seems like an academic trajectory. HR Goon says, "MBA = grad school." Poof! Now you have a masters degree (not really) and your ticket to white collar whatever is now in the mail.

So, that's it? I toil away in the academic mines until I get an MBA (for non-academic work) or some other masters (if you actually want to focus on something in higher ed). The answer, unfortunately, is still no. 

If you want to go toward something academic, or at least "less applied", you will need a PhD. I could ramble on for pages about the ridiculous gatekeeping you are about to encounter, but I'll just quickly point out that many doctoral programs don't want to be part of an educational system. They want to be part of a prestige system. So, they filter candidates not so much on who can experience the most change via entering their program (what would seem like a fair goal of an educational institution), but rather which candidates are the most likely to reflect favorably on whichever institution can take the credit for their accomplishments (See also: honorary degrees).  Even if you decide to buy into the agonizing world of pursuing a doctorate, you have guaranteed yourself nothing unless you hit several other jackpots along the way: Is your advisor a big deal? Is your institution a big deal? Is your department within your big deal institution a big deal? Is your fledgling publication earth-shattering, or moreover, has your perfectly decent publication been overshadowed by someone or something else (clearly not reflective of your competence, but merely an accident of timing)?  Add to all of this, the fact that your labor will be exploited for the duration as grad students are more notoriously underpaid and overworked than undergrads and this could drag on for years.

Did you also consider a professional doctorate? Unless you are considering an MD, that is not going to go as well as you have been led to believe.  Professional doctorates are regarded by the collective industries about as well as just showing up at an interview and saying, "I've mostly just taken a handful of classes beyond a masters but I really want people to call me "doctor"!"

Well, anyway, that's it, though... right? A doctorate-- a PhD-- is the best you can do, right? First of all, maybe if you are in the US, you've never heard of the non-philosophy based doctorates that are also not professional, but those also exist. The good news is that not many HR people have heard of them either. Good news if you don't have one, real bummer if you do. Have fun explaining your SciD to the HR drone.

Then, we get into fellowships and academic positions and the wonders of realizing that the prestige from the institution where you got your degree does not necessarily predict the prestige of the institution where you can hold a tenured position. Yep. You'll be chasing tenure until you get it and it is highly political and demoralizing. 

Again, pages could be written about how tenure is widely misunderstood in its value and application. I'll sum it up briefly. Tenure was meant to protect academic researchers from work-related consequences when their research was not viewed favorably by their employers. For example, if you publish something about the Earth being round and your employer is a flat-Earther, he can't fire you over it.  It is not meant to be a carte blanche for "job security for life no matter what". Being straight-up bad at your job is not supposed to be protected by tenure.

So, OK, academia seems brutal. I'll just go with industry or private companies (maybe non-academic public sector). I even got my MBA, so I'm at the top of that heap now, right? No, dude.  Just, no....

Clearly you have not ventured down that rabbit hole of certifications. Well, which ones do I need? Nobody can actually answer that. For almost any certificate there is likely at least one other that supposedly indicates the same competency. That's good, right? Just like I can go to any academic institution and get a degree, I can choose the alphabet soup I want trailing my name. Yes to that last part, no to that first part. You won't know which certs matter until you pick a specific job and company. They all have their preferences and biases. Sometimes there is a pretty clear majority impression and sometimes there is not. The point is that it is not as simple as degrees-- and my earlier rant-vomit probably convinced you those are super straightforward, I would think.

Then, there is the actual attainment and maintenance of certs. Degrees may put you in debt for life, but at least once you pay for them, you don't owe them any more money (other than the monthly IV drip from your bank account for the rest of your life if you couldn't manage to be born rich or get a scholarship)<-- [US bias here. The money factor is not as much a part of the problem elsewhere.]

The exams are (often) expensive and quite often presume a considerable amount of esoteric knowledge. So, where do people get this knowledge? Why, they go to boot camps and prep courses! Aren't you glad you dodged going back to school?

Once you pass your cert exam, you get to pay for annual maintenance (usually) and earn continuing education credits (quite often not free) then-- for no reason whatsoever-- it expires in some fashion and you either have to retake the cert exam (for some renewal fee) or jump through some other hoop, like projects or whatever.  Sure, industries grow and change and it is important that you, as a professional, do as well. However, one might think your employer would enforce this more effectively than some board of academics who love to insist that everyone be an unrealistic paragon of their profession to be employable. 

(Full disclosure: as of this writing I sit on the exam writing committee for a cert board. I know how this stuff works from the inside. I wanted to see what I could do to improve things from within. I guess we'll see....)

So, what about areas like IT which have a gabillion certs? Which ones do I get? Nobody knows, grasshopper.  Some just keep adding strings of letters to their names ad infinitum. Some pick one and hope they're done. 

Is the opinion of an accredited ivory tower that has bestowed a degree on you more important or a constantly nagging cert board? Surely they are mutually exclusive, right? Nobody would expect you to get a degree and get certified, right?

...yeah.... Degrees are quite often prerequisites for certifications, my friend.

So, I guess it's settled. I just get a degree and skip the whole cert mess. No can do, amigo. Go look at your doctor's wall. He had to get a medical degree, pass the board certification exams for his medical specialty, and get licensed by his local government.  

HR has convinced industries worldwide that exemplary academic performance is a minimum requirement, that higher education is necessary to pursue non-academic professions, and that assessing competence is a moving target that is best handled by throwing money at it.

(You might note that the office wall of your friendly neighborhood HR pal does not have several degrees, multiple certifications, and government licensures. Huh. How about that?)

Well, I've ranted long enough. I don't know if I've said anything helpful to anyone, but I needed to get all this off my chest.  Hopefully, I can put a skeptical bend in your perception of this nonsense and the newer additions to the workforce will realize the folly of all this and start to unravel it and replace it with better ideas. Perhaps the best way to move civilization forward is not to simply continue doing what was best hundreds of years ago.  And, you know, maybe also consider who these methods are serving. (Hint: I won't give it away, but it sounds like "corporate overlords")