I perform: bluegrass, blues, country, rock, jazz, folk, funk and soul as needed.
I play: piano, acoustic guitar (flatpicking and gypsy swing), electric guitar (rock, blues and jazz), piano & organ (rock, jazz, blues), banjo (bluegrass), mandolin (bluegrass and jazz), electric and upright bass (all styles but classical) I also sing, both lead and harmony.
I teach: all of the above, plus music theory, songwriting, arranging and basic sound engineering, as the situation dictates.
So could you do my job without a degree? Sure. It’s about doing, not being educated (I’m self-employed)
But it’s gonna take you at *least *10 years to approach my level of proficiency, assuming you’ve got the talent.
My present job in retail? Absolutely. But a college education wasn’t required even in theory.
My just finished job as an Alternate Assessment Scorer, scoring alternative assesments for the students who are too cognitively disadvantaged to take the usual standardized assessments? I’m going to vote for “probably”.
It’s a temp job, and it brought in people of every age from early twenties to sixties. Every background from teaching to accountants to future doctors or missionaries. Male and female. Pre-career (if you know what I mean), mid-career, post-career (retired). People desparate for extra income and people just looking for something to keep them busy.
You needed a Bachelor’s degree to qualify for the interview, and then they gave you a few days or a week of information on how to score assessments, then you scored some assessments and they evaluated them to see how your scores held up. Those with a high enough accuracy were made table leaders, those with not quite such good scores were kept as scorers, those who didn’t make that cut were allowed to try a second time.
The actual work was somewhat stressful but did not require any special knowledge or skills. You were expected to learn to work independently, but certain types of questions always got referred to those with specialized knowledge, and there are checks and balances in place. I won’t say you couldn’t mess up royally, but you’d be unlikely to do so consistantly without being caught and re-calibrated. And that messing up could be as much from the wrong mindset as from lack of whatever it is you get out of a college education.
Okay - got it; using that thinking: no way…not even close!
ETA: and picker, from the sound of it, I would need at least 10 years of hard practice to do what you do…and I’ve already been playing for 30 years! That’s a lot of musical styles across a lot of instruments
Absolutely. In fact, my own degree has nothing to do with my career, nor am I even aware of a degree that is designed to teach you how to be a Business Analyst. (There is a professional certification program, similar to PMI, but it’s relatively new and not as widely recognized)
There’s a bit of specialised knowledge that’s specific to my industry and a few software packages that you’d need to learn to use, but most anyone could pick that up fairly quickly once you’re on the job. Other than that, all you need is some common sense, a good grasp of critical thinking, communication skills and reading comprehension, and a knack for writing in a clear and concise manner… most of which are part and parcel of a standard bachelor’s degree.
Machine engineering requires a knack to be good at it. It requires visualization and an understanding of how things work and fit together. Some people can do it easily and some can never get it. In Engineering school you get the math ,stress analysis and that sort of education. it does not necessarily translate into good conceptual or practical design.
Growing up playing multiple styles and then spending my twenties doing literally nothing but studying, touring and practicing had a lot to do with it.
Plus after college I had a period of about 5 years where I practiced approx. 6 hours a day, plus gigged at night and taught/studied the rest of the time. No social life, no nothing, (made up for it on the road )
Being a theory geek and jazz nut helped immensely too. I mean, if you can hack Giant Steps at 220, handling bg banjo at the same speed is just easier changes, same speed, and most rock and folk styles are simpler than that.
Being able to read music and play piano is what really makes the difference, though. Everything else is gravy, conceptually speaking, once you grab harmonic theory from a pianist’s perspective.
Oh yeah, and gig, gig, gig. Every minute on stage jamming is worth 10 in the woodshed. Nothing like working in real time to keep you honest.
My professional license and advanced degree have nothing whatsoever to do with the profession jobs I’ve been doing for the last decade. I’m a social worker (MSW, CSW, LMSW State of New York) and instead I’ve been doing database development since 1998 without benefit of a single computer sciences course (let alone degree in that field) and nary a single certification either.
I dunno if you would pick up database design as I did, but lack of specific training in it is no impediment.
As for social work itself, my training was all in program planning, administration and research but my relevant employment (back when I last did that for a living) was direct services to clients. I can’t say that any of the training I did receive taught me anything I did not already know about counseling and listening, and that while I did have lots of theoretical training that aided me in putting what my clients told me in a larger societal context, most of that training was NOT in my field and a good portion of it was independent reading I did on my own.
Yes, although these days I have to be able to carry on a pretty detailed conversation with both the business folks, engineers in different fields, and whatever scientists we come in contact with. It’s extremely unlikely that anyone without at least a bachelor’s would have the technical background to do all that, and this is certainly not an entry level position.
If you change citizenship, and get the security clearance, you might. It would depend upon your character, not your degree, in fact your own degree might even be a hindrance.
I suggest you need to be over 30, and preferably nearer to 40 before even starting - life experience is crucial, you would need a skilled trade background complete with proper trade papers and it takes at least 10 years in a skilled occupation to be a proper tradesperson, not some 25 week course in welding or car mechanics, you’ll need adult teaching qualifications - which is where the degree comes in.
Not easy to find folk with the combination of trade, experience, plus teaching qualifications, which is why you’ll probably be well over 30.
There’s folk who could do it, but not many who would want to.
Maybe. You could certainly learn all the necessary details of my job in a couple months (I basically did). But you’d have to start off able to read and carefully analyze long complex documents, be able to carefully and precisely write moderately complex documents, be comfortable doing minor to moderate calculations, be able to shift between different ongoing projects, and be able to work by yourself without direction. Now, you don’t need college to do that, but it is pretty good practice for most of those things.
(Technically to have my job title, I think you do need a degree).
My current job (PhD student): no way. Half the time, I have trouble with it. You’d need a fundamental understanding of fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, and heat transfer to do the research, and you’d have to be able to teach upper-level geochemistry.
You could do half of my previous job, especially if you spent some time working in construction. I worked for a company that manufactured pollution control systems, and my time was split between construction-phase installation and R&D. The construction work was stuff you could pick up - reading blueprints and doing installation inspections is pretty straightforward once you get the hang of it. Troubleshooting and making changes to the installation on the fly is tougher, but a few years of experience will teach you from a practical perspective what you can and can’t do (although you’d need a licensed engineer to sign off on some of your decisions). The hardest part of this half is dealing with the on-site crews. You have to be able to say “no” to a 50-year old foreman who’s been doing his job longer than you’ve been alive. It takes a while to get comfortable with that, and some people never do.
The R&D part would require more education - back to fluid mechanics and mathematical modeling.
Ya, you could probably do my job. I’m an engineer, entry level - 3 years exp, but its really simple engineering. In fact I’m the senior engineer, for my company, in this basin. I don’t even use a calculator more complicated then the once that comes with windows. Basically all you need is an understanding of how a wellbore is drilled which wouldn’t take more then two months on a rig and reading the textbooks in your spare time.
In general my job is coordinating between experts so as long as you have a basic understanding what they are saying and can then dumb it down so other can understand it you’ll be golden.
I would hate you for this, too - but I can’t even comprehend playing John Coltrane that fast (for those of you following at home, he is referring to playing Coltrane’s famously complex song Giant Steps at an absurdly high metronome speed, let alone bluegrass banjo, which makes my head spin…).
If I could play piano and read music, which I can’t - I would probably still hate you.
In a heartbeat - but only if you stop giggling at my technique and show me stuff!
All of this is a way of saying, in reference to the OP, no, you couldn’t do **picker’s **job!
The OP isn’t asking about the government’s licensing…he’s asking about what you do…
And I really would like to know: what do you do as a lawyer that I couldn’t learn by skipping the formal education and being an intern to you for a year or so? That’s how lawyers were trained back in Abraham Lincoln’s time.
In my job, I deal with a lot of real-estate lawyers. And most of what I need them for is procedural stuff: filing certain forms at certain times with certain goverment agencies. This is what they know how to do, and they do it very well–but they didn’t learn how to do it from 3 years of classroom ectures by law profesors. They learned it during their first year of internship.
I have bought and sold several houses, and each time the lawyer charged me a couple thousand dollars— just for typing my name and the price in the blanks on a standardized form, and then filing the papers with the proper government agencies. (Yes, I admit that he has to know a little bit of theoretical contract law, too, so he could have represented me if my buyer breached the contract, etc,… But I’ll bet that I could learn that theory too, within one year of shadowing him around his office, with no formal legal education.
I wouldn’t be a very good lawyer, but I could do a lawyer’s job, methinks.
(Please, please prove me wrong…I’ve paid so many legal fees for so many trivial legal functions, I want to believe that I paid for something valuable )
So IOW, “yes”. **Agent Foxtrot **could do your job after reading a Dilbert book.
Seriously though. I have a similar job. As a mid to senior level consulting firm manager it’s hard to say whether you can do my job. A lot of it is intuitive to me, but I’ve been working for 14 years and I have both an engineering degree and MBA. So it’s difficult to separate what specific skills I learned on the job vs what I was formally taught and what I just sort of picked up by oasmosis.
I’m a lawyer, and there’s no question that just about any resonably intelligent person could do my job with not all that much training.
And, IMO, the same could be said for a great many - if not most - lawyers.
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