How long do you have? I write software for a living and I do a very wide range of things, from talking to machinery to database to graphics. It would take you a long time to develop all the different skills needed to do the things I do.
But I wouldn’t say you couldn’t.
Anyone else surprised at the number of folk who contine to comment on the degree/licensing requirements of their position?
Does that reflect cluelessness, an intentional misreading of the question, a desire to flaunt their accomplishments, or something else?
Surprised? No.
Doing what I’m doing, taking away the licensing requirements, still requires a great amount (years) of training. Which he is not able to get on his own, as they only give the training in some academic facilities which will require more education.
Can he cut up a dead animal? He could, the techs down at the necropsy floor can do that. Will he be able to answer to the veterinarian and tell him WTF is wrong with the animal, what where the findings, what are the next diagnostic steps, etc.? And say it in a technical/medical language, not just “Liver looks bad”?
Learning how to cut into tissue properly is not difficult, nor is it staining (I did it for years)… But once he sees the tissue under the microscope, will he be able to diagnose it? Will he be able to tell the vet what it is, give prognostic information (if available), confirm or deny the diagnosis the vet has in mind, etc.? Will he stand by his position, even though his word may mean death or life for the animal? That’s what I’m training for.
Similarly, will he be able to do spays or neuters? What about sick animals? Does he know how to treat different diseases? Does he know what are the most likely causes of X for X animal species? I mean, I get senior students going through my rotations who still struggle with that. I struggled with it through college… I see my cases (dead animals) sometimes die because of what their vet did. And those are all with training and licensing.
So I’m guessing no, he cannot just switch places with me.
Yes - my manager doesn’t have a degree.
I create online training materials for salespeople to learn about consumer electronic products. I double majored in Political Science and French Language and Literature - so I’m a good writer and have a strong grammar background which is definitely helpful, but it’s not like my degrees are integral to my day to day job.
If you can write, you can do this job. Since I get a lot of content from people I work with, I’m really surprised how many people in corporate America (I work for a very large consumer electronics company) cant write at all. Most of my job is proof reading, copy editing, a little graphics/layout, research and writing good assessment questions. I also get to do fun stuff like encourage people to come take our training - designing/managing prize programs, etc.
This is exactly how I got my job in advertising (media buyer). I only have an AA degree but got my foot in the door at an ad agency through a temp job and then just started asking for more responsibility and proving myself.
If the practice of law in your location is anything like the practice of law in the states, lawyers primarily learn how to respond to such situations through on-the-job training, rather than from law school. If anything, I think most reasonably intelligent persons could learn the basic vocabulary and research skills necessary to practice law through a brief intensive course, after which they could obtan their “apprenticeship” at the expense of their clients and under the supervision of more experienced lawyers.
I consider this far different from medical, technical, and artistic fields others have mentioned, where the basic ability to perform the job demands certain innate or acquired skills and abilities.
One of the things I do is issue “no-rise” certifications. These must be stamped by a civil engineer licensed to pratctice in the State of Mississippi. So, I’ll go with “something else”. 
As a computer programmer, I’ve worked with the degreed and the non-degreed. I don’t see much difference between the two. To do business programming, you need: basic equation solving skills, the ability to listen to and comprehend what your clients’ problems are, and the desire to solve problems. For the most part, it ain’t rocket science.
Not everyone is suited to my profession, with or without the education and licensing.
How squeemish are you? Do bad smells make you want to hurl? Can you think clearly with a whole lot of screaming in your ear? Does blood in copious quantities upset you? How do you do under pressure? Good people skills when the same people are trying to bite you? Are you physically able to spend over 12 hours a shift rushing from one cold, sterile room to another?
Can you tactfully and compassionately tell a woman she’s never going to be able to have another child? Can you explain to an family what congenital defects mean to a lifestyle? Can you look a 19 year old college student in the eye and comfort her when her baby dies from all the cocaine she ingested ?
I hope you can, because I want to retire someday.
Cyn, RN
If you could do my job, more power to you. Right now, I am in the process of trying to prove that if R is a boolean algebra, then any submodule of any power of R is a a fixed object for the duality Hom_R(-,R)) between the categories of discrete and topological boolean algebras.
I realize that sounds like (but believe me, isn’t) gobbledygook, but that is the sort of thing that my life as a mathematician consists of. Although I have the degrees, it is really open to anyone who wants to try to do my job, no degrees necessary. Every once in a while, someone manages to slip in without degrees. “Good Will Hunting” was fiction but it does, very rarely, happen.
It’s a reflection of the fact that licensing requirements have other functions. For example, to be registered in my profession, outside of the requirement of a degree, you have to be “of good character” and a “fit and proper person”. Supposedly, these requirements are for the protection of the public and the protection of the reputation of the profession.
Interestingly, I work with people who either have three years on-the-job training or a three year university degree to do the same job, which kind of proves, that no, you don’t need a degree to do my job. Our approaches are very different though. The on-the-job people tend to do things by rote, while the degreed people tend to problem solve.
Could reflect the fact that people are responding to the question in the OP and not the later addendum.
I agree, I’m a public school band teacher, and I teach guitar lessons plus freelance gig with a variety of bands in rock / jazz forms. Also do classical guitar.
I consider my “education” degree to be a “bullshit” degree in so many ways. Since I’m a guitar player by training I learned how to teach band through the school of hard knocks. I trained myself to play trumpet by leaching off of better players, and joining community bands. Really I honestly think I have a better concept of trumpet then some people who actually have degrees in it (certainly not all, I’m not that good). I did it mostly by myself. This alone really makes me question doing any more schooling in a fine arts program.
So hell yeah, if you want become a band teacher! It’s fun! 
But you will have to get a BS (bullshit) in Education
I’m surprised by the arrogance of many people who feel that they can just walk onto someone elses job and do it with no education or training.
I always say there are two basic questions to qualify someone for my job: 1. Do you mind having people angry at you? and 2. Do you enjoy reading Chaucer?
I’m an expert in the Federal Aquisition Regulations, and spend most of my time telling Program Managers why they can not do what their customers have asked them to do. It’s not fun most of the time, and if nobody is PO’d then you are probably slacking.
You’d have to read, comprehend, and be able to quote the FAR, among other rules and reg.s.
So, could you do it tomorrow? No. Could you get the job without a degree? Most folks who do this job have a law degree, I never finished my undergrad. Could you learn it on your own without the help of a professor? See question two above.
Did you see the episode of the Flintstones where Fred was the doppelganger for a business tycoon who’d gone missing? I forget the plot, but the people egging him on to do this said that he needed to say only three things:
[ul][li]Who’s baby is that?[/li][li]What’s your angle?[/li][li]I’ll buy that![/ul][/li]So he spent much of the episode saying those three things as people came at him with various problems, and by and large, people didn’t notice.
I’m currently managing a group of engineers doing odd things, and if you followed me around for a week and filtered out the domain-specific jargon, it wouldn’t really seem all that different. At this point, I have to go into meetings without sufficient time to prepare, and make quick decisions that sometimes have big consequences. If you had experience with motivating people, felt comfortable estimating the size of complex engineering tasks, and were somewhat successful at separating the wheat from the chaff when looking at complex, malfunctioning systems, you could probably do it.
The challenge is that it requires a lot of experience and reputation. A guy I worked with a few years ago expressed frustration that, at a presentation he had given, people had started expressing doubts about one part of his design, and after about two minutes of back and forth discussions, I just piped in, “He can do this; it’s not a big deal.” Everybody basically accepted that and we moved on. That was a little unfair to him, but I was more of a known quantity to them.
So, where you might hear me say, “We can do that” or “I’m worried about that,” I’m condensing a couple of decades of experience into deciding what’s important and what’s not; if I make a wrong call, people will suffer six months later, and it would eventually come back and bite me.
There’s also the issue of managing engineers. I don’t want to be a manager, but got so frustrated by bad managers that I ended up stepping into the fray, and have alternated between doing straight technical work and being a team lead for most of my career. As an engineer, I just want people to say what their requirements are, give me the resources to do the job and leave me alone to do the work. When I work as a team leader, I do what I can to create those working conditions for the people I’m working with.
Overall, you probably could perform my team lead activities without specific experience, but you’d probably have to form a relationship with a more technically oriented person to help bring you up to speed.
Note, however, that the job is managing radar sw engineers who will be integrating their software on experimental hardware, so when I say jargon, I mean that they might sound like squeaks, clicks and whistles to someone unfamiliar with radar, signal processing, physics and embedded software development. (This is why you’d need to quickly find a technical mentor). Still, it could be done.
For my current position as a graduate student, I think the most important thing to consider is why you didn’t pursue formal education past an AA. Is it because you can’t stand academia? Then, no, you couldn’t do my job. Is it because you want nothing more than to spend as many of your waking hours as possible learning everything there is to know about topics that no one else cares much about, but can’t do that because life intervened? Then most likely. I imagine the learning curve would be nasty, though.
I’m an English teacher in China. Yeah, you could easily do this job without a degree, and I’ve heard plenty of stories of people faking degrees to get past the regulations.
You’d probably have a better time of it if you have interest in teaching and some basic teacher training. I’ve done 22 weeks of teacher training in all and I think that went a long way towards helping know where to start when it comes to teaching. You get a freedom and training can help give you some direction.
Putting the education bit aside, how many of us could do our own current jobs without any training? 