Nursing is a little bit of a special case - in addition to an LPN going back to get a degree and qualify as an RN, it’s still possible in at least some states to be licensed as an RN without any degree, just a diploma from a non- degree granting nursing school. My cousin was an RN with one of those diplomas and got a bachelor’s a few years ago , not to get a raise at her current job but so she could change jobs. All the other facilities required a bachelor’s degree for new hires.
I figured that my knowledge (actually my sister’s) was out of date.
I was that guy, many decades ago.
I was working in IT at a major pharma, having shown my chops while working in a stockroom–I was designing databases between other tasks–but without a formal degree my pay had always been anchored by “starting hourly pay of stockroom worker” plus “multiple years of max percent allowed”
At night I would go to university classes a few days a week. After six years I completed the bachelor’s degree.
My boss looked at me with sad eyes as he gave the max raise allowed by HR (I think it was 10%) and he said “unfortunately, the only way to ever match your peers is for you to leave”
…and so I did. I spent six months working in an entirely different industry.
Then one fine evening as I was out mowing the grass my old boss pulled up and asked if I was interested in coming back (Boy howdy was I!). A month later I was back in the saddle, with about a 50% increase from before, bringing me into alignment with my peers.
In a major corporation, it is quite unlikely that they will suddenly provide a pay increase even though they had been underpaying by a huge amount.
I have no issues with the way this worked: the company paid for my education, and had a strange hoop for me to jump through before I would be paid at my level.
Good for your boss.
I was once down-rated by my boss because when i failed to get approval for a promotion for my best employee, i was honest with my employee that i wouldn’t be able to promote him for two more years (per my boss, who didn’t want to promote an employee in fewer than 3 years.) So when another department recruited him, i gave him a strong recommendation and wished him the best of luck when he took the job. I had failed to retain my staff, you see.
And yes, i had trouble replacing him, and struggled for a while, but he and the overall company both were better off. He got promoted into another department the following year, and is still doing really well at that company.
My boss was an asshole.
(i got that job because he failed to promote the woman there before me. And then he hired me at the level he refused to promote her to. I knew what i was walking into–she was a friend and gave me an honest assessment, and the job worked out well for me overall. Sometimes it’s worth it to work for an asshole for a while.)
just to add one rationale (not the only one, mind you) …
if you produce after the MBA et al. the same output, paying you more, would be the definition of “introducing inefficiencies” … (same output with higher input cost = inefficiency)
So, unless the person can demonstrate they produce “more or better” output, it is a hard case to ask for a raise. After all, it is more than evident that the job did NOT require an MBA …
that’s the theoretical part … the practical solution is: go out and find a job at a different company at MBA level/responsability/pay.
That’s one of the problems with companies these days. They treat employees like fixed, interchangeable cogs as opposed to someone who can continue to grow and develop within the corporation. An engineer or programmer with an MBA is well positioned to shift into a product owner or marketing role. A shop manager with an MBA would be well positioned for a more executive role. But companies often think “An Engineer I can only become an Engineer II in a few years”. Then they’ll go outside the firm to hire professional managers who stay at the company just long enough to learn something to bring to their next job.
I suppose that’s one of the main reasons most people who aren’t in an Executive MBA program paid for by their company usually get their MBA in their 20s so they can get MBA jobs in consulting, sales, or finance.
I was an engineer with a BS working for the DoD. I was hired as a GS-7, but if I’d had a master’s, I’d have started as GS-9. However, getting an advanced degree while employed likely wouldn’t have made much of a difference, since I wasn’t at all interested in a management position. In fact, I had a coworker with a PhD and he and I were both GS-13, so only our longevity determined our paycheck, and I think we were both at the top of the scale. Of course, government rules don’t apply in the real world.