Yes, you can be overqualified. At one research center I was a manager in, there was a PhD who insisted everyone call him Dr. This got him a certain level of respect until it got around that his thesis was on sociology. His earlier EE degree vanished in people’s minds and that extra degree made him seem less qualified instead of more.
Another example, my sister got her PhD writng a book of literary criticism. When she found a job, it was with an ad agency that just wanted to have a few titles on its roster to wow clients. She ended up “writing” billboards for Serta mattresses that showed a woman rubbing her back and one word: Serta. Talk about overqualified! She’s now a prof in lit crit.
Do companies actually check if a master’s was obtained in a terminal or non-terminal program? I got a terminal master’s, but from a school and department that gives out a lot of PhDs. Just wondering how screwed I am for job hunting 
One way for a company to find out that your master’s degree is non-terminal is for you to list your top degree on your resume as “ABD in [Subject],” as if ABD (All But Dissertation) was an actual degree. :dubious:
(I had a supervisor who did this on their CV.)
Basically what they were wary of were anything other than something like an MFA or an MLS. A Masters in English or Sociology or Anthropology was a red flag to the HR people.
When I first came to the US, after my work permit arrived, I took the first job I was offered, because I needed a job. After two years, I couldn’t stay there in that mind-numbingly inane place, so I started looking for other jobs.
After she read my resume and talked to me, I was told by the manager that I was overqualified to work at CompUSA. (That ought to give you an idea of the kind of people they want to have as employees…) I couldn’t understand it at the time, but upon reflection, that was probably the best favor she could have done for me. I kept looking and wound up with a career in the field where I am most qualified.
I have a PhD in one of the hard sciences. If I applied for an MS, or (gasp!) a BS level position, I would never even get an interview. The worry is that I would start the job, be bored in six months, and want to leave.
Which sucks because the market for PhD jobs is awful (and are actually lower paid than MS level jobs for some reason).
There is a bit of a change lately where young mothers with PhDs can basically say that they want off the scientist treadmill into a stable 9-5 job that pays decently. But, that particular group seems to be the only ones pulling it off consistently.
Yes.
Suppose you get a job answering questions that are to be answered from the company responses. You’re education makes you know the company answers have major flaws that most of the workers don’t see exist. How long until you go nuts answering the calls incorrectly everyday, or get fired for not delivering the official company answer.
I’m overqualified for my job. Former restaurant owner now a chef. I had to lop the last 5 years off my resume to get the job. Nobody wants to hire someone who can go around saying “When I was boss, we …”. And I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t have hired an ex owner myself.
That information is going to make NajaHusband a very sad panda.
Just wondering - was the store you applied at one of the dozens of CompUSA stores that went out of business about 6 months ago?
No, they’re still in business. It’s the only one of their stores in this area, and it serves as a training center for the paragons of mediocrity they send to other stores that haven’t gone out of business yet.
We don’t have a problem with being over-qualified per se - but with people who expect to be paid more because they have qualifications that are not useful to us. In the majority of cases, we get better value from a CS graduate than someone with a Masters who has studied an irrelevant field (which is almost always the case as you don’t get Masters degrees in devleoping POS software).
My MS in Chemistry? It’s got personality issues. Depending on where I apply, it’s on the resume or not. I know I’ve had jobs where I would never have been hired with that MS on the page.
But then, by now I have three distinct resumes:
- the one that lists all my work history indicating the MS period as a teaching job in a university,
- the one that “bares all,” including that MS, the MS in Safety, the Exchange Research stay in Germany and the (very short) list of publications, and
- the one that’s even longer, doesn’t mention non-consulting jobs at all, barely brushes over my qualifications and has each consulting job puffed up to half a page or more (I have no idea why agents want it this way, I’d be bored out of my skull by page 2).
Be a little careful with this. I’ve seen people fired for not disclosing that they have degrees on their CV. We had someone working for about six months who it turned out had a PhD that she didn’t have listed, because it would have made her overqualified for her MS level position, and was fired for being dishonest on her application.
She had a job for six months she wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. That’s money to live on.
Yeah, but she was looking for a career, not a temp job.
Damn, that’s really shitty. Sometimes you just can’t win. If she was doing a good job in her current position, it seems like the company didn’t gain anything by firing her. It’s not like she was claiming a degree she didn’t posess.
In general, you are free to list whatever true job qualifications you think make you look most marketable on a resume. Omissions are OK, pretty much everyone has to trim a little bit or it would be pages of drivel. On an application, there is usually a statement you sign saying the information is correct and complete. So that is definitely the time to 'fess up about any extra degrees you have lying around. Read the fine print of what you’re signing. Employers don’t want people who will lie to them. And, even though an extra Ph.D. is not a bad thing, employers tend to take a zero tolerance position on application misstatement, because the more common problems are omitted criminal convictions or made-up credentials, pretty serious stuff.
Never forget the bosses who feel threatened by those who outexcel them and I’m not even on about those who think that your after their job.