Get High at Work!

Tag: software

  • Don’t go to college

    Following on yesterday’s topic, “Your college degree is worthless“, I’m tacking in a different direction today. What I learned in college is serving me very well today. However, when I was in college (get ready), we didn’t have smart phones, email, laptops, or social media. The world has changed – completely – and the mindset around a college education has to change along with it.

    Even before my time, if you had a college degree, you really set yourself above the fray. If you got an MBA (which I did), then you were head and shoulders above everyone else. There are still a set of very specific areas in which a college degree (not “the equivalent”) is required, including (but certainly not limited to):

    • Medicine
    • Engineering
    • Accounting
    • Law
    If you are going to pursue a career in these or similar fields, you must get a college degree, and then some. No getting around it, and all of those are very respectable and much in demand careers that pay well, enabling you to pay back all the loans you’ll probably need to get through all that schooling.



    However, if your bent is toward technology, either software development or networking technologies or any sort of digital skills, you do not need to go to college. I’ll say that again: to work in the fastest growing sector of jobs in today’s economy, you do not need to go to college. You do not need to spend 52 months pursuing a college degree just to say you got a college degree. You do not need to spent a ridiculous amount of money over those 4+ years when you could be working and earning money.



    College ain't cheap!



    Instead, you can engage in shorter, more specific, more valuable, and more employable education, like any one of the following:

    • learn to write software in 3 months for less than $15k. Software developers are experiencing negative unemployment today, especially in Atlanta. There are many choices:
    • attend a series of computer networking (Cisco, Microsoft, RedHat, etc.) bootcamps and earn the highest level networking certifications in less than one year.
    • attend a series of part time digital classes in UX design, Analytics, Business Fundamentals & Tactics, Data Science, Digital Marketing, Product Management, User Experience Design, Visual Design (just to name a few) while you’re working and earning money and learning to be the most valuable digital master in your company. 

    Not one of the careers that result from these skills requires a college degree. None.



    Or you can spend $100k to live with little or no responsibility for 4-5 years, learn how to drink beer, and then try to get a job in the digital age. Seriously, though, if you’re not going to pursue a career that absolutely requires a college degree, spending 52 months and well over $100k just to say you have a degree is not a wise investment of anyone’s time or money.



    If you’re inclined towards working in technology, you don’t need to go to college.

  • Top 3 Tech Skills to Get Hired in the Digital Age

    Cross posted from the General Assembly blog.

    When you graduate from college, you have a degree in some specific subject(s). But it is becoming increasingly important that you have practical skills when you enter the workplace, in addition to the specific knowledge you gained during your college career. When you enter the workforce, no matter who you work for, there will be some learning curve as you learn how they do business, what tools they use, and their processes and procedures. But wouldn’t it be great if on day one when you arrived at that sweet new job, you were teaching them new tricks?

    If you learn these three digital age skills, there’s a good chance that you will blow their doors off when you start work on Monday.

    1. Front end website development

    HTML5, CSS, Javascript, WordPress. For the non-developer, these terms are very intimidating, but a qualified instructor can make them music to your ears. When you enroll in one of these classes, it’s generally understood that you’ve never written software code before, and that’s where it’ll start. Then, 3-4 months later, you won’t recognize yourself as you crank out beautiful web pages and awesome functionality from your keyboard. Just think, the next time you have a great idea, you can just build it!  These classes are usually…

    • 3-4 months long
    • $3,500 – $10,000; financing is available
    • available in-person, online (on demand)
    • part time or full time “immersive”

    Why you should learn front end web development: so you can build your own websites any time you want to try a new idea.

    2. Digital Marketing

    SEO, site optimization, content strategy, social networking, paid traffic, analytics. Also might sound a little intimidating, but you already blog and use social media, right? Then you’re halfway there. Learn digital marketing, and you’ll understand that it’s not dumb luck that gets a website millions of page views, downloads, likes, and retweets. It’s a process, and anyone can learn how to make that process sing. The basics of marketing are the same as they always have been, but just that great word – digital – makes it move a whole lot faster and gives you instant data that old school marketers never dreamed of. To learn digital marketing, you’ll need…

    • A computer and Internet access
    • Free tools like Google Analytics
    • A spreadsheet software like Google Sheets
    • about 60 hours of class time (10 weeks part time)
    • approximately $3,000 if you take a formal class

    Why you should learn digital marketing: so you can market-test anything you build, gain traction and capture leads for your business.

    3. Ecommerce

    Shopping cart software, ecommerce gateways, merchant processing. When you want to find a product, you look on the Internet. When you find that product, and want to buy it, more often than not, you purchase it over the Internet. That’s ecommerce. It’s much more sophisticated than it used to be, but basic ecommerce is very much available to anyone who has the skills and knowledge to set it up on their website. With today’s plethora of shopping cart software packages, simple Internet gateways, and banks (finally) becoming very accepting of a “Mom & Pop” ecommerce shop, selling something on the Internet is something anyone can do. A very simple example is setting up your personal site with SquareSpace, which is already integrated with Stripe. All you do is tell Stripe where to deposit the funds.

    Why you should learn ecommerce: so you can easily setup an online store and sell just about anything you have or build or create.

    Combining these three skills makes you a triple threat, since you’ll be able to build it, market it, and sell it. Not many people can do that, but you can. You’ll be prepared to be the entrepreneur you’ve always wanted to be, setting up your own website and selling your widgets. Better yet, when anyone else you meet wants to do the same thing, you’ll be prepared to do it for them. That’s called being instantly employable.

    On average, it takes 52 months to earn a bachelor’s degree. Compare than to approximately 4 months it would take to learn to build your own website, create a strong following, and sell products from that website to actually make money. Not to mention the drastic difference in the cost of these two very different programs.

    Am I advocating that young people today not attend college?  Maybe. Maybe not. But in this day of $100k+ for a college degree when you can learn very marketable skills for less than 20% of that number in 1/10th of the time, everyone should at least give it some serious consideration.

    This post originally appeared on the General Assembly blog.