The University Of Life

“Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in” Leonardo da Vinci.

A recent BIS report claims that higher education participation rates are dropping well below 50% within the UK. The ongoing questions that young people ask themselves when considering university:

• “Is it going to be worth the debt I’ll get into?”
• “Will my degree guarantee a job when I graduate?”
• (And most importantly,) “Am I going to be able to afford more than just a diet of beans on toast & pot noodles?”

Whilst admittedly I am quite partial to a pot noodle, I was pessimistic about these questions when finishing college and in the end I decided to stay home. A lot of my friends ventured off to university and all I could think was ‘what on earth have I done’.

#Freshersweek #Studentlife #8amlectureszzzzzz – social media was swarming with things I couldn’t relate to and I hated it. Work experience was pretty much unheard of and I thought that I’d missed the chance to get a degree & get into a good job.

“Just remember, there are millionaires out there that didn’t graduate” seems to be the mantra of all people who decide against university, but you can’t tell yourself that excuse if you’re going to sit there and do nothing, yet aspire to be like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.

I now work within the operations team for a niche recruitment company (Identify Group) and in all honesty I have not regretted missing university in the past 3 years that I’ve been here. Sure, I sometimes envy students that drink Jagerbomb’s 6/7 nights of the week, but the resources available to me and the experience that I’ve gained through working here has given me more than I feel going to university could have done – with the bonus that my liver is still intact.

“The only source of knowledge is experience”. - Albert Einstein

I work within a great team who all come from a variety of backgrounds; Business graduates that teach me how our company operates, a lean expert without a degree who mentors me about process and ‘Kaizen’ (my favourite Japanese word to shout around the office), and marketing enthusiasts who show me the power of social media and company branding. I encourage articles to be sent on to me, books to be left on my desk and surprisingly I don’t mind being sent on an Excel course, even if the guy running it is quite dull and a little odd.

If you read a handful of job adverts that are out there nowadays, the ratio of degree to experience required isn’t too dissimilar. Employers are realising what an individual’s experience can bring to their business and now all twenty-one year olds are realising this too.

Pick up books, use what you can and take in everything around you – your initiative can take you a long way. My colleague Neal Rawlinson recently posted about “The Five Hour Rule”, encouraging people to ‘Read, Reflect and Experiment’. Google are hugely famous for experimenting & I’m going to take this approach on myself and start using the 5 hour rule within my week to see what further development I’ll gain.

Last night whilst seeing people my age post pictures of their diplomas and graduation caps, I picked up my read of the week: “The 80 Minute MBA” by Richard Reeves & John Knell, a book recommended to me by my Managing Director. The Independent described it as ‘Slick, Short, Funny, Focused and more than 4,000 times cheaper than an MBA from a top UK business school’ – I’m in. I know I know, I won’t actually get an MBA at the end of the book, but the point is that there hundreds of resources out there to help the development of people like me, the non-graduates and underdogs who have the right amount of motivation to get there without going to university. As they keep saying in the book ‘Citius est Melius’ – Quicker is Better.