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Hello, and welcome along to another episode of Walk into Your Next Grade. This is a podcast for thoughtful Higher Education professionals who are exploring career progression. I'm Fiona Bicket, your resident professional development coach and week in, week out, I'm here to remind you that you don't have to turn into somebody else to create the kind of career success that you want.
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And actually, we're really here to figure out what are the moves that will matter most as you look at your career progression in your unique context with your lifestyle, your background, your history, your preferences, your ambitions, all of that stuff, it all comes to bear.
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In this episode, I want to talk about qualifications because I think this is particularly tricky for professional services professionals working in and around higher education, because we are in this sort of system where typically academic staff or the academy, to use the sort of American term, for it is positioned, viewed as more important, more superior in some ways to professional services.
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And I can think of numerous examples even now as somebody who is working adjacent to Higher Education where doors are not open to me as a service provider, as an expert in my field, as a coach working into Higher Education because I do not have a PhD and I know those of you listening, there will be loads of you who have examples of situations where you have excellent expertise but doors are not open because you're not an academic.
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And I think it points to this real tension that we have in the sector where the academic side of the house operates on this sort of underlying structure of meritocracy where the person with the biggest qualification, the person with the highest credentials wins, for want of a better word.
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And in professional services we are coming through in this sort of system and structure, which is more aligned with bureaucracy, where the person who follows the procedure you would like to think wins and, a lot of power is held in things like how effectively you can move your ideas or proposals through committee structures, how if you want to bring in a new system that has an IT element, then how you navigate the IT, data security and all of that kind of bureaucratic processing.
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So the person, the people who are best navigating that stuff typically or historically win in a bureaucratic structure. And so, I think it makes a lot of sense that when professional services people are thinking about their career development and they're experiencing some, self doubt, some uncertainty, not sure how to go about making the next step or the next move.
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They look around and they go, okay, well, maybe what I need is another qualification. Maybe that will help me in gaining the kind of credibility that I want in this structure where there's a lot of tension between the people who are operating under meritocracy, where the biggest title wins, and people who are operating in bureaucracy, where the person who navigates the systems and processes and protocols the best wins.
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If I don't find it easy to operate in a bureaucratic system or where operating in the bureaucratic system has kept me feeling stuck, maybe I need a qualification, maybe that will open doors for me.
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So I think that makes a lot of sense, right? Just putting my hood up because it's just started pouring down rain. That makes a lot of sense, because that's what we see the people who are, operating at the top of higher education institutions, they're all professors, they've all got PhDs and doctorates and are on that sort of meritocratic system.
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However, I think for a lot, not all, but for a lot of professional services, people who do that, who go ahead and think, okay, great, I'm going to go and get an MBA or I'm going to do my masters or my doctorate.
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What happens is they then invest like four years, sometimes more, and a load of time and effort, a load of family investment, often in one of the parents, if there are children in the household, being busy on weekends and in that sort of family, traditionally, family time is now taken up with writing assessments and reading papers and textbooks and doing all of the work that goes into those qualifications and then at the end of it you're like, okay, great, so I've got my MBA or I've got my masters or I got my PhD or whatever and I actually still don't feel any more confident and I feel more burned out and I don't feel like the door that I wanted to open ahead of me is opening.
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And so essentially you're kind of in the same spot as you were when you started thinking about doing that qualification. Now, I do not want to whole scale poo poo doing qualifications in some contexts, for some people they're a perfect next step and I really recommend it for many people where actually what they're looking for is some confidence, some clarity, some credibility, some conviction in their own abilities and in their validity to move forward and to progress in their career.
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I just think it's kind of a waste of time. Controversial opinion in working in and around Higher Education. I know it's a controversial thing to say, but the number of people I speak to who have those qualifications and at the end of it are going, I still don't feel like I know what I'm doing.
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I still don't feel like a grown up. I still don't feel like I can become a senior leader. I still don't feel whatever it is that they were looking for that they thought they would feel at the end of completing that qualification.
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So what does this tell us? I think what that tells us is there has to be another route to get that clarity, confidence, conviction, the opening of those doors that you're looking for.
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And my proposal is actually, it's more of an inside job. It's more about exploring your own inner world, your sense of your identity, the storeys that you've heard throughout your life about what progression or seniority or leadership mean, what they look like and feel like, what is available to you, what people like you get to do, and untangling some of those stories so that you can make different decisions about how you show up in the world, how you show up in your institution or your role, whether you're going to step out and take a different role because sometimes it's easier to rewrite those stories in a new context than it is to try to rewrite them in a context where people already have a picture of you and who you are and how you show up, sometimes it can be easier to step out.
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So while I think it makes sense that getting those qualifications is a route that a lot of people go down, I don't think for a, lot of people, I don't think it's the right move. And I think actually you'd be better placed and obviously I would say this with some amount of bias.
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I would suggest actually getting some coaching or some therapy even to explore those stories and what those stories mean for your patterns of thinking and self belief and behaviour, so that you can make different choices about how you're showing up and the impact that that has because when you approach your career and your job and how you influence others without necessarily having direct authority, how you interact with senior colleagues, how you lead your team, how you keep yourself and your nervous system regulated under stressful situations so that you can create clarity out of chaos.
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All of that is so much more compelling in your career progression and in the way that senior leaders will conceptualise you as an employee and what you're capable of.
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I just think that's, so such a more powerful way to move where it's based on the things that we know that professional services leaders are looking for in people that they want to support and sponsor to progress than having a Master's or a PhD, where actually, in professional services, those are not, or an MBA even, in professional services those things are not necessarily valued.
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There are some amazing, amazing, amazing professional services leaders at Director of Operations sort of equivalent levels that I've worked with who don't have a 1st degree. They've got A levels and that's the extent of their qualifications and yet they are exceptional leaders.
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But you can hear it. I'm getting really excited about this, but you don't necessarily need to buy into the meritocratic system in order to progress and actually bringing it back to the sociology of what is the system and the structure that we're operating in, I think in professional services, historically we've worked in bureaucracy, where it's about whoever follows the process and procedure best.
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I think more and more what we're actually arriving in is adhocracy, where institutional leaders who need to get stuff done are, looking around them and going, woohoo, here is best placed to get this thing done and then cherry picking or specifically selecting people for things like task and finish groups or project working of whatever nature to come together, regardless of what department or faculty or directorate they're in, whoever it is that has the skills, the experience, the attitude, the aptitude that that project needs in order to move it forward and deliver the thing. I think that system of adhocracy is going to be more and more and more powerful as we move forward in the development of whatever comes next for Higher Education and professional services in particular.
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So I'd much rather that you develop the skills and the approaches and the ways of thinking that will let you move around more fluidly within that adhocratic system and to be on people's radar as somebody who can contribute really effectively to those projects, either in a contributor fashion or as a leader in those projects and ways of working that are more focused on getting the thing done than they are on do you have a PhD or not?
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Or an MBA or not? Or a Masters or not? All of that kind of stuff. Let's leave that to the academics. For professional services, it's about, do you speak the language that the leaders who are making the decisions are looking for? And can you position yourself in a way that makes it obvious that you are the best candidate for whatever it is that they are trying to achieve?
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If that sounds like you're kind of, direction of travel and you think, yes, that makes sense. I'm really glad because I've just saved myself a lot of money and time investment in doing a Masters or an MBA or a PhD. Please work with a coach.
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I would love to support you if my vibe is the right vibe for you. If it's not me, there are loads of us out here. There's like a whole bunch of people who are amazing coaches who support professional development, Higher Education professional development folks.
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All of us have different specialisms and preferences. You can check out my website if Getting Ready for your Next Grade feels like a good fit for you, or if you want to work with me one to one, or if you read over my website and go, yeah, maybe not quite that, but more like this, but you don't know where to go, contact me.
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I'm really happy to make recommendations because like I said, there's a bunch of us who all have different specialisms and expertise in this area who would be delighted to support you and save you all that time and money of doing a PhD because I don't think you need it.
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Alright, that's the end of the rant for today. Thank you for listening and I will speak to you next time. Take good care. Bye.
