Can I Be Successful Without a Degree?

This will always be an on-going question, with no defined answer, asked by those who go to university and those who don’t.

Those who have a degree will always support needing a degree to be successful, and those without will always deny needing a degree. I suppose there never will be a correct answer to it and it will always just depend on many things.

So, can you be successful without a degree?

First things first, different people see success in different ways. Someone may have their dream of living in a hot climate, whereas others dream to be the owner of a multimillion pound company (don’t we all).

Here’s some info that might shock you (and make you green with envy), a number of the world’s most famous billionaires actually happen to be ‘college dropouts’. These include Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs. However, this doesn’t mean they haven’t worked incredibly hard to be where they are now.

Around 80 per cent of millionaires have been to university which is a huge percentage and supports the fact that it is mostly beneficial to have a degree to make money. These include Michael Bloomberg (Mayor of New York), Oprah Winfrey and Jeff Bezos (co-founder of Amazon).

The main decider on this questions narrows down to what industry you want to work in. A lot of industries these days only require apprenticeships or short college courses such as hairdressing or plumbing. These areas simply don’t require degrees and therefore you can be successful within these fields without one.

However, other professions such as doctors and scientist do require degrees of which tend to be over a lengthy period too with a pharmacy degree ranging from 4-6 years. These jobs require a lot of training and experience due to the intensity of their work and the amount of responsibility that comes with their jobs.

There are also jobs that hang in limbo as to whether you need a degree or not, this is probably the case with IT. Some professions will be happy to employ someone with no experience or skills in that area and will train them up. Others can now be achieved through college courses such as computer science, which is now a popular skill to learn alongside a job via a part time college course.

University may not be for everyone, but you need to make sure you research their industry you want to work in and if the majority of jobs require a degree, it will most definitely give you a head start in the job ladder when you graduate.

We have a number of exciting graduate jobs on the site, click