Employability has become a buzzword amongst students finishing their studies and undergraduate degrees. In today’s economy graduate employment is becoming increasingly competitive as tertiary education has doubled in the past 10 years in Malta. Such competitiveness has never put more emphasis on the question: what has more value a Masters degree or experience?
As an increasing amount of people are reading Bachelor degrees in Malta, having a Masters degree can help job hunters stand out from the crowd when applying for their first role. It can also permit someone to change their academic route if they feel they no longer want to follow the exact subject they originally went down with their bachelor degree.
In addition to this it can also help those who took a general degree to home-in on niche skills and increase their knowledge and employability in this specific field.
However, many employers are increasingly favouring the experience route, especially at the start of individuals careers and especially in the field of IT. Why? IT is generally considered to be a practical subject and employers would rather to have experience working in the field rather than in the classroom.
IT is also a continually evolving subject and technologies are forever changing and developing. Because of this many employers see it as being more beneficial to be in the market place, where individuals can be more flexible and adaptable to new technologies. Also having experience in the workplace offers more general business and office environment skills, which employers consider an asset.
Castille Resources spoke to a leading i-gaming company on the island on the matter to shed some light on the subject from an employer’s point of view.
“I believe it makes more sense to gain working experience before a master’s degree.
“A Master’s degree is meant to consolidate and formalise work experience; without the work experience you cannot bring real life scenarios into your studies,” commented the top executive of the company.
“From my experience in the industry I still prefer to have more experienced people than a person with a Master’s degree. I would say that in today’s climate the work experience is even more important since we need people to be much more flexible and willing to adapt to new working practices and technologies.
“I would say that in Malta we are obsessed with studying and having letters after our name and the situation is getting worse. People in general are also keener to study for longer and delay the start of their working life which is not necessarily a bad thing! I also believe that over the last few years the situation has become worse since there is a larger pool of IT resources all competing for jobs which have not grown at the same rate as the available resources.
“This therefore creates a deficit where there are many more people applying for the same jobs and one of your advantages over other people is going to be the academic background.”
From experience, good advice usually hinges upon the age of the individual, the number of years working experience, their stage in life, and what academic background they already have. From Castille’s experience employers are generally favouring experience over a Masters degree, especially within the more practical IT sector. If Maltese IT graduates are looking to improve their employability they are better off looking to gain experience in companies through work experience or individual personal projects. There is also an increase in clients looking for people to have supplier qualifications, such as MCAD, CCNA, CCNP, which is another more practical route to go down.
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Ms Hughes is brand manager at Castille Resources Ltd.