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Dr Mehmet Yildiz
Overqualification Is A Thing Nowadays
2021-01-25
This story reflects the rejections of a talented person by several workplaces due to an unusual excuse. The good news is a coping mechanism that exists.
Henry is a talented software engineer with multiple degrees.
His recent degrees were a doctorate in law and anthropology. His first degree was in computer science. He achieved a postgraduate diploma in Information Technology.
Henry also completed a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree. Henry gained 30 plus industry and vendor certifications in Information Technology, Information Management, Data Science, Technical Design, Open Source Architecture, and various programming languages.
Henry's achievements in software engineering were above and beyond. He authored several peer-reviewed papers published in high-impact journals. He co-authored two books in Data Science and Data Analytics. He also designed an interesting iPhone iOS application on his own time and monetized it through his website. The app generated lucrative passive income for him.
After working 14 years in a large business organisation as a software engineer, he was retrenched from his full-time job because of downsizing. His employer adored him as he was loyal and productive.
Despite the strategic focus on talent retention, business organisations sometimes have to make tough decisions in a bad economic climate. COVID-19 is a prime example that affected many companies to downsize.
Since he has three young children and his wife was unemployed, parenting the kids, Henry needed to find a job urgently. His passive income from his Apple smartphone app was not sufficient to feed the family.
Considering his experience, education, and industry certifications, he thought finding a job would be easy. Henry was keen to find one and started the process.
He applied to many positions he found on LinkedIn and several other online job application sites. His profile was showing his endorsed skills, qualifications, work experience.
He looked at his list and noticed 27 job applications sent from his LinkedIn profile.
To his surprise, after a few weeks, he did not receive any response to his applications.
Henry decided to reach out to the contacts in the position descriptions. He politely asked them about the progress. He received some response to his surprise. All responses were depicted as rejection.
All of them showed similar responses like: "Due to a large number of qualified applicants, we regret to inform you that your application was unsuccessful for this position. Please free to apply for future positions in our company".
Henry confused and disappointed in this situation. He wanted to obtain feedback by responding to the rejection letters. These rejections made him curious about what was wrong with his application. He again kindly asked for further feedback on why his CV did not even generate interviews.
Fortunately, some of the employers responded. There was a pattern in responses.
All responses were using the term "overqualification".
As a confident person, he reached out to the employers to get honest feedback and request guidance. He wanted to understand what overqualified mean. He invested a lot of time for his education, skill acquisition, and gaining experience. Being overqualified did not make sense to him.
Findings from his inquiry were interesting. They all boiled down to a single item. As Henry had multiple qualifications and industry certificates, the employers thought he was overqualified and would not be an excellent match. The perception was his qualifications would stick out in the team as no one in the software engineering team has masters let alone double doctorate.
Even though Henry has required knowledge, skills, capability, and experience, and exceeded the criteria, he failed to secure a job. Henry saw this an irony, but he was smart to overcome this challenge. challenge
This time removed all his degrees except for computer science and added only a few industry certifications. Out of ten applications, he was invited to ten interviews.
He did not mention his additional qualifications during the interviews.
Out of ten interviews, he got six job offers.
With the negation skills he learned from his MBA, he got the most optimal position.
He told me that he was compensated at least two times better than the job he was retrenched.
The moral of this story is there is a thing called "overqualification". But smart people have a coping mechanism with this unusual syndrome. Only show the essential qualifications, the more can hurt, but overqualification is a thing in the industry.
Thank you for reading my perspectives.
If you enjoy this story, you might also check my other technology and leadership articles published on News Break.
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