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Should I go back to college/university? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 4 days ago by SpiceDealer@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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I'm been thinking a lot about my future lately and I've come to the conclusion that I've had it with blue collar work. I want more out of life than living paycheck to paycheck. For sometime now, I've been hearing that college degrees are worthless nowadays so thought about getting Comptia certifications (A+ and then Sec+) and working remotely. But then I thought about if AI will make those certifications obsolete. I know that "AI taking jobs" is a bit of sensationalist reporting but I do have legitimate concerns. I then thought about going back to college for "advance" careers like computer science and/or electrical engineering; more specifically, a bachelor's degree.

What I want to know is this: would returning to college, especially for a tech-oriented degree, or will it be a waste of time and money? Should I pursue an alternative like certs? Thanks in advance.

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[–] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

I've seen folks use certificates to get jobs more often than to get promotions.

Since you're looking to land your first job in the field, relevant certificates sound like a promising place to start.

I've been impressed with job candidates who subscribed to a flat fee online service like Udemy, Cloud Academy or LinkedIn Learning for a year and worked their way through several courses - especially when the courses included labwork with virtual machines.

As an interviewer, I suspect that I usually accurately guess who did their homework, and who only watched the videos. Both approaches have merit, but folks who do the lab work tend to retain what they learned better.

Also - if you want to work in any computer field: Go make a website. Do it immediately.

Building your website will do a few things for you:

You'll learn useful things. It's not terribly hard, but a website has many more moving parts than you probably guessed before you started.
You'll have some war stories to tell during job interviews. Nobody ever put a website online and kept it online without solving some stupid bullshit with either cleverness or persistent effort or both.
Try to use nothing but AI to make it. Try to use only AI to maintain and update it. It'll be nice at first and then it will suck. Now you know why your work is worth money, and which parts of the work AI won't be replacing any time soon.

Hopefully you'll have fun some with it, and then get paid a bunch of money. Computers are sometimes fun and almost always a huge pain in the ass.