Education is important. It is not a replacement for experience. Would you prefer to be a passenger flown by an experienced pilot, or one that had studied the details of every Boeing plane ever built and was now ready to use that education for the first time?

I have worked with outstanding engineers with degrees in unrelated topics, and even some who never completed college. I have a degree in Mathematics, which has some relevance to Computer Science. However, the most useful skill I gained from my degree came from organizing the student elections. This taught me, through experience, project management and how to influence people over whom I had no direct authority.

Formal education builds a strong foundation. Yet it is the practical application of skills, the lessons learned from working in distributed teams, integrating complex systems, and delivering measurable value that make effective employees. Experience compounds over time in ways that theoretical study alone cannot replicate.

Formal education carries more weight early in a career, simply because there is little else to evaluate. A hiring manager reviewing a recent graduate has no project history, no track record of delivery, and no colleagues to call for a reference. In that context, a degree signals something useful: the ability to commit to a long-term goal, absorb structured information, and meet external standards. It is not a measure of talent, but it is a proxy for it when nothing better is available.

Even then, experience matters. The student who spent summers interning, built side projects, or — like organizing an election — took on real responsibility with real consequences, will stand apart from one whose only credential is the degree itself. Education and experience are not equally available to everyone at the start of a career, but those who find ways to accumulate both early will rarely need to rely on their qualifications for long.

The most effective professionals are not defined by the certificates on their wall, but by the problems they have solved, the teams they have navigated, and the judgment they have earned through doing. Education opens the door — experience is what you build once you are inside.