A fellow creative recently pondered whether creatives need a degree or not.

I think a degree is for HR departments. It helps them whittle a thousand job applicants down to a hundred. Barring obvious professional qualifications (I want to drive over a bridge built by a qualified engineer, not someone who taught themselves on YouTube) I think a degree is a ticket to the front of the queue for corporate job applications.

I think that most of the time a degree is a certificate of attendance, did you show up often enough to get the piece of paper. But your clients don’t want to know about your attendance, they want to know about your competence.

For a surgeon, a degree is a proxy for trust. The patient trusts the degree because the surgeon can’t easily show you the quality of her heart valve replacement surgery – her work is sewn up inside another human being, and even if she could show you, you wouldn’t be able to tell if it was good or not. And so you defer your opinion to her degree, as you should.

But creatives, we can just show our work. “Here, take a look at this. I made this. I designed this. I filmed this. I wrote this. This is what it costs. If you like this, I can make one for you.”

Show your work, not your certificate.