Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Do Employers Care if you got an Online Degree?

One of the biggest concerns that people have about online colleges is how potential employers are going to view their degree. This makes perfect sense of course since the reason that most people go to the trouble of getting a degree is to get a better job. The question is should you be concerned about what employers think of online degrees.

If you go to any distance learning forum one of the most common questions is whether the degree says that it was earned online, this seems to be mainly because they don't want potential employers to know that it is an online degree. In reality this is not that big of a deal as few employers will ever ask to see the degree anyway.

In general employers are not going to know one way or the other how you got your degree, in most cases they simply aren't interested enough to bother looking into. Therefore unless you tell them that you got an online degree it not likely to be a factor. There are of course exceptions to this, you will find it very difficult to get an academic position with an online degree and jobs like an investment banker pretty much require an Ivy League degree.

Even if you do tell a potential employer that you got your degree online it is not likely to matter too much in the hiring process. There is much more acceptance for online degrees than there was a few years ago. More importantly in most cases employers place far less weight on academic qualifications than most people think they do. As long as you meet the minimum qualifications you should be fine regardless of where the degree came from for most jobs. This is particularly true if you have a fair amount of work experience.

The best advice is to not worry too much about whether an employer finds out that you got an online degree, most of them don't care either way. You will find that your work experience is far more valuable and one of the benefits of an online education is that you can get this work experience while you are studying which should put you ahead of the game.

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