Too Many Qualifications: Are You Learning or Hiding?

I spend quite a lot of my working life talking to people who are much better qualified than me. This isn't difficult. I could probably assemble my entire academic record on the back of a reasonably small envelope, whereas some of the people who send me their CVs require most of page one simply to explain all the things they've learned. There are degrees and Master's degrees and MBAs and postgraduate diplomas and professional qualifications and certificates in project management, leadership, change management, strategic management, people management and, increasingly, artificial intelligence. Soon there will presumably be a qualification in managing all the qualifications. And I will have to ask where they'd like that putting on the CV as well.

Normally, after admiring this collection for a while, I ring them. And this is where things become odd, because the person with enough letters after their name to interfere with the formatting will tell me they aren't sure they're ready for the job they want. They may have spent 18 years working in the industry. They may manage 40 people. They may control millions of pounds. They may have been promoted five times and be the person everyone rings when something catches fire at 4.45 on a Friday afternoon. But the vacancy they've seen mentions strategic leadership and, although they have been strategically leading things since Gordon Brown was Prime Minister, they're wondering whether another qualification might help.

It probably would. Universities are very good at this sort of thing. For several thousand pounds they will teach you about leadership and then, after you've demonstrated that you understand it, give you a certificate saying so. This is useful if you've never led anything. It becomes slightly stranger when you've spent the previous decade running a department. At that point I would argue that the department was the course. The employees were the coursework. The budget was the examination and the occasion when two senior managers resigned, your biggest customer threatened to leave and Finance announced a spending freeze on the same Tuesday was the final assessment.

But people don't see it like this. They see an MBA. An MBA is real. It has a university logo on it and can be framed. Experience is much messier. Nobody sends you a certificate because you stopped a £3 million project collapsing. You don't receive a diploma for increasing sales by 38%. There is no graduation ceremony for keeping 70 people employed during a restructure while the Chief Executive changes his mind every eleven minutes. You just go home, have something to eat and come back the next morning because another problem has appeared.

So the qualifications keep coming. First the Master's, because everyone has a degree. Then the MBA, because everyone has a Master's. Then PRINCE2, because apparently nobody successfully completed a project before 1996. Then Agile, because PRINCE2 presumably wasn't moving quickly enough. Then Scrum, which still sounds to me like something involving cauliflower ears and a Welshman called Gareth. Then, when all of those have been safely added to LinkedIn, somebody announces that AI is going to change absolutely everything and the whole process starts again.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of this. Learning things is generally better than not learning things, and there are many jobs where qualifications are absolutely necessary. If I'm ever lying on an operating table and the surgeon announces that he doesn't believe in formal education because experience is what really counts, I will get up and leave, even if somebody has already removed my trousers. But I'm beginning to wonder whether some people aren't studying because they need to know more. They're studying because studying is considerably less frightening than finding out whether the job market thinks they're as good as they hope they are.

Because education has rules. Careers don't. If you start a Master's, someone tells you what to do. There is a reading list, a timetable and an assignment. Do everything properly and eventually someone says you've passed. It's beautifully organised. Applying for a £70,000 job works differently. You send your life's achievements to someone called Chloe in Talent Acquisition and three days later an automated email informs you that, while your experience was impressive, they've decided to pursue other candidates. There is no mark. No feedback. No resit. Just Chloe.

This makes another qualification extremely attractive. You can tell yourself you're not avoiding the bigger job. You're preparing for it. You're developing. You're investing in yourself. You're becoming the best possible version of you, which is something people say on LinkedIn shortly before announcing they've completed a six-hour course in Excel. And while you're doing all this developing, someone with fewer qualifications sees the vacancy you wanted, notices they meet most of the requirements and applies.

This person is a menace because they haven't followed the rules. They haven't waited until they can tick every box. They haven't spent three years constructing the perfect collection of credentials. They have looked at the job, thought “I reckon I could do that” and pressed the button. Six weeks later they're doing it. Two years later they have two years' experience at the level you've spent two years preparing to reach.

Employers, rather inconveniently, appear to like this experience business. The Government's Employer Skills Survey found that 61% of employers considered relevant work experience critically or significantly important when recruiting. A degree or equivalent qualification managed 20%. This doesn't mean degrees are pointless. It means that if you've subsequently spent 20 years actually doing things, those things may now be worth mentioning before the dissertation you wrote in 2004.

You wouldn't know this from many CVs. I've seen senior people devote half of the opening page to qualifications and then hide the fact they run a £20 million operation somewhere below “strong communication skills”. I've seen Master's degrees given more space than multimillion-pound achievements. I've seen courses from 15 years ago proudly displayed while the fact the person has since managed teams across five countries is reduced to a bullet point. This is the professional equivalent of Lewis Hamilton turning up for a job interview and spending the first ten minutes talking about his provisional licence.

And here's the really peculiar part. According to the CIPD Good Work Index 2025, 29% of working adults already believe they're overqualified for their current jobs. Among graduates it's 34% and among people with an MA, MSc or PhD it's 33%. So roughly a third of highly educated people think they already possess more qualifications than their job requires. I don't know how many of them are currently studying for something else, but having looked at enough CVs, I suspect it's not zero.

Maybe this is because qualifications are addictive. Not in the heroin sense. I've never heard of anyone burgling a garden centre to fund a CMI Level 7. But they provide something careers rarely do: certainty. You completed something. You passed. You now possess evidence that you are better qualified than you were last Tuesday. It's measurable and reassuring, whereas experience is just this enormous untidy pile of things that happened while you were trying to earn a living.

The trick is recognising when the untidy pile has become more valuable.

If you're 23 and have little experience, the qualification can be the story. If you're 43 and have spent 20 years managing people, money, projects, customers and assorted disasters, it probably isn't anymore. The story is what happened after you qualified. What got bigger because you were there? What got better? What stopped going wrong? What did you build? What did you save? What did you make? Who trusted you with something expensive and, crucially, did they ever trust you with anything expensive again?

I've written before about people applying for £70,000 jobs with what is effectively a £35,000 CV. This is the same disease from the other end. Their career has moved forwards but their confidence has remained parked somewhere around 2018, so they keep buying evidence that they're ready instead of noticing the evidence they've already accumulated.

Of course, another qualification might genuinely be the answer. If every job you want requires one and you don't have it, this is not a particularly difficult mystery to solve. Go and get it. If you're changing into a profession where you lack the necessary technical knowledge, learn it. If you simply enjoy studying, that's fine too. Buy as many qualifications as you like. Eventually you may need planning permission for the certificates, but that's your problem.

But if you've already got the MBA, the MSc, the professional qualifications, seven certificates and 15 years of experience, and you're looking at another course because you still don't feel quite ready to apply for the bigger job, I would suggest an experiment.

Don't enrol.

Apply.

If they reject you, the university will still be there on Monday.

And you'll have saved £8,000 finding out.