EDUCATION:Keep an eye out for the next big thing in your industry, then make sure you have the training and skills to take advantage of it

HOW FRESH are your qualifications? Some executive search professionals are suggesting that primary degrees, masters and even doctorates have a shelf life. In project management, it could be 10 years but for information technology it could be as little as a year. If you have recently returned to the jobs market, you could be told that your qualification is past its sell-by date, says Michael O’Leary, managing director of HRM Executive Recruitment.

The high unemployment rate means companies can afford to be choosy when it comes to everything from skills to training, he says.

“We are driven by client requirements and those requirements are very conservative at the moment,” he says. “Most clients are looking for what is known as ‘perfect hire only’, so there’s not much flexibility at all.”

In the boom years, recruiters were all chasing the top 20 per cent of the talent. Today, they are chasing the top 2 per cent. So any edge you can gain is worth the effort.

He cites the recent example of a candidate who had been out of the recruitment market for eight years. “This candidate was a particularly good project manager, very detail-oriented, but his qualifications were more than 10 years old,” he says. “Methodologies in project management have changed. Even at the interview, it would be difficult for this candidate to engage with some of the project management issues coming up now.”

The shelf life of a qualification varies from discipline to discipline. “In ICT, which famously moves at a revolutionary pace, skills learned in college can become obsolete within three to four years,” says O’Leary.

“There are organisations that use what we call legacy skills – areas of coding that no one wants to work with any more. If you are working with such a company, you are not working on the curve. These companies continue to have problems hiring, even in this environment, because ICT professionals want exposure to current skills, including training and support.”

Even those who believe their skills are strong should consider going back to college, says O’Leary, because recruiters are specifying that they want evidence of commitment to personal and career development. “If you haven’t been near a college, university or other training forum for over a decade, it doesn’t look good.”

Staying up to date with changing legislation is very important in such areas as accountancy and law, according to human resource professionals.

The sectors are well-organised when it comes to continuous professional development, however, so tired qualifications can be refreshed with relative ease.

At MBA level, there is a growing awareness of the issue, according to Brian Marrinan, MBA careers manager at the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business.

“After five or six years, the tools and techniques start to change,” he says. “The MBA is based on leading business thinking so naturally that thinking moves on in some areas.”

To address this, the school has established Executive Edge, a top-up programme for MBA graduates. It offers executives a one-day intensive refresher course on trends in management, including such subjects as marketing, strategy and negotiation.

Marrinan, who has been involved in the executive search business, says he has not come across an instance of a job applicant being told that his MBA was not of value.

“The main grounding of the qualification – in finance, leadership, personal and professional development – remains the same. But a few years down the line, graduates benefit from exposure to the latest business thinking.”

Project management is another discipline that has evolved relatively quickly in the past decade.

Dan Aherne of the Project Management Institute says that changes are being driven by very active professional bodies, as well as research in the universities.

“It’s a very dynamic environment,” he says. “There are fundamental project management principles that still apply, but there is new expertise on subjects such as change management, outsourcing, virtual teams, risk and working across international borders. ”

Imagine attending an interview for a project management role and being asked to describe your approach to managing a virtual team – not an easy one to talk your way out of if your Master’s is 10 years old.

Aherne advises graduates, especially those with an older qualification, to join a professional body, such as the International Project Managers Association or the Project Management Institute, and take advantage of the tools they are producing based on the latest research.

That is good advice for graduates of any discipline. Those who stay in touch with a community of professionals in the same field will be aware of what qualifications and skills have the most value in a changing world.

ICT is perhaps the most dynamic field of all. A graduate with a qualification that is not in demand can find himself on the shelf, especially if he hasn’t made the right career moves in the interim, no matter how recently those skills were gained.

Hugh McCarthy, IT division manager at Brightwater Recruitment, says qualifications in ICT have been known to go sour within 12 months. “Within a year, anyone with ITIL customer services methodology expertise found their qualification eclipsed by a move to version 3,” he says. Those who had just completed studies in version 2 found their skills redundant within a year.

“In software development, any company looking for Java engineers is now looking for Sprind framework experience,” he says. “Struts was the last big thing in Java and many ICT professionals still work in that but Java developers without Sprind will have difficulty getting work.”

According to McCarthy, it is important to keep on the lookout for the next big thing, as recruiters favour those who are evangelical about development. “Even home-based projects in hot framework development areas come into play here,” he says.

So what about taking your old qualification to a company looking for older skills?

The worst thing you could do would be to take a position with a firm that is actively seeking out expertise in legacy technologies, says McCarthy.

“You do not want to get into old banking systems like Cobol when everyone else is moving into Prime Server Development Environments,” he says. “You need to move away from legacy programming or you are heading down a dead end.”

There are a number of ways to counter qualification depreciation. The first is to choose to work with companies that give plenty of exposure to new methodologies and technologies, and plenty of training to support it.

If it is too late for that, seek out professional bodies associated with your discipline. There you can get information on current research, short training courses or other supports.

Return to your alma mater and find out if it is offering any professional development programmes to complement your original qualification. Remember that employers are looking for commitment to the discipline, so even projects you pursue at home through distance learning, will go down well.

Seamus McEvoy of the careers management service at University College Cork says it is not so much how old your qualification is as what you do with it that matters.

“You have to keep up,” he says. “Sure you can top up your MBA, but you can also read the Harvard Business Review. You have to stay on top of your discipline, that’s just common sense.”