We don't care about your degrees!


Having a great education is invaluable and something you profit from your entire life. Intelligence and general knowledge combined provide a solid platform, where you can start your career with. Our Head of Human Resources, Esmira Alieva not only creates hiring plans and recruiting strategies, but also participates in final interviews with candidates.

She mentions the importance of having higher education and states: “The goal of higher education is to develop your critical thinking, to teach you to work with loads of information, to sail and find your way in unknown waters, to make decisions and to build connections with different people.”

At the same time holding a certain degree is no guarantee for a successful career and prosperous life. In fact, there are many prominent examples, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Michael Dell or Steve Jobs in the business world, who didn't finish their studies and still built an intriguing career and business. Does this mean that degrees became useless? By no means! Enjoying a good education and learning how to organize oneself and meeting people and building connections for the rest of your life, is an important step in your personal development – from a hard skill and from a soft skill perspective. 

Anyhow, degrees only tell, to a certain extent, something about your ability to do your job well. You might be better to fulfill a specific task, when you have studied this before in theory, but there is more needed, what professionals must bring to the table these days than just executing on tasks. The learning materials provided by the universities for example, are often outdated and have nothing to do with the real work life. It is very common when fresh graduates straight out of university have no idea about the work they are going to do. You may have profound theoretical knowledge, but it won’t help you to be successful in your career if you don't possess certain skills.

The most important aspect of all is the willingness to learn and to adapt to change. We are facing a fast-paced environment and we are exposed to a constant change. And we need to react to these changing circumstances right away and when the given conditions change, we must learn how to approach them. So the learning curve is quite high nowadays. For people, who embrace lifelong learning this is a pure bliss. For those ones who value consistency, this can be challenging.

Either way, this is the world we now live in. 

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On another note, hard skills are always something you can develop. There is hardly anything out there you can't learn to at least understand the basics. Esmira Alieva further explains: ”Back in the day, people used to choose their profession once and for the entire life. There wasn't such a huge variety of online courses, resources, and training centers available any time. And it was logical to get a theoretical background in the field to which you want to devote your entire working life. Now with all the opportunities available, people started to follow the concept of life-long learning. Some people decided to focus on developing soft skills to become even more successful in what they are already doing. Others get inspired by a chance to learn and develop new skills and acquire a new profession that may have not even existed when they were students.”

A great example is the Pandemic. During the Pandemic people started to think more than ever about flexible working models, remote working or even switching their career entirely. And the times for switching careers couldn't be any better with all the resources we now have available. And switching careers doesn't have to have a negative impact. On the contrary, it might be helpful to have learned some skills in one profession and use them in another one in a different context. 

You can transfer the knowledge into the new setting and create even better solutions – if you know how to adapt to change and react to new surroundings. 

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Soft skills on the other hand are becoming even more important. You must have them right. During the last couple of years, they became more and more relevant and “empathy” for example is one of the highest-ranking soft skills desired in managers according to Harvard Business Review. 

As a matter of fact: To become successful you constantly need to develop your skills further. Besides empathy, some of the most desired soft skills are being a good communicator, being able to prioritize and solve problems. 

Coming back to your degrees. So does this mean you can apply for any open position with any background? 

No, not quite. You still need to demonstrate that you can do a great job for whatever position you applied for. But if you gathered your experience in an Ivy league university or with the help of studying tons of books or online courses or completely as an autodidact, it doesn't matter for us.

We look for the best candidate for this position by looking at the needed hard- and soft skills.

Esmira Alieva has a clear point of view on this: 

“I personally don't care if a person holds a degree from an elite university or studied all by themself. I am looking for the best candidates for the open positions in our company. After all, we don't hire for degrees, but for the best talents.”

So: Why wait? Check out our open positions


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