How important is formal training in most occupations?

You know I always heard that in some occupations that you need formal training to do them effectively. How important is formal training in any occupation? And what makes it better than being self taught?

Wow. This is a very broad subject. I'd suggest that people reply with very specific examples, just to help keep the thread on track.

Most upper middle class professions are in fact defined by the formal training each requires. Given that the professions only exist because specialized skills are seen as necessary in order to fulfill the tasks society provides, formal training is critical. Probably the most important aspect of any profession is the necessity of being able to exchange highly technical new knowledge with other members of the profession. That's why they each develop a specialized language that only other members of the same profession really understand. My profession is psychology. When I publish an article, or make a presentation at a conference, I need access to a shared vocabulary that will allow me to express my insights in a highly precise, information dense way. I need access to the same vocabulary to access the insights of others. After that, following the same general procedures given specific types of problems is what allows us to evaluation each others' work, which helps make psychology accountable to society as a whole. We can police ourselves, and ensure that only high quality services are offered to the public, because each of us knows in general what should be done in any given situation. Finally, training allows people entering the profession to gain proficiency in the field more rapidly than the old "apprenticeship" system, which can take a decade or more to produce a specialist with enough expertise to practice on their own. All of these advantages depend on formal training, without which we would have to re-invent psychology all over again from scratch.

So, very important.

Regarding the question about being self-taught, formal training is better for two main reasons:

1) You ( presumably ) get certification. That is, someone ( or something, like a university ) vouches for your ability to achieve a given standard in an occupation. Whereas if you're self-taught, potential employers just have to take your word that you can totally do the things needed to complete the job ( and there are various other unfair opinions held by potential employers, such as "I had to go to university to get this job, so I'm only hiring other people who have as well". I'm not advocating this, I'm just saying that it's there and you'll have to deal with it if you're self-taught. ).

2) Professionals in the industry usually have input into the topics you're expected to cover when you get formally trained. If you self-teach, then you may not even know how to find out what the leaders in the industry expect in terms of topics and depth, let alone be able to teach yourself at the level they want. Formal training is designed to give you just that.

I had no idea that this was a broad topic but I can see the points made. Still, how much can formal traing help if you had no job experience outside of the occupation that you trained for?

Two things:

1: Ideally, you shouldn't need much school-based training outside of a select few highly-skilled professions where your performance will directly impact peoples' livelihoods (lawyers and any kind of medical person, for instance).

2: I'm thoroughly convinced that companies should put more effort into training their own employees. Unfortunately (in America at least) most of them offload that training to colleges with the expectation, for some reason, that the work force will pay to teach themselves. And that's just mind-boggling.

edited 28th Feb '15 9:12:29 PM by AwSamWeston

For an example of a field where "self-taught genius" often works well, self-taught musicians are often unaware that certain practices can be long-term physically dangerous; formal training would help them avoid making those a habit.

"Still, how much can formal traing help if you had no job experience outside of the occupation that you trained for?"

Your question is unclear. Help you for what, specifically?

Lets say you do earn a degree in something like Aeronautical Engineering but you hadn't actually worked at a job as you never had to before.

To get the degree you have to work in that field. College is more than just sitting in a room and having someone speak to you.

Like my degrees:

• BA in Art History
• BA in Religious Studies
• MLA in Communications

I have had classes in studio art, actually restoring art, running a gallery, translating a ton of different languages and original documents, teaching, etc.

In both my undergrad and graduate I had to stand before a panel of experts and defend my right to continue my degree program with a portfolio of my work. I also had to do an approved and published project to receive every degree I have.

You have a ton of practical experience by the time you graduate. You just arent paid for it.

Software is a field that's often held up as self-teachable, but there are enough formal practices, thought processes, and paradigms that self-taught coders don't often do well, and it shows up pretty quickly in interviews. When you have a large repository of code being simultaneously edited by dozens of people, stuff needs to be set up pretty uniformly and people need to be able to think along common lines.

In CS, you only learn specific languages for the first year and a half — I had those done as electives before I even went into the major. After that, the focus is on cooperative projects and broader design/architecture principles common to most languages. That's not the sort of thing you get by spending a couple months copy-pasting C++ tutorials.

You can KIND of get away with it in freelance web design, but tutorials put more focus on "get stuff on the page and working" while formal classes tend to put a lot more focus on the really critical stuff like security. And if you're doing a web-client for a professional company, you go right back into huge teams and mountains of code between them.

edited 1st Mar '15 11:02:24 AM by Pykrete

I was always told the opposite about musicians — that people with informal, self-taught training have an edge precisely because they have to learn how to do things, as opposed to learning how they are done.

The mantra I've usually heard about it, is that formal training will help a good, self-taught performer become great, but that the same does not hold true in reverse. I suppose it has something to do with the idea that restrictive -habits- can be hard to unlearn, but restrictive thinking is nearly impossible.

Then again, I suppose it also has to do with my disinterest in chamber/big band music, which I reckon would be something akin to the software industry example mentioned.

You need to know the rules if you hope to break them properly.

I can look at someone's art and see if they are formally trained or not.

It all depends. I can't speak for music. I played as a kid, but it wasn't my passion.

At least with art, the more you learn the more tools you have in your creation box.

I have seen both people who started as self trained or formally trained. I don't see much difference between them. Its about the quality of the formal training really, and what you do with it.

The stress of exhibiting is a pain, just like the stress of publishing. But this is the healthy kinda stress that helps you refine your craft.

I suppose it might have just as much to do with the quality of self-teaching.

What a lot of people do by 'self-teaching', is explicitly try to learn how to do something -without- the 'formalities' (aka 'learning the rules') of how to do it right.

I'm not sure I would even qualify this as a 'self-education'. There are plenty of people out there who would disagree, and consider themselves 'self-taught' in this manner. And yea, the quality shows.

If you know what to look for, you can hear a lot of classical and baroque concepts sneak in to some unexpected things, and it's usually a signal that they do have a certain amount of classical training. Classically-trained musicians also tend to be more adept at things like polyrhythmic harmony, or how chords can stack without sounding like shit. Self-taught musicians also tend to more frequently hit a lot of common pitfalls like overusing parallel harmony, or taking the chorus up a fifth when they can't think of anything more interesting — largely because so much of the informal, non-professional music they learn from does that constantly.

My sister is way better at picking it out than I am, but I can usually at least venture a guess.

Large-band music is rigid by necessity (sort of — there's a lot of style that goes into it, but it has to be carefully coordinated ahead of time), but it also forces you to be very, very aware of everything playing around you even in looser styles and arrangements, and to more carefully structure your own performance. For instance, there was a girl in one of my theater classes who had an outstanding voice, but she was so far into the relaxed nature of jazz that she never learned how to keep tempo by herself. It took her a bit to get that jazz musicians really do keep track of that, but consciously screw with it.

edited 1st Mar '15 10:25:30 PM by Pykrete

Short answer is: it depends on the occupation, it depends on what sort of job you are applying for, and it depends on where you got this formal training from.

I learned more about accounting from one year of working with a retired accountant on his son's business's books than my undergrad and graduate accounting classes combined. Far as I'm concerned, on-the-job training is much better than theoretical stuff there. At least as far as laying down a good groundwork for understanding it. I think now that I have a few years of experience under my belt I can go back to my textbooks and actually really get what they were trying to teach me instead of just parroting back quotations and formulas.

However, school did teach me how to give a good presentation to people who didn't want to listen and were actively giving me the stink-eye. That's been a very valuable skill.

edited 1st Mar '15 10:15:29 PM by Bur

A lot of ground has already been covered here and in the Higher Education thread, but I have a few additional comments.

Autodidacticism can manifest itself in people who don't necessarily have the resources to immediately pursue a field of study, but I feel the need to point out that historical figures that have been autodidactic often came from wealthy families that enabled them to more easily hone their skills. It's kind of easy to be self-taught in philosophy and religious history when you live in a mansion with its own private library and you have no immediate need for a day job.

As Aszur already summed up, it really just depends on the skill set being conditioned, the field of study, the personality type and what resources are available to the individual in question. I have to back up what Pykrete said, too. I'm relatively new to programming, but I've already noticed that the experienced programmers in my class, while talented and naturally gifted in the logic needed for coding, aren't particularly good at explaining what the hell it is they're doing because they haven't had enough formal experience to sketch out their ideas in a pressure-cooker environment.

A lot of misunderstandings about formal training, audodidacticism and cognitive development come from debunked neuroscience that hasn't quite been shown the door and Hollywood portrayals that water down how learning actually works. Good Will Hunting is a good movie, but I find that its more nuanced moments were ignored in favor of the "Matt Damon being a smartass" archetype everyone seemed to have half-digested.

But I digress a bit. One grey area of necessary formal training is in athletic activity. Many great athletes got their start just experimenting on courts and playgrounds, but that raw talent was later discovered and honed into something greater.

I watch cage fighting from time to time, and the sport almost always demonstrates a clear difference between pedigree fighters with good training and short-term gimmicky street fighters who don't last long against the former. I've dabbled in some martial arts from just reading books, but it never compares to a classroom or gym environment with other human beings that will hit you back. Backyard throwdowns may work for the neighborhood bully, but those skills won't hold up to snuff against a seasoned fighter who has been training under an actual instructor.

Some of the people I've gone against in sparring and tournaments who had no formal training put up a good fight on first contact, but their strategy falls apart after a while because they haven't been exposed to the science of it all beyond just watching other people do it and using heuristics to improvise their punching, kicking and grappling.

On another note, language acquisition rarely works well without formal tutoring. Too many times have I encountered someone who claims they can speak Spanish from working in a kitchen or because of that one time they went to Cancun.

edited 1st Mar '15 10:57:20 PM by Aprilla

I never actually considered those points but I guess formal training is better for most things.

Oh god, I can attest to the language thing. I've been trying to learn one by myself, with little more than a few scant written materials. It's not working so well.

When it comes down to it, I'm not sure that a meaningful distinction between 'formal' and 'informal' training can even be made until you name a particular activity. As a general rule, I think of 'informal' training as anything not involving direct supervision by a human instructor.

There are few occupations where this will work better in terms of developing acceptably job-useful skills. There are no occupations where self-training will result in job-useful skills at all, unless you hold your training to the same standards as those expected of existing professionals in the field.

If that's what is meant by 'formal' vs 'informal', then I would say that no, most occupations value formal training far too much, because most occupations are not professions. Most occupations do not involve any task that even remotely warrants such a distinction between training styles.

If -that's- what's meant by formal training, then god no, it's not important in most occupations, and AwSamWeston said the only thing that needs be said. Formal training in non-rigorous, sub-professional jobs is completely useless. The only training that will actually matter is that which you won't ever get until you start working. Most jobs DO reward hands-on, informal, 'experience-based' training far more than they reward structured, formal study.

This isn't because of the merits of one kind of study or another. It's because — let's face it — most jobs out there are not entirely difficult, or important.

There's only so much formal studying you're even going to be able to -do- towards a field that is really nothing more than a glorified, cushier, and hopefully longer-term/more-secure version of the same kind of work you'd do in an hourly position. Which is -almost- every salary position.

Part of me feels like the -real- purpose of formal schooling, in most fields, is to make people feel better by referring to crap like travel coordination or accounting as a 'profession'.

Businesses get to save time and money that might otherwise have to be spent showing you where the buttons are... People in their early 20's get to feel very adult, and thus more-deserving of a nicer job than the teenagers (whether or not it's true)... People in their late 20's-onward get to feel like they're a 'skilled worker' instead of acknowledging their status as an aging drone, stuck in a slightly-upscale dead-end job... Everybody's happy.

edited 2nd Mar '15 3:15:42 AM by Preta

Let's put it this way, even if your certain occupation or hobby even doesn't require formal training, it never hurts.

To go with the lines of what Best Of said, I am going to put two examples of two jobs, one for which formal training is great, and another for which it is not so defining.

For the example of programming, I am aware that there are a lot of autodidactic people who program perfectly well out there. I know that self-thaught programming is a thing, and so are many skills. However when you are applying for a job in an engineering position, or software development position, it is different that in your resume you say "self thaught Java" as opposed to "certified in Java, X school, year 2013".

A job such as programming has a product. "hey. It does not matter if I went to school, right? I mean, I can program and I can show it", but the fact is that the person who will recruit you is probably going to be a random HR guy based on your resume, interview, and past job experiences. NOT based on your actual work since the HR guy knows little of that, and the best thing he has to dilucidate how good of a programmer you are is not on what you can do, but what you have done with what you can do that shows. Titles and certificates show. Claims that I cannot verify, do not show.

Compare and contrast with say, a web designer. I mean simply setting up a web site, not coding every link, and making everything functional. I mean ismply designing it to look pretty. In here, everything is reliant on your skills that can very easily be self thaught, and the only thing that will be asked of you is if your job looks good enough. And that is something that I can see in the work itself, not where, or how you learned it.

Being merely a visual thing makes it perfectly viable to hire you for this task based solely on the product, but if it takes something more technical then remember the guy who will look at your resume and works is not prolly going to be someone specialized and knowledgeable in the field, but an HR guy who only has your impact on other organizations as proof of what you do, and cannot, or will not, see your actual work.

You'll usually be interviewed by actual programmers, who will ask you to work through a simple exercise or two. Self-taught programmers tend to be...scatterbrained, and the result is often a pile of spaghetti where something simple would have sufficed.

In web design it's very, very rare that you'll ever be hired to just set up the layout of the page and not hook up functionality — especially with libraries like Bootstrap out there that do half the styling for you. When the job market contracted, the "pure" web artists were among the first who got laid off, because employers figured out we can do the same job ourselves if necessary.

In what I'm doing now, we have a small art department that comes up with layout, control flow, and usability stuff, but only in a wireframe with delineated component dimensions and maybe coming up with a couple image assets. The programmers generally have to implement it from scratch.

edited 2nd Mar '15 8:33:04 AM by Pykrete

The first layer of people who read the Resumes are however, not the programmers though which is my point. Which means some people might not even GET to be interviewed because the human resources guy could not pinpoint a skill. And I tried to make the second example as specific as possible, as the guys who did only the looks rather than functionality, but you are correct.

I learned English mostly by myself. Been going at it since I was 6 years old. It's not impossible.