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Education and Productivity: Whats the Correlation?
Subject:Education and Productivity: Whats the Correlation? From:Matthew Danda <matt -at- SONYTEL -dot- BE> Date:Tue, 24 Jun 1997 11:06:02 +0200
Hello:
This education thread is provoking my thoughts, and I invite anyone to
agree or disagree. I speak primarily about the education level of SME's,
and how tech writers communicate with them.
Education and Productivity: What's the Correlation?
I have had the opportunity in my career to work with both college
dropouts and PhD scientists, and everyone in-between, and I'll admit
there is a rather nebulous relationship between education level and
overall productivity. However, I have noticed the following advantages
to working with educated people:
-Meetings run smoother. Its easier to keep a PhD on-topic and focused on
the particular agenda for the meeting.
-Disciplined thought. PhD's tend to listen better and think through
problems more clearly. (Of course, implementation is a different
story....)
-Reading ability. If you are dealing with programmers, most will cringe
even at the sound of "documentation." But a higher probability exists
that a PhD will understand the merits of good technical documentation
and make an attempt to follow through in both reading existing materials
and creating new technical documentation.
Of course, the flip side is the following:
-PhD's can be surprisingly in-the-dark when it comes to the latest tools
and software packages (ironic, isn't it?).
-PhD's have incredible difficulty shipping imperfect products (a must in
the software development world, a flogging offense in academia).
-There is absolutely no correlation between education level and business
acumen, and this fact of life is sometimes incomprehensible to the
higher degreed--a source of frustration to others who have to interact
with him/her on a daily basis.
Conclusion:
Mostly the question of educated versus non-educated becomes a
personality issue, depending on the particular person and circumstance.
However, given two people with equal brain power, the one with the
higher degree is easier to communicate with in a linear, sensible
fashion. The hyper-intelligent college dropouts (they are all over this
industry!) tend to approach problems in a less disciplined, non-linear
fashion, thereby making it more difficult to communicate.
Just my US$0.02.
Cheers,
Matt
--
Matt Danda
Technical Writer
Sony Objective Composer (Belgium)
matthew -dot- danda -at- sonycom -dot- com
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