Second Most Credentialed Person in Modern History

[sanantone]

I'd much rather work for an employer that uses common sense and treats its employees well. An employer would have to be clueless to deny paying for a secretary's degree after he or she has been working for the company for years just to turn around and hire someone externally for an office manager position that requires a degree. The companies that keep their employees promote from within. Since you were in human resources, you should know that many, if not most, office managers start in lower-level, administrative assistant positions.

If you want common sense: in your example, if the secretary had been at the company for years, and had shown that she could do the job of office manager, I in my role in HR would encourage the hiring manager to just promote her, without requiring a degree.  Office manager is NOT a job that should require a degree at all (and places I worked, it didn't).  The most common sense plan to me, is not to put arbitrary degree requirements on jobs, so that you don't have to pay for someone to get a degree when the job duties don't require it.

But, isn't this true for most positions? If someone is already working in an IT position, they obviously didn't need a degree to do their job. Does someone really need a degree to be an IT supervisor? Most degree requirements are arbitrary. You did your job many years ago without a degree, but how many more employers currently require HR specialists to have one?