What do Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Dell, Richard Branson and many other entrepreneurs have in common? Each dropped out of college and failed to earn a degree. Many of them had parents with advanced degrees in professional fields, but they did not follow that path.
Of course, there are some fields that require advanced degrees; medicine, law, academia, and others. Those people need to get the degrees appropriate for their work.
I hold a bachelor’s degree from Purdue University and my wife has a master’s degree from Ball State. I tell her that she is the most educated person in our household. She jokingly tells me that I have come a long way with a bachelor’s degree.
No one ever asks what my degree is. This fact has never held me back. I have worked with a number of Ph.D.’s over the years and value their contributions. In my current role as a consultant to the power transmission industry, I let my work and accomplishments speak for themselves.
You don’t require an advanced degree to be successful in your chosen profession in most cases. But whether you possess one, it helps to have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, a high level of curiosity, a strong drive, unequaled creativity, and passion for your work.
During my 36 years at Fairfield Manufacturing (now a division of Dana Corp.), they empowered me to devote the time and energy that I might have used to get advanced degrees to learning what I needed to know to do my job more efficiently, and get better at my craft, and in this way becoming more useful to the company.
What I learned during my four years at Purdue formed the basis and foundation for what I achieved in my career at Schafer Gear Works and then Fairfield. I was chief engineer at both companies. Almost all I learned and needed to learn after Purdue, I did either on my own through reading, researching, interacting with colleagues, mentors, and others or from courses, seminars, trade associations, and in other related ways.
Mine was a mostly self-directed journey. I studied a lot on my own believing that it is always a good policy to learn what you need to learn, when you need to learn it, and in whatever way you can. My longtime boss Jim Dammon always told me that at Fairfield a person made his own job, became good at something, maybe even an expert like I did, and that made them uniquely valuable to the company.
At Fairfield, I designed, specified, and developed complete gearbox/geared assemblies. This necessarily included designing or specifying shafts, bearings, gears, seals, housings, materials, lubricants, splines, hardware, and everything else that a gearbox contains. I had to consider manufacturing, quality, assembly, testing, and other related issues. Also, I was responsible for managing my own programs and projects from start to finish. I sometimes did this for complete product lines of multiple gearbox assemblies, such as gearboxes for a line of oil well pumping units and wind turbine generators. I have three patents for this work, the last of which was granted in 2016.
This was unusual, both then and now. Most companies, particularly large corporations, have teams of engineers and others that do this work, many specializing in only one of the above listed functions or individual parts. It normally takes one to two years or more to do this with the many people described above to complete projects of this scope. Depending on the complexity of the project, I did this in weeks or at most months. I did this year after year for almost all my time at Fairfield ― over 300 gearbox assemblies in total.
Fairfield, at least in my department, was merit based and almost entrepreneurial in spirit and did not rely on professional credentials alone. Just performance. This, in a company of 1,200 people and worth $600 million, is noteworthy.
Tesla, where I worked for several months, and some of the tech companies, operate the most like this today, in my opinion.
In the fall of 2019, I guest-lectured at Purdue in two different fields of study in a period of three weeks; I provided future mechanical engineers an overview of how to design and specify complete gearboxes/transmissions, and then to budding entrepreneurs in the Krannert school of business how to start and maintain a sole member LLC consulting company like I did. Not bad for someone lacking an advanced degree.
In your career, you don’t need anyone’s permission to be successful. You can just do it. It is still possible to do what I and many others have done in this regard and as I described above. There are many people doing this today. You can be one of them!
Photo credit: Freepick.com