People are drawn in when reading stories about the highly successful founders in the tech industry who were basically self-educated like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. They open companies and dream about that startup that brings in millions. The problem is that this rarely happens. While it is not impossible, the truth is that it is quite difficult to replicate the success of the people mentioned.
The Learning Paradox
In the tech industry, nobody stops learning. The common approach is to simply go to university. After a few years you think that you managed to learn absolutely everything that is necessary to be successful. It does not matter if you learn management or something technical. You are taught that this is what you have to learn but at the end of college, you may be surprised to notice the fact that most of what you learned is already outdated.
Let’s think about business management. In college you will learn the basics of how to create great financial business plans. However, when it is time to build the plan for your company, you can end up realizing that you do not know anything about how to incorporate anything related to online expenses.
The bottom line is that business and tech are not like law or medicine. Anatomy will not change overnight. In technology, everything can change from one day to the next. Because of that, you need to keep learning.
Why Are Universities Recommended?
What was written above may lead you towards thinking that formal education is not needed. That is not actually the case. Many do not understand the fact that colleges and universities can teach you how to build social skills, how to multitask and basically offer you skills that are really useful when trying to grow in your career. You get to become more organized, which is a necessity in all careers.
What you can easily learn if you read about the personalities that managed to succeed without universities is that their self education was quite similar to what you learn in college. The skills that are developed through formal education are important and these people realized this.
At the same time, we need to admit the truth that companies want to see you holding a degree before a job is offered. In the event that you just want to work from home, this will not be a problem. However, in the event that you need to work in other companies in order to gain experience or learn new things before starting your own business, formal education becomes mandatory.
Self-Education Is Not For Everyone
Learning is not at all easy. In fact, it is really hard to learn alone at home from sites like Treehouse or similar. You are tempted to believe that this is easy but the truth is that you need a lot of motivation and discipline. For some people the process is easy but for most, formal education offered by colleges or universities is a lot better.