How Can Someone Be Overqualified?

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I’ve been a freelance for a long time now, since the mid-nineties. These days I don’t get much exposure to the recruitment market for employee roles, or those sorts of agency roles which are basically the same thing, only with fewer rights. However, I do still get enough to be exposed to the concept of being “overqualified”, and to know that that is precisely the sort of feedback I would get if I were looking for a staff job (thankfully, as someone who now works almost exclusively as an expert witness, the idea of “overqualification” never comes up).

It is pretty clear that “overqualified” is HR talk for “too old”. Since age discrimination is illegal in the UK, they can’t tell you that you are too old, so instead they tell you that you are too good. “You’d find the job too easy.” “You’d be bored.” As a freelancer, these issues might matter to me, but what staffie in their sixties ever said “This job is too easy, I’m going to have to resign, before I die of boredom”?

The people I started out with in engineering who remained in staff positions have mostly retired. I don’t know if that was their idea or not. Very few of them admit on LinkedIn that they got the push, unless they are looking for a new position. I’m glad I’m not in their shoes. Getting a new job in your sixties in engineering is no picnic.

Around five years ago, some anonymous and rather bitter junior academic, who was peer reviewing a book proposal I had submitted, commented that I was “nearing the end of my career”. I was in my late fifties at the time. I wrote an article for PII about it here.

I still spend time inside engineering companies as part of my job, and I know that the average age in EPC companies in particular is maybe half mine. What I also know is that what these companies could really do with is a few more people with a few decades of experience. I see way too little know-how, and not just in the cases where I am there as an expert witness.

It’s not a matter of qualifications. Most of those young engineers have Master’s degrees. It’s a matter of practical engineering knowledge, passed on through mentorship by – or at least interaction with – the old geezers who know what not to do.

When I started as an engineer, there were guys my age working as engineers. There were graduates and people with trades backgrounds, and there were a few old guys who were the unofficial gurus, who could be relied upon to know how to do anything which needed doing. More importantly, they knew what not to do, because they knew what happened when other people had tried and could tell you a great story about it.

They would have a filing cabinet full of odd bits of paper, photocopied multiple times and passed on through generations of engineers like themselves, covering all of those arcane nuggets of knowledge necessary to do the job, but of no interest to academia.

The younger engineers, finding that there was no published information on how to do whatever they had to do, would go and see this guy (let’s call him Maurice, after the first of these guys I encountered), and ask him how it could be done. Maurice would establish just what it was that needed to be done, go to his filing cabinet, and pull out a bit of paper for you to photocopy and return.

You’d probably be back to see him again quite soon, because that bit of paper wouldn’t really tell you how to do it. You’d need explanation and guidance, and for Maurice to check your calcs a few times until you could reliably use the technique.

These bits of paper wouldn’t pass muster in an academic environment. There would usually be no reference to an original source, just a few nomograms or diagrams, and some notes. I incorporated some of what I had learned from Maurice (and others like him) in my book “An Applied Guide to Water and Effluent Treatment Plant Design”. One example particularly stands out. It might be surprising to learn that there is no academic literature which tells you how to size a pump to dose acid or alkali to obtain a specified pH for natural waters. Someone like Maurice once gave me a bit of paper which told me how to do it, and talked me through getting the hang of it. Later in my career, as part of writing a textbook, I went looking for the nomogram which formed the basis of this approach. It was taken from a paper published in German in 1912! Practical engineers had developed a verbally transmitted, rule-of-thumb-based, approach to a common engineering problem which academics hadn’t even tried to solve.

There are many such approaches, they are still needed, and they still work. Young engineers are not taught them in university, and they aren’t going to learn them on the job if nobody employs the old engineers any more, because they are supposedly overqualified.

Maurice didn’t seem bored. Much of his job was passing on knowledge to grateful younger engineers. He wasn’t overqualified. He was just qualified enough.