I’m a university person. I’ve got two Masters degrees (and still don’t know how to apostrophise ‘Masters’). One day I’d like a PhD if I can get one without much extra work. The world of vocational study is quite foreign to me, so I did what all good university people do when they meet a concept they’re not familiar with and looked it up.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines vocational as ‘providing skills and education that prepare you for a job’.

Allaboutschooleavers.co.uk says that vocational study:

• Takes place in the workplace
• Helps students learn how to apply new knowledge to real-life situations straightaway
• Is designed to meet the specific needs of employers and job sectors
• Can help people decide whether a particular job sector is right for them.

Techtorium says that

‘One of the significant differences between vocational and academic study is that study for an academic degree involves study across various and broad subjects, for example, Calculus is required for many engineering directions. Economics for any business direction, whereas vocational study is directed towards focused topics like repairing computers or cutting hair.

All of which is leading me to my thought for the day: PhDs are vocational qualifications.

PhDs:

• Take place in the workplace (a university)
• Help students learn how to apply new knowledge (research methodologies) to real-world situations (research projects your manager tells you to do)
• Meet the staffing needs of university departments and applied research organisations (and not many other people?)
• Can help you realise whether a particular job sector (academia) is right for you
• Don’t include subjects that can be called ‘various’ and ‘broad’
• Teach you the focussed and specific skill of how to do research.

What do you think? Is this convincing?

I did a taught Masters, and learnt a lot about my subject. I did a research Masters in a different field, and learnt a lot about the skill of research. One is academic, the other vocational.

And I realise that I’ve annoyed people by saying this, because society can’t conceive of the highest course that universities offer as being vocational. Vocational is plumbers and electricians and other people who have no status but hold society together. The fabulous Sir Ken Robinson put it well, in his watch-once-a-year-for-the-rest-of-your-life talk ‘Do schools kill creativity?’

‘Academic ability… has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image.’

And this is a broader problem than some arbitrary categorisation of a course that very few people take and even fewer care about. Contrary to what many people are taught to think, a higher university degree ≠ a more intelligent ≠ a better person. (If a PhD is an assessment of anything, I’d suggest it’s bloody-mindedness.) I’ve drafted a longer post on intelligence and how our society defines it wrongly – it’s in-depth and thoughtful and therefore I’ve been putting off finishing it for weeks, because more degrees ≠ less procrastination – in fact, it just means I have a lot more practice at it.