When I was twenty-eight, I watched my supervisor get promoted to regional manager. He’d started in the mailroom fifteen years earlier with nothing but a high school diploma and an uncanny ability to understand systems. Last month, that same position was filled by someone with two master’s degrees and three professional certifications. The kicker? The old boss was twice as effective.

This isn’t nostalgia talking. It’s a pattern I’ve watched unfold over my thirty-five years in the insurance industry, and it’s accelerating now that I’m on the outside looking in. The self-taught workers of my generation – the ones who learned by doing, who climbed from mailroom to boardroom – we might be the last ones who got to play that game.

The golden age of learning by doing

Remember when “I’ll figure it out” was a valid qualification? My grandfather arrived in this country with empty pockets and built a successful life by watching, asking questions, and working sixteen-hour days. No trade school certificate. No business degree. Just hands dirty and mind sharp.

That world is disappearing faster than free coffee in an office break room.

Jonathan F. Harris, an author who’s studied this shift, puts it bluntly: “Credentialism is the combination of two related phenomena. First, it is the stacking and use of credentials for their signaling power rather than for the skills and knowledge they convey. Second, credentialism is the ever-growing accumulation of credentials with diminishing levels of return from each subsequent credential.”

In other words, we’re collecting degrees like baseball cards, hoping the right combination opens the right door.

How did we get here?

The shift didn’t happen overnight. It crept in like that colleague who gradually takes over your desk space – one paperclip at a time until suddenly you’re working in a corner.

When I started as a claims adjuster, the requirement was simple: be smart, be reliable, show up. By the time I retired, that same position required a bachelor’s degree, preferably in business or finance, plus industry certifications that cost thousands of dollars.

What changed? The work itself hasn’t gotten significantly more complex. If anything, technology has made many aspects easier. But somewhere along the line, we decided that potential could only be measured in transcripts and certificates.

The real tragedy isn’t just that we’re shutting out capable people. It’s that we’re shutting out a particular type of thinker – the kind who learns by taking things apart, who solves problems by getting their hands dirty, who innovates because nobody told them it couldn’t be done.

The hidden cost of credential inflation

Here’s what keeps me up at night: the infrastructure we rely on – bridges, power grids, water systems – was largely built by people who learned on the job. The foreman who supervised the construction of your office building probably started as a laborer. The engineer who designed your town’s traffic flow might have begun as a surveyor’s assistant.

These people didn’t just bring technical skills. They brought something universities can’t teach: deep, intuitive understanding that comes from working your way up through every level of a system.

Daniel Lehewych, a graduate student of philosophy, observes that “Credentialism has made things much harder for employers to fill positions, as less than half of the U.S. population possesses a college degree. Employers are beginning to catch on to just how inefficient over-emphasizing credentials are to hiring high-quality workers.”

But are they really catching on? From where I sit, watching former colleagues struggle to hire, the credential arms race is only accelerating.

What we’re really losing

Think about the last time you solved a real problem at work. Did you reference your college textbooks? Or did you draw on experience, intuition, and maybe a conversation with someone who’d been there before?

The autodidacts of my generation weren’t just self-taught in skills. We were self-taught in learning itself. We developed our own methods, our own approaches, our own ways of seeing problems. That diversity of thought is what drives innovation.

I learned more about managing people from watching my father work double shifts at the factory than I did from any management seminar. He never read a book on leadership, but he understood how to motivate tired workers at hour fourteen of a sixteen-hour day. That’s knowledge you can’t credential.

When every manager thinks the same way because they all went through the same programs, read the same case studies, and got the same certificates, you get exactly what you’d expect: the same solutions, over and over, whether they work or not.

Breaking down the new barriers

So what do we do about it? How do we preserve the autodidactic spirit in a world that increasingly demands papers to prove you can do what you’ve already been doing?

First, if you’re in a position to hire, look beyond the credentials. Ask candidates to solve real problems, not recite what they learned in school. The person who figured out how to fix your website might be a philosophy major who taught themselves coding, not the computer science graduate with perfect grades.

Second, if you’re building your career, don’t let the credential game discourage you from learning on your own. Yes, you might need that piece of paper to get through HR’s filters. But the real edge comes from what you teach yourself after hours, the problems you solve because they interest you, the skills you develop because you need them, not because they’re on a syllabus.

Third, share what you know freely. The apprenticeship model might be dying in formal settings, but it doesn’t have to die completely. Mentor someone. Write about what you’ve learned. Create the kind of learning opportunities that shaped you.

Final thoughts

The generation now retiring might be the last to have climbed from mailroom to management without a degree, but we don’t have to be the last generation to value learning over credentials. The pathway might be narrower now, the gate might be higher, but the human capacity to learn by doing hasn’t changed.

The question is whether we’ll recognize that capacity when we see it, or whether we’ll keep looking for it in all the wrong places – in transcripts and certificates rather than in the spark of someone who says, “I don’t know how to do that yet, but I’ll figure it out.”

Because at the end of the day, that’s the spirit that built everything worth having. And losing it might cost us more than we realize.