There is a growing debate over whether university education is still essential for career success or work experience matters the most. While some people believe that there is one and only strategy I reckon that in order to succeed a candidate needs both: a solid training base in a specific field and some work experience to start.
High education is crucial for a young person to strengthen its competitiveness in the job market. University gives not only specific knowledge for acquiring the profession as well as general knowledge about the whole field and basics of the disciplines going hand in hand with the major subject. Which enables detecting many other relations between issues, training questioning, exploring the reasons and finding the solutions. Education gives a person a number of diverse optics and a specific set of mind to explore the world. Utilizing it a person may become successful not in the practical side of his profession. For instance, Étienne-Louis Boullée, French neoclassical architect, studied in the middle of the XVIII th century, has built just a few buildings for his whole life. However, the architect attained his fame by theories and concept ideas that are still influencing specialists all over the world.
Nevertheless, few university training can prepare a student for a real job market. Corporate culture teaches to speak different languages: with colleagues, contractors, directors or junior specialists. Performing everyday professional practice allows to define what skills are truly valuable and worth time and money to spend. By gaining work experience a person becomes capable of distinguishing what kind of problems the field has right at the moment and how to solve them. All this knowledge can be only obtained by years of practice, they are what is named as the value and the expertise. A self taught person who gained such an experience may become prosperous. For instance, Japanese architect Tadao Ando, although he has never graduated from the university, taught himself with the greatest pieces of architecture while travelling around the world. Later he started his own practice. By developing the buildings in his signature style he won many architectural awards. Nowadays Tadao Ando remains one of the most famous and admired architects in the world.
In conclusion, I equally agree with both views. University gives a student the scope of knowledge the specific kind of a specialist is meant to obtain, but real work experience teaches a person how to be this specialist. The declarative knowledge in addition to procedural knowledge makes the candidate able to solve the business’s problems and become more valuable for the market, which can guarantee a good job.