Do you envision yourself as the next Mark Zuckerberg or working for a company like Google or Apple? If so, you may want to take note of a recent report from Entrepreneur magazine.
While we tend to place many tech entrepreneurs on a pedestal as outliers that shunned the need for formal education in exchange for their own genius, many owe at least some of their success to the time they spent at colleges and universities across the country. They also won’t begin to hire talent if said talent lacks the proper credentials.
To determine what those credentials are, they often turn to many of the types of schools they attended (even if they only attended there for a short while).
Why do they do it? Doesn’t it sound at least a little hypocritical?
Fair questions.
Put yourself in their shoes. They know their strengths and weaknesses better than anyone, and they had the confidence to go out on their own. But that was largely because they’re living inside their own skin. They have access to who they are. They don’t have access to who you are. And when it comes time to scale, they need to see a certain degree of discipline to go along with the ability.
Getting a job at a Facebook or a Google or an Apple is next to impossible if you don’t have a good-looking resume. While it can be challenging to stand out, it is definitely worth the rewards.
Paysa reveals tech employment education data
The Entrepreneur report — taken from online career website Paysa’s findings — analyzed over 286,000 resumes of people from around the world who work at the top 100 companies in the tech sector. Paysa delved into details such as where most tech workers attended college, educational diversity of those employees, and average salaries of graduates among others.
Turns out, many of the most common degrees came from colleges and universities located in the western U.S. More from Entrepreneur:
“The University of Washington was the most common college found on tech employees’ resumes, with Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California also in the top five.”
The No. 2 school was located in the eastern U.S., the institute being Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Penn.
“Proximity to companies gives students an edge in forging connections that lead to jobs. At Seattle-based Microsoft, 6.5 percent of employees are graduates of the University of Washington. Meanwhile, 5.4 percent of Googlites are Stanford grads,” the Entrepreneur piece states.
Social media company Snap Inc. seemed to prefer candidates from Stanford University at 16.1 percent of the overall workforce. Meanwhile, Yelp — out of San Francisco — welcomed 11 percent of its workforce from the University of California at Berkeley.
“Out of all 100 companies surveyed, Google, Microsoft and Amazon had the highest proportions of graduates who came from the same schools and even the same graduating classes,” Entrepreneur’s Rose Leadem stated, adding that Google employees “can expect an average of 9.2 fellow alumni from their class to join them in the workplace.”
Leadem continued: “It’s almost the same case for Microsoft and Amazon — there are typically around eight employees with the same alma mater at these companies.”
Paysa on educational diversity, income
According to Paysa, if you want to work somewhere with a more diverse educational makeup, you will have to eyeball a smaller company “such as Optiv, Prosper Marketplace and Zillow,” where, on average, “ just one employee will have attended a given college at each of these organizations.
On the payfront, highest-paid graduates working at tech companies are from some not-so-obvious locations like Seattle University and the Pacific Lutheran University. Graduates here average around $265,000 a year.
Some tech companies also explore their options from foreign universities. The University of Cambridge in England and the University of Toronto, for two examples, are among the top 10 best earning groups of tech employees with a Cambridge alumnus averaging a salary of $252,645 annually, and Toronto students coming just under at an average of $252,639.
For the full report as well as all the helpful infographics from Paysa, check out this link.
Aric Mitchell's work appears regularly here at 4tests.com and across the web for sites, such as The Inquisitr and Life'd. A former high school teacher, his passion for education has only intensified since leaving the classroom. At 4tests, he hopes to continue passing along words of encouragement and study tips to ensure you leave school ready to face an ever-changing world.
Do you envision yourself as the next Mark Zuckerberg or working for a company like Google or Apple? If so, you may want to take note of a recent report from Entrepreneur magazine.
