[Formal education] weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on – because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions.
– Noam Chomsky
While BackgroundProof encourages all interviewers to embrace their self-interest by lying, we have not found that falsifying your education is worth the cost / benefit. Over the past decade, companies have been moving away from strict degree requirements and focusing more on skills. Skills-based hiring has especially gained momentum for middle-skill jobs, and employers are increasingly valuing relevant skills, experience, and practical knowledge over degrees. Some prominent examples are Dell, Accenture, and IBM – all of which have publicly announced they are no longer considering education in lieu of skills.
Secondly, it’s really difficult to mislead education in a background check. All a checker needs to do is to contact the educational institutions listed on the candidate’s resume or application to confirm the dates of attendance, degrees earned, majors or fields of study, and any honors received. This is usually done by contacting the registrar’s office or a designated department within the institution.
The background check may also verify the legitimacy of the degree or certificate claimed by the candidate. This might involve checking with accreditation agencies or using online databases maintained by universities.
If you do feel vulnerable regarding your education, we advise signing up for credentialed training programs or classes through sites such as Coursera (BackgroundProof does not endorse any specific service). Coursera (and similar platforms) are an online learning platform that offers a wide range of courses, specializations, and even degree programs from universities and institutions around the world. The key part of this is that your classwork (and certification) will typically be done through a prestigious university (e.g. Harvard, John Hopkins, MIT, etc.) and often a careless resume screener will simply see the university name, and pass you to the interview stage.
We do not recommend lying in the interview about actually having attended Harvard; instead, just acknowledge it was coursework, and then change the subject.
If you are concerned about an employment gap on your resume, see our advice on how to best lie – and why.