Education or Experience?

When you’re looking for a job, there are 2 things that are pretty important – your education and your experience. But which of the two carries more weight? I suppose it depends on the employer. In my opinion, experience is more important. It shows that you can actually implement what you’ve learned. But then again, my opinion doesn’t mean bupkiss. It’s the opinion of the employer that is the deciding factor.

Yeah, having both the education and experience in the field you’re looking for work in is the ideal situation. But unfortunately, that’s not the case for me. I do have an education, but it’s in a completely unrelated field. I have a BS in Meteorological Studies but I’m looking for work as a web developer. What does the weather have to do with website? Absolutely nothing. LOL I did take a computer concepts in meteorology class in which we had to put our reports online. That was my first taste of web programming.

All of my knowledge in the world of web programming/development has been self taught. I’ve done websites for myself … I took over maintaining the website for my first employer out of college … I’ve done websites for a couple local bands. I learn best by doing … by actually sitting down and writing code. If I want to do something but don’t know how, I’ll look it up online … either tutorials or examples.

For the past 4 years or so, I’ve been working as a web programmer. I have furthered my knowledge in php and learned mssql. I had never even seen mssql before taking that position a little over 4 years ago. My database experience had been limited to MySQL, and that was just basic INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, and SELECT statements. But now I consider myself quite experienced in mssql. I’m not expert, by any stretch of the imagination, but I know what I’m doing. And if I don’t know how to do something, I know where to look to find out how to do it.

While I am very proud of the fact that I’ve taught myself what I have, I’m starting to wonder if not having a degree in a computer related field is hurting me. Most of the positions I’m finding around town are for .NET programmers. I’ve never even seen .NET. Yeah, I’m convinced that I could pick it up, but employers are going to want someone who can sit down and start coding right away rather than someone they’re going to have to train. I DO want to learn new aspects of the web programming world, but I’d rather find a job that uses the areas I already know with the opportunity to learn the new stuff. That way I could be useful right off the bat and ease into the new stuff.

Am I just kidding myself? Is an education more important than experience? Or DOES experience carry more weight? Am I okay with one and not the other as long as the one is experience? What do you think?