"Higher education is overrated; skills aren´t"

Coming from HARVARD Business Review, that´s quite an interesting blow to the formal education team.

(...) there's no shortage of "well- educated" college graduates who can't write intelligible synopses or manage simple spreadsheets. I know doctoral candidates in statistics and operations research who find adapting their superb technical expertise to messy, real-world problem solving extraordinarily difficult. Their great knowledge doesn't confer great skill. Nevertheless, you would find their research and their resumes impressive. You should. But focusing on their formal educational accomplishments misrepresents their skill set outside the academy. Academic and classroom markets are profoundly different than business and workplace markets. Why should anyone be surprised that serious knowledge/skill gaps dominate those differences?

"I knew that being president couldn't lead to unemployment"

That was what my successor as president in AIESEC Norway told me, about 2 weeks ago, when he heard that I've got a job in the human resources of Yara International. It wasn't easy, but finally my 5 years in AIESEC paid off. Don't get me wrong, I know it paid off a lot in terms of development and experiences that I will only be able to get 10 years ahead in my career, but it doesn't help me if only me and other AIESECers know that. And I was extremely lucky, since they were looking for someone with my expertise (a mix of communication and human resources) and the new head of human resources in Yara was the head of HR in UBS, which is a proud and happy AIESEC partner. So when I was in the interview, I already started with a good impression, since he knew AIESEC from before and my new boss also knew AIESEC because Yara was a partner of AIESEC Norway.

It's sincerely a relief to have a job, after 3 or 4 months of daily job applications and negative answers. What is most extreme is that in the same week I received an offer from Yara and from another big company I admire a lot. Statistically that was very unlikely, but, well, it happened and it helped boost my self-confidence after such a long period of feeling useless - especially after applying for jobs from a wide range of opportunities, from management to shop assistant and everything that is in between.

I start at Yara on 1st of August, but I am already working some days a week and I am enjoying it a lot. But in the next days I should speak about my job, it deserves a whole post only for it. :)