Welcome to the Degree Free Community | New? Start Here! (DF#100)

Hannah [00:00:59]:

Welcome back. Welcome back, folks, to the podcast. Ryan and I are stoked to have you on, as always, and especially on today, on this episode of all episodes.

Ryan [00:01:07]:

Yes. Because today is a big episode for us. Today is episode 100.

Hannah [00:01:13]:

Triple digits, folks.

Ryan [00:01:15]:

Yeah. It is crazy to think that we have been doing this once weekly show. It comes out every Wednesday. We have been doing that for 100 episodes, which is almost two years.

Hannah [00:01:31]:

Two years you and I have sat down at these mics and done an episode every week.

Ryan [00:01:36]:

Yeah. And it could not have been possible without you listening to this podcast. And so at the very beginning, I want to say thank you for listening and thank you to the Degree Free community for being there and striving and helping everybody else get the work they want, helping everybody else reach their career goals, their professional goals, and help them ultimately live the life that they want.

Hannah [00:02:03]:

Yeah. We really cannot thank you enough. And folks, we read all the emails, we read all the comments. And I also want to thank everybody as well and just say we really appreciate how invested you all have been in this community, in this movement, how much you help each other, because Ryan and I do see it and it inspires us every day. If you didn't see it recently, one of our Degree Free community members was highlighted on Business Insider for his story. And more and more of these stories are going to become mainstream and people are going to start seeing that they have options, that they have the ability to get the work they want to teach themselves, the skills they need to teach themselves. And it's because of you and because of all the support you folks have given us that we're able to bring attention to these stories and help other people do the same thing. Before we get into the actual episode, I want to take a moment too to thank Ryan. Ryan is the unsung hero of the degree free podcast. Ryan does all of the production, all of the editing. He makes this podcast possible. He invests so much time and energy and care into making sure that these episodes are great and that you folks have access to the resources you need and the show notes. He does all of it. And so we are just really grateful for Ryan and for our team that makes this possible. And it's just we're really proud of 100 episodes. And thank you so much.

Ryan [00:03:21]:

Yeah, thank you. And thank you to our team. What is crazy for 100 episodes is we've been through like, five or six sets.

Hannah [00:03:32]:

Sets is a generous term.

Ryan [00:03:33]:

Yeah, exactly. Well, for a really good portion of it, we were just doing them in our living room and we would move all of the cameras out of the way every day.

Hannah [00:03:43]:

Oh, my gosh, I remember that.

Ryan [00:03:46]:

Yeah. And they would just, like, take up a really good portion of our living room. And so yeah, it's crazy to see what this has become and where we came from. So if you've listened and watched since day one, thank you so much. And you can go back and watch the YouTube videos of all the different sets that we've had. What I wanted to do on Episode 100 is a little bit different than what we normally do. Next episode, we'll get back to our regularly scheduled programming. On episode 100, I wanted to make a place where we could send people to get everything they needed from degree free just to be a starting point for you to dip your toes into degree free, because one of the most often asked questions is, oh, you have a podcast. You have a show. Which episode should I start with? Which episode should I start on? Honestly, I didn't really have a great answer.

Hannah [00:04:44]:

Yeah. You kind of look around for the best episode for them, but sometimes you're not sure if you send them to the right one.

Ryan [00:04:49]:

I wanted this episode to be that episode that we and you listening to this, can send people to, because I know a lot of you share these episodes and share this podcast. Thank you so much. It's difficult for you as well because you're not sure if you should be sending them the most recent one or if you should send them the very first one. And it all gets really overwhelming. So Episode 100 is going to be the episode that you send out to your friends and family that might want to start dipping their toes in degree free and start taking charge of their career and making those career advances in a degree free way. And if you are a longtime listener, if you've been listening since episode one, first of all, thank you so much. This is going to be a lot of review for you, but I think that you're going to love this episode. And if you are new to degree free, which most of you are, and thank you for listening, this is a great way to dip your toes, as I said before, into degree free. And the mindset and how we do things here and how you can advance your career, get the work that you want, start that business. Whatever your career goals are, how you can accomplish that the degree free way. The best way we can start off is going over our background. Maybe we should start at the beginning. At first, there was the dinosaurs.

Hannah [00:06:10]:

Lord, we're going to be here a while. I'm going to rescue you all from that, from The History of the World by Ryan Mariama. And I would watch that movie. Anyway, we'll talk about that later. So fast forward to March of 2020. I am working at a call center, making $28,000 a year, and then COVID happens and I get laid off like a lot of other people. Now I am desperately researching and trying to find what I can learn that will get me a good job. I happen upon a reddit thread after researching using the whole Internet, Google, Quora, Reddit, all of the things, I happen upon a reddit thread in which someone mentions salesforce administration. I begin studying for my Salesforce Admin certification. It takes me 31 days, and then I pass the exam on the 31st day. And I remember because I walked out into our patio at the time and we drank a bottle of wine to celebrate because it was a really big deal. And I was extremely stressed about this exam. It was very long, and it was difficult to buckle down and study like that when I hadn't studied like that since probably high school. So I successfully passed my salesforce administrator exam, got my certification, started applying for jobs, and then was almost immediately hired for a 70K remote role for a four day work week job that said it required a degree in computer science, which I obviously did not have. After that, about seven months went by. I continued retooling learning different skills and getting different certifications, and I broke the $100,000 mark by the end of that year, so that by the end of 2020, I was making over six figures. And I had been told my entire life I would never be able to do that unless I went to college. And since then, I have been helping other people do the exact same thing.

Ryan [00:07:51]:

There are a couple of things in that story that I wanted to hone in on that I thought was very smart by you, one of which the first thing being that early recognition of the fact that your job was probably not coming back, or at least not coming back for a really long time. Because I remember sitting there, you got laid off. It was a furlough, technically.

Hannah [00:08:19]:

They said, oh, we're just going to take a break. Basically exactly.

Ryan [00:08:22]:

And so they shut down your department and a whole bunch of other departments. Everybody throughout these departments was laid off or furloughed.

Hannah [00:08:32]:

I was working in tourism at the.

Ryan [00:08:33]:

Time and we were living in Hawaii, which was all tourism based. So really the whole economy there shut down. But you had the sense to look at that situation and say, wow, I really need to get out of this situation. What's crazy for me is I thought that it was going to be really short and I thought it was going to be two weeks and then everything was going to reopen back up and you were going to get your job back, but you recognized really early that that wasn't going to happen. And so you spurred into action, which is exactly the same thing that we tell people to do that lose their jobs without any notice. A lot of people might sit there and think, oh, I have time, unemployment is going to come in and unemployment might come in, but you do not have time. You should get on it immediately. And I want to commend you for having that early recognition of the fact that your department probably wasn't coming back or at least that you needed to do something about it. And the second part of it that I wanted to talk about was being confident enough to apply to roles that was almost triple the amount of money that you were making prior. Because what a lot of times happens is people that are making $10 an hour $15 an hour working fast food or working retail, doing these jobs that they don't want to be in. They go and they try to get out of it, and they're trying to make job changes, and they're trying to make career changes, but they are only looking at roles that pay maybe $12 an hour or maybe $17 an hour. And they're not looking at roles that pay two X, three X, and paying the amount of money that they actually want to make because they don't feel qualified to do so. And I'm using qualified with air quotes here. They don't feel like they can make that leap from fast food worker to tech worker or from whatever it is that you want to do to making that amount of money. And I'm not saying that it needs to be in tech. It could be a plumber, it could be in the trades, it can not be in the trades. Whatever it is that you want to do, you can make those career transitions.

Hannah [00:10:39]:

This comes up again and again as the thing that people really lack, which is confidence. A lot of people just need to be told, yes, you can do it. Yes, you can get that job. Yes, you can apply for that job. Yes, you can learn that skill. And that really just embodies the degree free mentality and the mindset that you need in order to move ahead and get what you actually want.

Ryan [00:10:57]:

Absolutely.

Hannah [00:10:58]:

So what about you? Let's talk about you.

Ryan [00:11:00]:

So, for me, I actually have a college degree. And I made the mistake that so many people do. I went to college and got a degree without really thinking about what I wanted to do for work. I had a general idea of the industry that I wanted to work in. And I'll tell you the general idea. The general idea was I wanted to be in business. The reason why I wanted to be in business was because I wanted to make a lot of money.

Hannah [00:11:31]:

Sure.

Ryan [00:11:32]:

What does that mean?

Hannah [00:11:33]:

I don't know.

Ryan [00:11:34]:

Literally, I didn't know either. But that's literally what I wanted to do and how I thought of it. So what I did in college, I didn't think that I was shotgun blasting my major at first. I was a business major. The way that the college admissions worked for the business school at the time was that you needed to have a certain GPA to get into the business school, and you needed to have a certain level of grade for certain prerequisite courses. So I wasn't smart enough or I wasn't taking college serious enough, so I didn't get the grades to get into business school. What was crazy about that experience for me was that the decisions that I made when I was 1718 and 19 because I graduated high school early three and a half years, I did in high school. Did all of my credits in three and a half years. I graduated early, so I went to college a semester early, just like everybody else. At that age, I partied and I didn't take things seriously because I was 1718 or 19 years old. And those decisions came around to bite me in the butt because of the way that the college admissions work. What I mean by that is those prerequisite classes that I was speaking about, I forget what it was, but let's just call it Math 100. I don't know. And you needed to get a C in that class. And at the first semester that I took it, I got an F because I just didn't go to class.

Hannah [00:13:02]:

Yeah, you were busy partying hardy yeah, exactly. You're busy doing keg tapping one on one.

Ryan [00:13:07]:

Yeah, exactly.

Hannah [00:13:08]:

Bottle flipping 800. For those of you that don't know why that's funny, it's because later he became a bartender.

Ryan [00:13:15]:

Yes, I did. I was working full time, and then I was going to school full time, and then I was partying full time. One of those things was bound to fall through the crack.

Hannah [00:13:23]:

And which one was it exactly?

Ryan [00:13:24]:

Just like a lot of people, it was school because I needed to make money and I needed to have fun.

Hannah [00:13:30]:

Yeah, and you needed to go out.

Ryan [00:13:33]:

So anyway, the way that the college admissions worked for the business school was that they averaged the grades instead of taking the highest grade. And I don't know if they do this anymore, but at the time, this is what they did. So in order for me, now that I got this F on my math 100, whatever the class was, I had to then get an A to average.

Hannah [00:13:55]:

It out to a C. What a racket.

Ryan [00:13:58]:

I couldn't just then take the next semester and then get a C and that be it. I had to average it out. And so whatever the class was, I did take it the next semester, and I got a B, but the B and an F doesn't average out to a C. And so I once again didn't do it. And I thought to myself, okay, so wait, I'm going to try. I have all the other prerequisites to go into business school and get a business degree except for this one class. And I have to take one more semester and then of the same class, learning it for the third time in order to get it. And I'm going to waste a year and a half of my life well, a year, because I didn't go over the first semester, but I'm going to waste two semesters, three on paper of my life going to the same class anyway.

Hannah [00:14:46]:

Do you think if you had got if you had gotten a business degree, would you have gone and gotten your MBA, too?

Ryan [00:14:51]:

Maybe. Probably not, because of what happened later in the story and what happens later in the story. And I will skip forward all of the years of college. Graduation day, I was walking down on the outskirts of it, of the aisles, and I got my degree conferred to me. And it wasn't even the degree. It's really just the placeholder of the degree. They give you a little folder because I went to University of Hawai'i, and there's just too many people, just like a lot of public schools, it takes forever. Exactly. So they don't actually give you your degree. They just say your name, and they give you the placeholder for it.

Hannah [00:15:29]:

All that effort, all that money, and they can't be bothered to hand you your actual paper.

Ryan [00:15:33]:

Well, it would just take too long. It just logistically, it would just take too long, and there'd be too much planning with it. So I got my degree, and I was walking back to my seat in the middle of the aisle, and I realized to myself that I am just as unemployable now as I was 10 seconds ago before I got this degree. And it wasn't until I wasted four and a half years of my life and got this piece of paper that I realized, wow, okay, companies still don't want to hire me because I don't have the skills that they want. Which blew my mind because my last semester of college, I went and looked at job openings and job listings, and I started applying, saying, that I'm going to graduate in May. I finally have the thing that you say that you care about the most. It is literally only line on this whole job requisition that says job required and I have it. Everything else doesn't say required on it at all. Nothing. The only one that says college degree required and you're still not hiring me. Why not? And it's because they didn't care. And it's because companies don't care about college degrees. They care about literally everything else. They want to know how you can provide value in that role that you are applying for. That's what they want to know.

Hannah [00:16:53]:

What's interesting about this too, is this kind of lines up because what year did you graduate?

Ryan [00:16:56]:

2013.

Hannah [00:16:57]:

The MC Burning Glass study that was analyzing the down credentialing movement started in 2014 because that is when they noticed that, hey, this is a serious trend that we're seeing where all these jobs are being down credentialed. So since 2014, 51 million job listings show a steady trend of down credentialing across all US jobs.

Ryan [00:17:16]:

And so to put a bow on this whole thing, I finished college with no job prospects, with zero, quote unquote, real job experience. I'm not going to lie and say that I didn't have an internship. I did have an internship as a commercial credit analyst. But you can go back and listen to the way that that ended.

Hannah [00:17:33]:

Do you really think that's a good idea? Yeah, that's a quote from the episode, not the direction about the episode.

Ryan [00:17:39]:

No. Go back and I'll put links to everything that we talk about here in our show notes, as I do with every podcast episode. You can go to degreefree co, and for this episode, this one is going to be degreefree co 100. And I'll put links to everything there. But I left that internship without any real skills or without learning anything and definitely without a job. So I had to teach myself, what do companies want? And ever since then, I've been landing jobs and changing careers multiple times in unrelated industries. And I'm using unrelated again in air quotes, because every job that you have, you are learning something that is applicable to another role in another seemingly unrelated industry. So if you are a dishwasher right now, if you are on your way to work your bartending gig or your retail job, which is what I did when I was trying to get out of bartending and out of the restaurant industry, and I didn't know anybody in there trying to further their career. If you're listening to this, you're not alone and you have skills that can be useful and transferable to other jobs. You just have to learn how to tell a story about your experience and relate that experience to your future employer.

Hannah [00:19:07]:

And make it easy for them to understand why they should hire you.

Ryan [00:19:11]:

Since then, I've dedicated my life to teaching these strategies to consistently break into new industries and new jobs to people on this podcast and through our courses. So where I wanted to go from here now that we have a little bit of color and context for our background and what we've done in the past, I wanted to talk about what degree free is.

Hannah [00:19:31]:

Degree free is an effective and different way to look at your skills, experience and goals and actually get the work you want through strategy and tactics.

Ryan [00:19:39]:

Yeah, absolutely. Degree free is all about being effective in the job search and being effective in trying to make those career changes, get that promotion, whatever your career or professional goals are, analyzing it and doing the most effective thing possible to get the highest and greatest result.

Hannah [00:19:59]:

Yeah. We're not worried about checking boxes of oh well, I have to do this or I have to do this before I do this. No, we are about, hey, does it work? If it does work, do it.

Ryan [00:20:07]:

A lot of this boils down to just knowing a few key things. And the first is that there are no rules.

Hannah [00:20:15]:

We are going to toss all of the things that they taught us in school, all the things they taught us in college. Why? Because they don't actually help us get work. They don't actually help us figure out what skills are valuable. They don't actually help us get where we are trying to go because they teach us to do things in an order that is unnecessary and too expensive and that takes far too long.

Ryan [00:20:34]:

Yeah. When it comes to getting the work you want and reaching your career goals, there are no rules. You can get to that career in infinite amount of creative ways. Obviously, there are some roles where you have to do this, this and this.

Hannah [00:20:54]:

Every time we say that, somebody goes, but what about the doctors? What about the doctors? It's zero point 25% of all US. Jobs and unless you're going to be a doctor, it doesn't matter.

Ryan [00:21:02]:

Exactly. And so for 98% of jobs out there, 95, whatever it was when we looked at it last, you can go about it in creative ways and you can do it a different way than what is the traditional, quote unquote path.

Hannah [00:21:20]:

Yeah. Unless it requires legal licensure, you're good.

Ryan [00:21:23]:

The second thing that you need to know about degree free is that you are going to be confident in the job search and you are going to apply fearlessly. You are going to apply even if you do not fit those job requirements. A lot of people that are listening to this are trying to get into new jobs, change careers, and really change their life at the end of the day. And what you need to know is that there is nothing that's going to happen to you if you apply to a job description or to a job role where you do not fit 100% of the job description?

Hannah [00:22:01]:

Absolutely nothing except for rejection or silence, which is what you were already facing before.

Ryan [00:22:05]:

Exactly.

Hannah [00:22:06]:

And we say that because men eliminate themselves from job descriptions, but women, especially to a higher degree, eliminate themselves from job descriptions that they could absolutely do. So the lesson there is to apply for it if you want it, or think you could do it, or you think you could learn it.

Ryan [00:22:20]:

What we say is that if you fit 20% to 50% of that job description, then apply anyway, apply fearlessly and you never know whether or not you're going to get that job until you've applied wide. If you apply and they interview you and they like you and you get the job, then it was okay. The worst that can happen is that you never hear back from them. And then you're literally in the same position that you are right now. We have talked to many, many people in HR and that run big companies that have really good data on the job descriptions and on the people that they end up hiring. We both know, and most longtime listeners know, that companies do not hire the people that look like their job descriptions. The job description is a wish list and you should just apply fearlessly and apply anyway. And then the third thing that you need to know about degree free is we are all about being effective, as we've said before. And one of the best ways to do that and be effective is start with a goal and then figure out how to get to that goal. Work backwards from your goal. And if you have no idea where to start and you want to change jobs, you want to change careers, you have no idea where to start. You can go and listen to our previous episodes on how to find a job backwards. And once again, I will put links to everything that we talk about at Degreefree Co 10 zero 100 and you can go and figure out how to get the job that you are looking for. And we even have free courses out there that was going to help you and walk you through this entire process. If you want the links to that, go to Degreefree Co, start and sign up for the free courses that can help you identify what you want to do and then how to get there.

Hannah [00:24:12]:

Absolutely. I could not have said it better myself. Now, Ryan and I have for a long time held the opinion that you do not need to go to college to be successful in your life. I actually remember when we first met. This was one of the first things that you and I spent. We had a very long conversation about this and about the entire landscape of college education and work as you and I have experienced it. And we concluded then, and we've concluded now, that you do not need to purchase a college degree in order to have a great career or make good money.

Ryan [00:24:40]:

One of the things that was crazy to us is we've held this degree free mindset for years prior to 2020, when we first experienced all of this. And then we started this podcast two years ago in 2021. We've held these opinions four years prior. We would always meet people that are degree free and very successful, and we would meet people that own companies, run companies that are really high up within companies that hold director C level roles. And whenever they would talk about their work, they would be really excited and they would be beaming. Whenever the college degree would come up, as it comes up, sometimes when you're speaking about these things, they would always shrink into themselves like, oh no, I dropped out.

Hannah [00:25:34]:

Or I never went.

Ryan [00:25:35]:

I didn't finish.

Hannah [00:25:36]:

And you just saw these giant people get so small.

Ryan [00:25:40]:

Yes, and that is wrong because they shouldn't feel and you shouldn't feel bad for not going, or if you're like me and you did go, but the college degree is not serving you, you shouldn't feel bad about that. And so we wanted to create language around being degree free, up around those people that feel like their college degrees are not serving them, is expired, as you just said, or people that never went, that never finished, and they didn't want to make a purchase that other people made. And so that is the whole impetus of the language or the words of degree free. We wanted to help create language that was positive.

Hannah [00:26:25]:

The goal was to reclaim something that does not belong to the colleges that they have taken and that they have used to ostracize and separate their product and sell it to people who want to purchase it. And what they have done is effectively they've divided the population by whether or not they bought from them, and then they have made the half that chose not to buy from them feel insignificant, feel unqualified, feel uneducated, and none of those things are true. It is a marketing tactic that has been used and it has been very effective. And that is why we started degree free. It's because we are not going to allow colleges to decide the value of people and we are not going to let colleges label people according to whether or not they have purchased from them. That is absolutely ridiculous. And that is why we started to grief free.

Ryan [00:27:10]:

Definitely. And that's a really good segue into one of the most frequently asked questions that we get, which is, who is degree free? Can I be degree free with a college degree?

Hannah [00:27:21]:

Yes, absolutely. People whose degrees have expired in that they are no longer using them, they are not serving them, and all they did was put them in debt and they then had to go teach themselves an actual useful skill and then get work that. Way. So they are now in unrelated industries that they have taught themselves into. Those people are degree free. Their college degree is not responsible for their success. Their college degree is not an indicator that they were not intelligent enough to make it. Their college degree does not dictate who they are as a person.

Ryan [00:27:50]:

To add on to that, obviously those that never went and didn't finish are also degree free as well. So basically if you're listening to this and you are ready to make changes in your career and in your life by looking at things differently and attacking the problem in a different way than you've ever done it before, you are degree free.

Hannah [00:28:12]:

So if you're listening to this and you're going wow, this sounds great, this sounds like me, what we are going to do is we are going to teach you how to be effective when you are job searching. We are going to teach you how to actually find valuable skills employers are looking for in the market and be able to do that going forward so you understand how to pick and learn things that are actually going to help you move your career where you want it to go. And one of the biggest things is teaching you to craft this story and understand how you are going to explain your past experience into a new job and make it easy for people to understand why they should hire you for the job you are applying for.

Ryan [00:28:43]:

Yeah, absolutely. And we do that in a bunch of ways. One is going to be this podcast and you can watch it on YouTube. You can subscribe anywhere that you get your podcast, anywhere that podcasts are bought.

Hannah [00:28:53]:

And sold, anywhere you find your podcast.

Ryan [00:28:57]:

And if you wanted to learn more about degree free you can go to Degreefree co start and that's the best place to get all of the links to the different resources that we have. We are always creating different free resources, doing experiments and other things. Going to the website is definitely going to be the best way to stay informed and if you want to get more degree free tips and how to be effective in the job search, we send out a free weekly newsletter to help you do just that. You can go to degreefree co newsletter to sign up there like we talked about. Links to everything that we talked about can be at Degreefree co 100. We are going to have links to everything that we do there and we are going to have links to our free courses that you can sign up to take. Right now we have a couple of different paid courses that you could be a part of. If you need more help in the job search and you need more help changing careers, we have links to all of our social media there as well. If you haven't already, follow us on YouTube. TikTok and then subscribe to this podcast.

Hannah [00:30:01]:

You can also connect with us on LinkedIn. He is ryan Mariama at LinkedIn. And I am Hannah Mariama at LinkedIn.

Ryan [00:30:07]:

Once again, we'll put links to all of that in the show. Notes degreefree Co 100 before we go, I wanted to talk about what you can expect from us in the future. And we have a lot of awesome things in the pipeline.

Hannah [00:30:22]:

We are doing quite a few things and as you all know, if you're listening to this episode or you may not, you can expect our weekly episode to come out every single Wednesday.

Ryan [00:30:31]:

Yep, our weekly episode that comes out every Wednesday. And we always talk about how to be effective in the job search, how to get the work you want. We talk about different tactics, tools. We have interviews with different degree free people so that you can glean lessons from their lives and their failures and how you can use those lessons in your own life. We are even thinking about starting to talk more about how to create businesses and side hustles. So definitely go to our YouTube channel, subscribe on this podcast, subscribe on YouTube, go to our newsletter and sign up so that you can be notified when that comes out. And if you're listening to this episode in the future, it might already be out. I know I talked about it before, but the two free courses that we have right now are going to be the Seven Day Get Hire challenges. And that is going to be a different lesson every day on the different steps of the job search and how you can use the degree free tips to get the work that you want. And the second one is going to be about the five degree free pathways. The five degree free pathways is something that Hannah and I invented to answer the question, what can I do? And you can even add on to that, what can I do instead of going to college? The five degree free pathways is comprehensive. You can take that course whether you're 16 or whether you're trying to make one more change before retirement, and it is going to be relevant for you. So if you have no idea where to start, definitely start there. And once again, you can go to Degreefree Co Start to sign up for those two free courses.

Hannah [00:32:07]:

If you have questions or comments, we are the Complaints department and also the Request department. So you can go right to YouTube and leave a comment on this video that is hands down the best way to do it. If you want, you can also email us at contact at degreefree co.

Ryan [00:32:22]:

Absolutely. And thank you all for listening and tuning into this week's episode, episode 100. This is really big deal for Hannah and myself and we are very, very glad to have you as a watcher, as a listener, and we are really excited to do 100 more of these.