When does your college major stop mattering?

If you’ve been reading much of the news about the recent Equifax data breach, you may have seen someone asking whether the Chief Information Security Officer is actually qualified for her job, based on her undergrad degree being in music.

As others have pointed out, what her undergrad studies were probably didn’t have much to do with whether she was qualified, because the technology she was responsible for in her current position didn’t even exist when she went to college. The hoopla, however, is somewhat informative in terms of showing us how many people haven’t figured out that the world has changed.

The logic of their argument seems to be that she went to college, studied music, then got a job in tech later, and isn’t qualified for it because she doesn’t have the college credentials. This line of thinking ignores two things though.

Source: What Was Your Major and Does It Matter Now?

This hits close to home because my undergrad was also music! The position I currently hold didn’t exist until a few years after college, and I graduated college just as the world wide web was making the leap from the academic world to the public.