How Do Nonprofit Employers Weigh a Candidate's Degree in Nonprofit Management When Hiring?

Over the past 20 years, the field of nonprofit management education has grown from virtual non-existence into a rapidly advancing industry. The Seton Hall University directory of nonprofit management programs (http://tltc.shu.edu/npo/) currently lists more than 250 colleges and universities offering undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate courses. This mind-boggling array of choices can require a student to invest anywhere from a few hundred dollars per credit to much more substantial amounts requiring loans and years of anticipated debt service. But most important is the question of whether students pursuing such programs will enhance their ability to get and hold a job in their chosen field of work, and under what conditions?

The Nonprofit Quarterly has wondered for some time about how managers in nonprofits weighed the value of a nonprofit management degree in job candidacies, so we conducted an informal poll of our readers who were potential employers. We received a flood of responses—many from the academic centers that provide those degree programs and some from current candidates for those degrees—and then a good number from the potential employers themselves. The reactions of this last group—your peers—mostly landed somewhere along a fairly short continuum from "I don't look at that type of credential at all" to "it is (or may be) a significant benefit on top of relevant experience."

The slight to marked resistance that we picked up from many readers to looking specifically for this kind of degree is probably not surprising considering the evolution of education in the sector. Until recently, education in the nonprofit sector has come not from formal degree programs, but rather from hard experience in the field. It has been transmitted from practitioner to practitioner, many of whom have had to survive management fads from the outside while establishing authentic and effective approaches adapted specifically to nonprofits. So, formal education meets up with some natural skepticism in the sector.

In addition, many of today's nonprofits were started within the past 40 years and most are not flush with money. The original founders of most nonprofits didn't go into the work with a burning passion for comp-time policies or strategic planning—they came to improve abandoned children's lives or to cure AIDS or to save a lighthouse. That sense of mission is what has kept things going when funding was tight or nonexistent. The idea that someone may expect to move into management without paying "their dues" at lower levels doesn't sit well with many.

Jim Work at the Des Moines "I Have a Dream Foundation" puts it this way. "You have to hire someone who cares about the mission more than their career or their ego . . . education does not give anyone that."

Aligned with this were comments from readers that confirmed many nonprofits hire from within their own field of practice, and often from the ranks of program staff who have taken on certain management tasks gradually in the course of their work. This practice may have some limitations on its surface, if the staff's understanding of management has some gaps, but the benefit is that such staff know the field they work in. They have the relationships and some influence and know the lay of the land.

As many readers mentioned, making things work in environments that are often resource poor and also affected by complex factors, requires knowing how to balance relationships—with staff, board, constituents, and funders—and a true understanding of how to manage those relationships may be in the quirks of the day-to-day doing of things.

This orientation toward recognizing experience in the field over academic learning had some emotional content. "My experience tells me that I'd rather have a smart high school drop out than someone equipped with an MBA and no street saavy," said one reader. "Give me a 50-year-old who knows how to work the phones and comes with a built-in supply of solid community contacts, over a 26-year-old with a master's degree and a pile of fresh ideas."

"I look for people who can readily separate the theoretical from the practical," CEO Michael Hatzenbeler says. "I want those who have learned to value the contributions of others, who respect the history and experience of a pre-existing team, and those who are ready to jump in and take on responsibility at whatever level they are asked."

In Hatzenbeler's experience, candidates with an education background tend to expect to bypass employees that have worked steadily through the ranks. "I have seen them ignore the fact that teams of co-workers, some with decades of experience, have been working before them," Hatzenbeler says.

A few readers mentioned that the availability of non-degree oriented education for people who had come up through the ranks—through workshops or even through the individual courses provided by academic centers—has made it more possible for non degreed people to pick up the useful skills and knowledge they may lack to manage today's more complex organizations.

Of course, the two sources of knowledge are not often mutually exclusive. Though nonprofit management degrees run the gamut in terms of who they seek to recruit, many aim to help mid-career people augment hard-won practical experience with additional skills and a strong theoretical background.

Those who have worked in nonprofits in addition to obtaining a degree are often well qualified, Hatzenbeler says. However, he would caution against the assumption that any degree, nonprofit or otherwise, could serve as an effective substitute for learning about the nonprofit world from within.

A few readers pointed out that the degree means little without some thorough testing of skills and knowledge, because nonprofit management degree programs are not created equal. Some, in the opinion of readers, propound outmoded or useless-in-practice theories. Some readers suggested that they had found real gaps or misapprehensions in critical areas like board development and financial management among degreed hires.

While many of the respondents stated that a strong nonprofit management degree could be a bonus and even a deciding factor in a hire if the candidate presented strong experience, the first priority, for nearly all of the respondents, was finding and hiring people with "smarts" and on-the-ground experience who could adapt, take "no" for an answer, and still find ways to accomplish their work. According to Kate Barr at the Nonprofits Assistance Fund, "I have found that the most important, and always on the top of my list is: 'must be smart.' Smart people figure out how to learn the skills, solve problems, and adapt as the work changes. I don't think I've ever really gone wrong when I've hired someone smart, no matter what kind of degree or from what kind of institution."

Several readers, however, voiced enthusiasm for nonprofit management degrees citing a candidate's willingness to go through such a program as a demonstration of motivation and commitment. "I would find hiring to be far more reliable if I knew that the prospective employee had a nonprofit degree," says Gayle Carlson of the YWCA. "Of course, program credibility would come into play, but just knowing that the employee has the basic techniques would help reduce the training time for mid-management and higher positions."

Dennis Morrow who runs a small nonprofit and teaches a degree program sums the situation up this way: "The issue isn't 'to degree or not to degree' but rather how to pair professional management training with experienced workers—it will be a melding of the two that morphs into the nonprofit leader/manager of tomorrow (but of course as in all things, we need them today)."