CODE IN TOKYO

Do IT Engineers Need a College Degree? — Maybe Easier With One, But in the End, the Learner Wins

“You don’t really need a degree to be an IT engineer, right?”

I get this question a lot.

My honest answer is: half yes, half no.

In practice, once you’re on the job, what matters is “what you can actually do.” Can you write code? Can you design systems? Can you handle production incidents? Can you use AI effectively? When a production server is down in the middle of the night, saying “I graduated from XYZ University!” won’t fix the server.

So in the working world, the value of a degree by itself fades quite a bit.

That said, Japanese society still puts a lot of weight on credentials at the entry point.

When you’re trying to get into a major SIer or a popular mega-venture, your degree becomes a strong ticket. From the company’s perspective, they have very little to go on for inexperienced hires, so they want to use “made it through entrance exams” as a proxy signal.

This isn’t really about right or wrong — it’s just a screening cost problem.

And here’s something that’s a bit awkward to say, but in reality, people with strong academic backgrounds are often used to studying.

The speed at which they absorb new concepts, their ability to grind steadily over long periods, their information organization skills — those tend to be genuinely strong.

But here’s where the IT industry gets interesting.

In this field, you can’t coast on your degree alone.

In fact, partway through your career, “are you still studying?” becomes everything.

New languages. Cloud. AI. Security. Containers. LLMs. The trends shift every few years.

This isn’t a world where you can fight for 20 years on old knowledge alone.

So even people with great degrees who stop studying get left behind, no exceptions. Conversely, people without degrees who keep learning grow steadily.

It’s actually a fairly fair world.

I’ve been in this industry a long time, and the truly strong people in the end are the ones who “don’t mind studying.”

They don’t need to be from a famous university. But things like:

You need to be able to enjoy these, at least to some degree, or it gets pretty tough.

The flip side: “I hate studying but I want to turn my life around with IT” is actually a pretty bad fit.

The IT industry isn’t a “credentialist society” — that part is true — but it’s a “learning society” instead.

You can break off the credential track and turn things around with skills. But those skills only come from constant, ongoing learning.

So if you have some complex about not having a prestigious degree right now, you don’t have to be too pessimistic. This industry is one of the few worlds where you can still catch up after entering the workforce.

But there’s a condition.

You can’t escape from studying. On that point, probably, everyone is equal.