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Credential Creep Credential creep is the trend whereby the credentials required for a certain position are increasing. This may happen when a professional organization increases the entry to practice requirements for the profession, or it may be the result of "one-upsmanship" among candidates for a job, creating a kind of de facto increase in required credentials for a position.

At the beginning of the last millennium (in the early 1900s), an individual with a high school diploma could essentially work as a banking professional and rise to the ranks of a branch manager or to even branch president. However, the quest for further education, the industrial revolution and the subsequent surge in national population in the mid-1900s -- especially in the north-- resulted in a professional transposition. In the process, the bachelor’s degree supplanted the standing of high school training, and the credentials required for certain position increased. This occurrence continued up to the end of the last millennium; as a furtherance of this trend based on the same conditions, the early years of the current millennium saw the master’s degree displacing the bachelor’s degree in some job entry positions.

For instance when [Brenda M. Coppard] was studying occupational therapy in the late 1980s, a bachelor's degree was the standard ticket to enter the profession. By the 1990s, a master's degree was expected. Today a doctorate is becoming the norm. This was due to the explosion of bachelor’s degrees spurred by the rise in knowledge exchange—hinged on population growth and technological innovation. With the advent of globalization recent years see the PhD taking over the role of the master’s degree-- especially professional degrees. Universities are currently reporting significant renewed interest in their graduate programs, with a particular focus on PhD study, as candidates consider retraining or adding new skills to their resumes that will benefit them as the economic situation improves. What once used to be training for the academic profession and open by a minor assemblage of individuals absorbed in research has become a platform to some job entry positions and forcing individual pushed for more advanced degrees in order to be considered for some positions. Clarifications

The highest educational attainment in terms of a degree is a doctorate. There are two level of doctorates: Research doctorates and Professional doctorates (which are equivalent to master's level degrees plus an internship). The highest doctorate is the Ph.D. which is immediately followed by other doctorates, which require around 20 credits less such as DBA, EdD, etc. In many parts of the world, Physicians and Lawyers receive a Bachelor’s level degree as a first degree. Nevertheless, in the United States the colloquial use of the term 'doctor' for physicians was used as an excuse to make it a graduate degree leading to an MD. It should be noted that the MD is not a doctorate in the academic sense. The same is true of the JD, the DDS and other so-called "professional degrees". A clear proof of this fact is that, holders of first professional degrees cannot use them as doctorates in Europe without further studies. MDs and DDS are qualified to practice their professional but are technically not qualified to do research. This is more or less the reason why most Nobel Prizes in Medicine are awarded to Ph.D. holders in the Natural Sciences. In summary, a doctorate is a degree that directly follows the master's degree and requires about four years of coursework in addition to the defense and publication of a doctoral dissertation.

Controversy

Some argue that the Ph.D. can reflect overspecialization that manifests itself as a lack of perspective; for example, a Ph.D. might not adequately prepare one for careers in development, manufacturing, or technical management. In the corporate world, some Ph.D. graduates have been criticized as being unable to turn theories into useful strategies and being unable to work on a team, although Ph.D.s are seen as desirable and even essential in many positions, such as supervisory roles in research, especially Ph.D.s in biomedical sciences. Even in some college jobs, people can associate negative factors with the Ph.D., including a lack of focus on teaching, overspecialization, and an undesirable set of professional priorities, often focusing on self-promotion. These forces have led both to an increase in some educational institutions hiring candidates without Ph.D.s as well as a focus on the development of other doctoral degrees, such as the D.A. or Doctor of Arts. Some employers have reservations about hiring people with Ph.D.s in full-time, entry-level positions but are eager to hire them in temporary positions; this is however a reaction associated to job insecurity, especially in situations where most the company leaders hold bachelors or masters degrees.

Future Trends

Once seen as the pinnacle of academic and intellectual achievement, the interest in PhD programs has picked up at the same time as the economic downturn has ended more than a decade of unprecedented global growth. One country that has recently benefited from an increase in PhD applications is Australia. With 9,163 international PhD students currently studying in the country, universities are making preparations to receive more students at this level than ever before, with increased interest from Indian, Chinese and Malaysian students in particular. One innovation in the Australian context is the recent rise in popularity of coursework PhD programs, allowing students to concentrate on a more structured syllabus in a range of applied areas, such as business and technology, many of which have a directly vocational benefit for the student after graduation. While it is too early to say what the likely outcomes of the renewed interest in PhD study are, with the current rate of development and competition for a limited number of job positions, it is invariable that more people will seek a doctorate degree in the future, leading to perhaps the demand for an even higher qualification.