When Lafawn Davis grew up, she did not dream of becoming an astronaut, doctor or teacher … She dreamed of becoming the CEO of seven companies, at the same time.
This ambition inspired a strong work ethics, which propelled Davis into the labor market at 14, when she took her first job in a flower shop belonging to blacks in her hometown of San Jose, California. And once she started working, she never stopped.
Despite his strong working ethics, Davis – who won his current job as a chief officer and responsible for sustainability in May 2024 – defeated that his career was not always fluid, in part because she had no baccalaureate.
“I was told that because I did not have a university degree, there were certain roles that I could not play. I was a believer that, whatever the description of the post, if I felt like I could do, I would go anyway,” Davis told Hr Brew.
But it is not the only HR pro without a baccalaureate. According to an HR HR Brew / Harris survey, 31% of professionals in the United States have reached this level of education. Some 12% have a diploma in a partner, while 30% have a high school diploma and 8% have less. Meanwhile, 18% have a higher education diploma.
Davis shared with HR Brew how she climbed the corporate scale without four -year university degree.
Career trip. After obtaining his secondary school diploma, Davis signed up for San José State University. But she said that she found herself to jump lessons to go to work and decided to abandon and join Corporate America. She worked in operational roles in startups at the time of Dotcom, but when this bubble broke out in 2000, she lost her job. And without a baccalaureate, Davis said that she had been diverted from new opportunities.
Thus, at 22, with a newborn baby to take care, she made the decision difficult to go home with her parents. But she was always determined to join the company’s workforce and realize her childhood dream to become a framework.
During these post-dotcom years, Davis said that it was strongly based on its network of corporate contacts, which helped her find the work as a complaints, executive assistant and chief of staff. Each role has taught him a new administrative competence or people. Then, in 2005, she obtained her big break – she was hired as a program specialist at Google, where she worked for eight years, ending her mandate as a HR trading partner for diversity and inclusion.
“I really focus[ed] On many HR programs and initiatives and how diversity, equity, inclusion can be woven throughout the life cycle process of employees, “she said.” I really loved it, and I thought I found what my career path was going to be, as opposed to work. I felt like I got into a career. »»
After Google, Davis said that she had played a game of “technological company roulette”, moving between the experience of employees and the roles of Dei in companies including Yahoo!, Ebay and Paypal. In 2019, almost 15 years after her HR career, she indeed landed as vice-president of diversity, inclusion and belonging.
The skills-first is the future.Davis said that she had the chance to have had so many possibilities to enter American companies without a baccalaureate, and wants hiring based on the skills that her employers practiced were more common.
“The adjusted skills movement is not at all a college diploma … It is more than a university degree is simply not the only way to acquire skills and help people and businesses understand what it means to hire for skills,” she said.
Davis said that she once “shame” had that she had no four -year university degree. Nowadays, she likes to share her story and uses it to inform her work indeed, where she strives to facilitate the application process for candidates by encouraging companies to adopt a skills approach.
“One of the things that I said when I entered was:” We have to drink our own champagne … All we are going to ask other companies to do, we have to do it ourselves, “she said, adding that this has actually dropped the requirements of the college degree of her job offers in 2022 and was called an equitable employer.
“I will not be the CEO of seven consecutive companies at the same time,” she said, but “being part of the C-Suite, knowing throughout the trip that I have no university diploma, was a large space of inspiration for others to know that they could do the same.”
This report was written by Mikaela Cohen and was Originally published by HR BREW.
This story was initially presented on Fortune.com
