Can The Education of Employees Show Business Maturity?

In case you missed it, my last article outlined how the workforces of Tesla and Porsche reflect the focus of the respective businesses. This article will take a deep dive into the educational background of employees at both Tesla and Porsche to see if we can correlate business maturity with the background of employees. Which company prefers masters students? Which university do they prefer? How long do you need to study for? More importantly, can educational insights into employees signal the maturity of a business?

Education Degrees

Firstly, let’s take a look at the level of education of employees at both companies. You might expect that a more mature business such as Porsche would have more employees with a masters degree by far. This is because Porsche is an older, more established business and may be more likely to request Masters qualifications. Porsche may also be more likely to pay the higher salaries asked by applicants with higher education. Tesla as a newer brand may value learn-as-you-go experiences and attitude over degrees.

What we actually see is that there isn’t that much difference in the percentage of Masters vs Bachelors students at Porsche and Tesla. This may be because Tesla is equally as exciting an opportunity regardless of degree level. Tesla also has a highly technical workforce as mentioned in my previous article — there are more software engineers at Tesla than Porsche which may explain the high percentage of masters degrees.

Education Length

Taking the deep dive into education statistics one step further — which company hires those who have studied for longer?

It becomes clear that Porsche prefers people who have studied for a longer period of time than Tesla. Porsche seems to have a strong preference for people who have spent 6–9 years in education. Marrying this up with the statistics mentioned above and my previous article paints a picture.

Porsche has 6% more employees with a masters degree than Tesla, and has 8% more employees with 9 years spent in education. This makes sense given that Porsche values senior consultants and industry experts who have probably spent more time in education than others. We know that Tesla has a high number of Software engineers, study.com says that should take around 4 years which places them in the 3–6 year category. This is mirrored in our analysis.

Tesla and Porsche also begin hiring younger employees differently as we know. Tesla tends to hire interns while Porsche recruits from their own study programme. This explains the spike in hires at Tesla for employees with under 3 years of education.

Universities attended

There is no clear favourite university to hire from between these companies. Porsche doesn’t hire Ivy-League only, and both companies hire from their home ground: Germany. This shows that neither company, despite their international reputation, is biased towards hiring international talent. Rather both companies are hiring from the local workforce. This shows that for both companies, it’s about what you’ve studied and who you are, rather than where you studied.

Can Educational Statistics of Employees Signal a Company’s Maturity?

In short: maybe.

That’s an annoying answer, and I know from writing this I wanted to be more clear. Let me expand:

These statistics fit in with the nature of these companies. Porsche has slightly more employees with a masters, and hires more people who have studied for longer, but not by a large margin. In order to understand if the educational background of hires can signal the maturity of a business we need to look at more businesses. We need to understand what baseline there is for the educational background of employees from new and established companies and what % difference in these statistics would be statistically significant.

Interested in being the next company covered? Email me: Julian@osterus.com