You Are Not Your Degree (But It Does Matter)

More than a decade ago, sitting across from a Brazilian consultant who was reviewing my resume for a potential project management opportunity, I received a verdict I was not expecting. He looked up from the page and said, matter-of-factly: "You're a theologian."

He was not wrong about my degree. I hold a Bachelor of Ministry, earned through an accelerated program at Harding University that covered nearly four years of biblical, counseling, and ministry education in two. But in the standard Brazilian professional framework, you are what your degree says you are. My PMP certification, my years of project management experience, my track record of delivering complex initiatives meant very little in that moment. I had graduated into theology. Therefore I was a theologian.

I thought about that conversation years later when I enrolled in a Master of Arts program in management with a concentration in project management, made possible through Viacom's employee education benefit. Part of me wondered, with some amusement, whether that credential would finally satisfy a Brazilian executive. Whether it would make me legitimate in the way the Ministry degree apparently had not. The honest answer is that I still do not know. What I do know is that education is something I pursue not primarily for external validation but because I genuinely value it. I have two master's degrees and three professional certifications. I rarely struggle to meet the continuing education requirements for my PMP because I am always studying something.

My second master's degree, a Master of Science in Innovation and Strategic Management, has been one of the more practically useful things I have done professionally. It sharpened my understanding of product strategy, user research, market signal identification, and the kind of structured creative thinking that product management requires. It positioned me for a career expansion beyond program management into product, which is a direction I might well pursue.

As this post is published, I have been unemployed for eleven months. I want to name that plainly, because there is sometimes an expectation that professionals in a gap should account for their time in ways that demonstrate productivity and self-improvement. That expectation is not entirely fair. Survival is the primary work of unemployment. It is not a sabbatical. That said, I have spent the time listening to audiobooks, reading, and working through LinkedIn Learning courses, because it is what I could afford and because staying sharp matters. The learning has not stopped.

What has become clearer to me during this season is that none of my education has been wasted, including the Ministry degree. The years I spent as a student minister, missionary in Brazil, and church minister built capabilities that I carried directly into project management: the ability to lead without authority, to communicate across cultural distance, to sustain forward movement when circumstances are difficult, and to build trust as the only real currency available. I am aware now, more than ever, that those years formed something in me that no corporate program would have.

I am sometimes conscious that two master's degrees could read as overqualification to certain employers in the United States. It is a real dynamic, and an ironic one. The very investment that deepens professional capability can become a liability in a job market that sometimes mistakes credentials for a threat rather than an asset. I suspect this would play out differently in Brazil, where advanced degrees carry considerable professional prestige and many executives hold MBAs as a baseline expectation.

What I know with confidence is this: by both experience and education, I am a seasoned professional in project and program management. I have fifteen years of delivery experience across technology, media, and broadcast environments. I have the academic foundation to teach, consult, and contribute at a strategic level. A Doctorate in Business Administration remains a longer-term possibility, and with it the prospect of consulting work and university teaching in business. That future is not guaranteed, but it is coherent and it is earned.

I am not a theologian. But I am grateful for everything that degree, and the life that surrounded it, taught me.