No College Education Is Required To Lead NASA's Social Media Strategy
1. "Salary $102,663 to $157,709 per year"
2. "There are no education requirements for this position."
Really @BettinaInclan? You are willing to pay as much as $157,709 a year to someone with no college degree (or high school diploma) to lead #NASA social media strategy? https://t.co/Q5EXfDoPgi
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) August 6, 2020
Keith’s note: Seriously? No educational degree is required to lead an outreach effort for the world’s preeminent space agency – one that needs to reach 328 million people domestically and billions internationally? And this uneducated person can earn from $102,663 to $157,709 when the median income in the U.S. is just over $30,000 at a time when unemployment is exploding? Baffling.
The job I had at NASA required that I have a college degree and experience. I would have had great difficulty doing my job without a graduate degree. Was NASA incorrect in asking that I have that degree? To be certain life experience and enthusiasm is vitally important, but I am trying to wrap my head around the notion that NASA is no longer going to require college degrees for jobs that require scientific and engineering knowledge. Our society is already on a road toward collective dumbing down – you can especially see it in how people react to the science behind pandemics. This Administration seems to see actual education as a liability and they put that bias into practice every day.
– Eric Trump’s Brother-In-Law Is The New Deputy NASA Chief Of Staff. Seriously., earlier post
– How Jonathan Dimock Auditioned To Be NASA White House Liaison, earlier post
Here’s the job description
“Summary
The News and Multimedia Division within the NASA Office of Communications in Washington, DC is seeking a skilled individual to serve as a public affairs specialist in the Digital Communications Branch. The public affairs specialist is responsible for developing digital media strategies, tactics, products and messaging in support of NASA’s charter in the 1958 National Aeronautics and Space Act to reach the widest practicable audience.
Responsibilities
– Oversees the development, implementation, execution, and measurement of social media channel strategies, with a focus on content production, community management, social listening and targeted audience growth.
– Establishes and implements a modern community management strategy that positions the agency as responsive and engaged with online audiences.
– Leads the creation of digital media plans and editorial calendars. This includes managing projects requiring agency-wide collaboration with communicators who specialize in audio, eBooks, mobile apps, social media, television, video, AR/VR and web.
– Coordinates with communication staffers, agency subject matter experts other relevant stakeholders to ensure consistent messaging and a timely, coordinated release of digital products.
– Maintains agency-owned accounts according to best practices. This includes creating or updating account profile information and artwork, creating or consolidating accounts, managing follower lists, etc.
– Stays up to date with the latest digital trends, sharing learning with stakeholders and making recommendations for new tactics and tools.
– Supports agency events and programs, including live coverage on digital platforms that may occur outside of standard business hours.
– Duties described above are at the full-performance level. Duties assigned at a lower grade level will be of more limited scope, performed with less independence and limited complexity; duties will be commensurate with the grade of selected employee”
Good they need someone with the relevant ” experience” with social media, lots of people in Jobs with degree’s in lots of cases with no relevance to the Job , where they are lots of people with more experience and knowledge who are excluded because they don’t have a degree.
And they need to promote the science and engineering things that NASA does since that is what NASA does. No college education? Uh huh.
I think that wasn’t the point. What about someone with a BA in German literature, from a college which didn’t have breadth requirements (i.e. requiring students to take courses well outside their major or field)? Would that satisfy you? I doubt it would, since that degree wouldn’t imply any knowledge of science or engineering. If NASA simply required a college degree, regardless of the subject, I certainly would be concerned.
What about someone without a college degree who started off at NASA working as a technician had been gradually been promoted to more demanding positions, and learned a fair amount of engineering along the way? I’m not sure about you, but I’d say that implies sufficient knowledge for this job.
But the notice you wrote the story about had _no_ requirements for any scientific or technical knowledge, from any source. That’s what I see as the real problem.
Yup. They’d need to consider high school drop outs.
Of course, a college degree per se doesn’t guarantee an adequate understanding of science & technology to ensure that the stories of what’s going on at NASA are effectively told.
Given recent trends in US government, neither education nor science knowledge is needed, or even desired in many cases.
And we are going to pay the consequences of dumbing down our goverbment.
We’re already paying, big time.
Already a fact: witness current Admin put in place by a minority.
If they’ve got a great portfolio, why not?
I still think you should apply, Keith. It seems as if you qualify.
At least they’re insisting on some experience in the discipline…
Yes, but if Keith applied,
1 – he’d have to come out of retirement
2 – he’d have to toe the party line and would lose his independence
Keith and nasawatch would be too much of a loss for us if he took that job.
I’m not retired – yet 😉
Apologies on that, Keith! But we still value you here too much!
There is no way NASA would hire me. I am black listed by PAOs at several centers, the Trump appointees hate me, and I am too old. And they do not like people who do not tow the line. Thanks for the compliment though 😉
A certain eccentric Billionaire could ask for you as his NASA PAO liaison. You will say no to him? 😉
Elon? He seems to do OK without my help 😉
You are avoiding the question. 😉
https://www.whitehouse.gov/…
“Sec. 3. Improving the Use of Assessments in the Federal Hiring Process. (a) In addition to the other requirements of this order, the Director of OPM shall work with the heads of all agencies to ensure that, within 180 days of the date of this order, for positions within the competitive service, agencies assess candidates in a manner that does not rely solely on educational attainment to determine the extent to which candidates possess relevant knowledge, skills, competencies, and abilities. The heads of all agencies shall develop or identify such assessment practices.”
The operative word is “solely”. Go look at other NASA job openings. College degrees are required.
I understand your position, but many Diversity and Inclusion initiatives have identified college education requirements as a point of failure. I say the best person for the job gets it regardless of how good a start they got in life.
That would be fine with me, but this amounts to deleting rather than rephrasing qualifications. If the job requires some knowledge of science or engineering (which I think this one should), the notice could say so. They could deal with your point about diversity by saying “Familiarity with science and/or engineering at the level of a bachelors degree or from equivalent work experience.” As it stands, they could get into legal trouble if they refused to hire someone with no scientific or engineering knowledge, since that isn’t a stated requirement. You can say “best for the job” in ways that don’t require a degree. But just dropping a requirement to avoid mentioning degrees isn’t the way to do that.
So NASA should drop the whole education focus then since degrees are no longer needed?
I’m not sure how that would work in practice. Other than poorly, but I mean the hiring process. That’s a GS-13 or -14 position, and one qualification is work experience equivalent to at least a year in the next lower grade. And I’m pretty sure a GS-12 position has a similar requirement. Etc. So the qualifications for this job might mean no formal education required, but a decade of work experience. And work experience which would be very hard to get without formal education. That’s pretty convoluted (as if most civil service regulations aren’t…), and it still wouldn’t assure _relevant_ work experience.
I will say I’m not a huge fan of requiring a PhD for someone to work as a scientist. My father did pretty well with just a Masters and ended up as a NSF divisional director before he retired. But that was after almost thirty years of actually doing field geophysics followed by ten years at the NSF. So I’m fine with substituting real, relevant work for the right piece of paper from a university. But in this case, it looks like they aren’t requiring the degree _and_ aren’t effectively assuring equivalent, relevant experience. That’s not a good idea.
Think NASA is looking for someone with experience and a large presence on social media platforms.
Just for laughs. NASA could hired Kylie Jenner for this PAO job. She is over-qualified for the position and is much more telegenic than almost all on-air personalities. Of course NASA will have to persuade her to step back from her cosmetic business.
Jeepers, Keith. I’m pretty sure that the salary level depends in large part on a combination of education and demonstrated experience. So you don’t get the higher level without, probably, the equivalent of a graduate degree and serious experience. But by not requiring a BA, NASA gets to look at the really creative people who dropped out of college and worked in the social media industry. They might find a gem they couldn’t have looked at if the application screened out everyone without a BA.
As for the salary levels… the median household nationwide earns $62k.
Lots of those are just individuals, or single-parent households. So $30k is just wrong. Furthermore, as you know, DC salaries are astronomical compared to most of the country. DC gets the max civil service locality
bonus, so $120k should be compared with, perhaps, $80k.
Is it a good salary, yes. But the same person could probably make a lot more working for a top boutique firm or powerhouse PR/advertising company.
What puzzles me is how someone who loves NASA and desperately wants NASA to be more creative in social media to enlist the young people inspired by space into the agency to realize their dreams… could question the idea of paying enough to attract great talent.
The position is a GS-13 or -14, and I think $102,000 is about right for the minimum salary for a GS-13 living in the D.C. area. So that’s the minimum they could pay. It isn’t as if they could find a good candidate without any education and hire that person as a GS-12. Nor does it make an specific reference to requiring “the equivalent of a graduate degree and serious experience” if someone doesn’t have a degree. If it did, I wouldn’t be concerned.
But there is a problem with hiring someone who “really creative people who dropped out of college and worked in the social media industry.” It takes some knowledge about a subject to communicate that subject to the public. Especially if it’s a technical subject. I know that’s not a universally held belief, but I’ve seen too many botched jobs from media relations people who didn’t know anything about the subject they were covering. That said, it’s not as if some PhD scientists haven’t also done equally abysmal jobs of public communications. So technical knowledge of the subject isn’t the only requirement. But I think it needs to be [i]a[/i] requirement.
The closest they come is saying that specialized experience includes about a dozen things, one of which is “collaborating with subject matter experts.” To put that in context, other things on the list include “use of Adobe Creative Suite.”
Exactly.
Is the subject matter “aerospace engineering and space science”, or is the subject matter “cool smart people of diverse backgrounds working together to discover knew knowledge and invent new technologies to lead humanity into the solar system”? I would argue that the latter, i.e. the HUMAN STORIES of people helping to open the space frontier, is especially what needs to be communicated via social media, especially using fantastic videos and sound and images.
The scientifically literate people that read NASA Watch are not the primary audience for the broad social engagement activities by NASA… it’s young people interested in new/exciting stories they can be part of. The ones who bite on the social media and want more will dig in via NASA’s websites and others (including this one) to learn more about the details under the flashy headlines.
I think this job is about both the subject and the content of the stories. It’s about translating the something about science and engineering into interesting stories about the discoveries or inventions and the people who made them. But that requires an accurate translation. If the best English-language writer tried to turn Kepler’s notebooks into a good story, he wouldn’t succeed if his German wasn’t reasonably good and he knew something about astronomy.
My favorite example of that is the original English translation of Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The translator really didn’t know what he was doing and it showed. At one point, he had Nemo describing the _Nautilus_ and make an off hand remark about steel having a density “seven tenths that of water”. Verne actually wrote “seven times that of water.” And, in more recent news, someone on an Ars Technica comment thread reported a newspaper which picked up a story on global warming from an American paper. The writer summarizing the US story faithfully took +0.6 deg F/decade, used a web app to convert to -18 deg C/decade, and that ended up in print. (And, yes, +0.6 deg F, as in 13.4 deg below freezing, is -18 deg C.)
That, as well as claiming something is a “first” when it really isn’t, and other errors, are the sort of things that ruin the story. If NASA media relations does things like that (and they have), then they might be writing about “cool smart people of diverse backgrounds working together to discover knew knowledge and invent new technologies to lead humanity into the solar system.” But the result ends up being as much fiction as a real, true story. That’s why I think someone with a job in NASA media relations needs to have _some_ technical knowledge about the science and engineering.
I met a number of the communications types working for NASA in recent months who have zero knowledge of spaceflight. Just a week ago I was proofreading one’s description of zero-G, which was, they said, due to the distance between the orbit and the earth.
I’m afraid I don’t have the heart to repeat the “heavy boots” story (which is part real and part urban myth.) But the problem isn’t just inventing a false explanation for something. It’s also taking the jargon most scientists and engineers use, trying to translate it into something the average reader would understand, and mistranslating it into something which isn’t even vaguely true. And, in fact, the resistance by many public information people to actually _explaining_ something. Sometimes one easily understood sentence can make a tremendous difference, but some people don’t like that. They’re afraid it would come across as trying to lecture or teach the audience, and they assume the general public would dislike stories which do so. (Or that the media feel that way and wouldn’t report on press releases which do so.)
And/or they condescendingly presume the public could never understand real subject matter.
No, now that I think about it, that isn’t the impression I’ve gotten. Although I will say there are some NASA media relations people I’ve run into who don’t understand the subject matter themselves.
The usual response I’ve gotten when I complain is that most important thing getting the news media to pick up the story. Just putting out lots of press releases doesn’t accomplish much if the media doesn’t report them. And the media relations people have a fairly fixed idea about what the news media will pick up. Explaining things is bad. Using terms the public wouldn’t understand is bad, even when accompanied by a clear, simple definition. The perception that the public will not like a story with things like that, so the newspapers know it won’t sell, so the newspapers won’t run the story, so press releases shouldn’t be like that.
Personally, I know you can go very wrong trying to explain a complicated subject. And communicating the story without watering it down to nothing is a difficult job. I suspect they’ve just found a path of least resistance for getting the news media to pick up there releases.
On the contrary.
Listen to NASA PAO commentary during television coverage of crewed mission activities such as rendezvous, docking, or EVA. Such commentary has nothing to do with ‘getting the media to pick up a story’ yet it still reeks of technical condescension toward the audience through its shallow and bland descriptions of everything taking place sprinkled with pointless trivia. No depth, no functional details = no drama.
NASA needs to engage its audience (the public) with effective storytelling. The stories are IN the details and why the folks involved care about them. If you can’t explain something to a 10-year-old, then you don’t understand it yourself. Presuming your audience can’t understand the story you are supposed to be telling them is not a good place from which to start.
It sounds like NASA PAO work isn’t exactly uniform. Which doesn’t surprise me. I was talking about the PAO work for scientific, robotic missions. Not human spaceflight events. In that case, television coverage is virtually non-existent (even on NASA TV), and the who thing is communicated through print and internet media and social media. (Twitter, by the way, inherently makes it impossible to convey any message which requires more than 280 characters.) I think what I described is accurate for _that_ part of NASA’s PAO work.
But I have to ask. For the talking heads you see on those human spaceflight broadcasts, do you think _they_ understand the details you’d like them to talk about? This whole comment thread started over whether or not someone in jobs like that need a college degree, or at least some background in science or engineering.
When it comes to not understanding something if you can’t explain it, Richard Feynman once got stumped on that. He said basically the same thing to another professor at Cal Tech (although he said a freshman, not a 10 year old…) His colleague replied by by asking him what this spin one-half quantum state for electrons actually was, not the math behind it but what it _was_. Feynman said he’d have to think about that, and that he’d get back to his colleague in a week or so. A week later, he ended up telling the other professor that it looked like _he_ didn’t understand electron spin states himself. I guess that’s an example of communicating something by actually admitting that you don’t know, and maybe no one knows. You can turn that into an interesting story which will get people’s interest. But I’ve noticed that media relations people don’t like that nearly as much as creating an air of institutional infallibility.
To answer your direct query, no, I do not think the PAO commentators understand the details to the level I think they ought to. (We did give the PAOs some simulator rides back when I was at JSC to help them gain insight, but I only remember it happening once…and it was constrained to a high-level show & tell, not any form of direct instruction. I came to sense on more than one occasion that having PAO folks consult ‘regular’ operations folks was discouraged since the OPS folks had ‘more important’ things to do.) But the Houston PAO folks aren’t the only ones seemingly lacking sufficient knowledge, which is as you say the whole point of Keith’s highlighting this item & all the discussion.
However, I think the content of what is discussed of NASA’s activities anywhere in video & in print etc—and how it is discussed—is shaped per management directive and/or established culture. The sheer ubiquity of the poor quality (in terms of non-effective engagement) testifies to this.
I addressed much of all this at length in my two-part TSR essay back in 2007 and even tried to ‘show the way’ in my first (and so far only…) novel. I used the TV coverage of Shuttle/ISS missions as my primary example in the essay but I tried to attack the larger matter of effective public engagement across all media. Since then, I have seen the barest minimum of my specific recommendations/suggestions so far implemented, and most of those took years to show up. [SpaceX, whether they read me or not, has done the best-est and most-est, and more besides. They seem to ‘get it’.]
But digging into any specific details isn’t as important as the mindset change required: successfully engaging an audience requires effective storytelling, and effective storytelling demands certain functional elements. NASA itself very, very rarely has ever been good at telling a compelling story; I’ve had a sense for a long time that they (whoever ‘they’ are) don’t think it’s their job.
As much as I appreciate the need for some depth of technical comprehension by those doing the conveying through media of what NASA does (I offered specific suggestions for how to possibly provide it), if we’re talking about really fixing things perhaps the required education for those doing it should include a degree in a discipline which trains persons to tell stories well.
https://www.thespacereview….
https://www.thespacereview….
/facepalm
See what I mean? Book learnin’ has value.
Why was I required to have college degrees when I applied for my job at NASA? I would have had no idea how to do my job without the education that I had. Was that a mistake for NASA to ask me to have a degree? As for your lecture at the end – I utterly resent your insinuation that I am against young people getting their dream job (I made zero mention of anyone’s age).
I believe the job you had was a technical (biology) job requiring a degree in a relevant field.
Finally… I am sorry about the “lecture”, but my point was that you really want NASA to do a better job at communicating its institutional hopes, challenges, and opportunities to the rest of humanity… and if someone can do that without having gone to some brain-dead journalism school (probably an inverse correlation there) then GREAT. I would think that of all people, you would be for OPENING the aperture of candidates, not narrowing it.
Your Trump pals have led a relentless dumbing down of policy when it comes to scientific accuracy. Education is now looked down upon. MDs with decades of public health experience are ignored during a pandemic. Climate change deniers run EPA. I just want to make certain that the “messengers” that NASA hires understand the “message” in the “messaging”. The bulk of what NASA puts out in its messaging is technical or summarizations thereof and requires a basic understanding of the concepts behind the science and engineering.
If I recall Mr. Wizard never finished college, dropping out to fight in WWII and then going into radio. And don’t forget neither Bill Gates or Steve Jobs ever earned degrees but seem to do OK in the tech industry. Either one would probably have made a good NASA Administrator, far better than Dr. Griffin or Dan Golden. You don’t need a degree to understand science or engineering, you just need a desire to learn about it.
Come ON, professor. I’m not sure if you are simply being obtuse (which I enjoy). Of course there are exceptions, but the rule still applies.
It depends on the level of creativity and vision a task requires. Do you want folks trained as workers or someone who is a self-driven innovator. In today’s work of easily accessible knowledge you don’t need to run up a huge bill attending college to be knowledgeable. Except for professions like medicine, engineering, law and accounting it is still possible to be self-educated.
Have you ever actually worked at NASA?
No, I teach at a university, but over the many years I have worked in space policy I have worked with many folks who have worked at NASA and heard their stories about what it is like working for NASA.
Incidently I teach Human Resource Management (both at the graduate and undergraduate level) and so look at this from the perspective of a professional. For legal reasons job openings like this should not be written on a whim but should be based on the organizational job description HR creates for the position based on the job tasks required, which in turn is based on interviews with supervisors and others that interact with those positions. I suspect that reason no degree is required is because those interviewed by HR didn’t indicated in their opinion that a specific degree would be of any value in performing it. But really, the folks to talk to about this should be the ones in HR at NASA. Maybe they will tell you their reasoning about why a degree isn’t needed.
But you never worked at NASA. NASA is not like a university. It is not like a company. It is a unique cultural entity that you can only fully understand by working there. Just sayin’
“or someone who is a self-driven innovator. “
And NASA/Congress wants self driven innovators there? Or someone who toes the line?
I will say I get frustrated by certain sorts of scientists and engineers. There are some who tend to rely on numerical simulations and computer models for their work (which if fine), and some of them tend to treat those models as black boxes they are trained to run (which is not fine.) You can tell, because they tend to simply present the results and don’t have good answers when they’re asked what the results mean or if the results may be wrong or uncertain (e.g. if the results might be sensitive to an uncertain input parameter or if some numerical errors or limitations might affect the results.)
NASAs downturn started 30 years ago and accelerated greatly in the last 20 years. It has less to do with education than experience.
30 years ago was when the Apollo era professionals and managers started leaving and 20 years ago was when NASA manned spaceflight became focused solely on operations and eliminated engineering and other functions that required technical expertise (experience) beyond how to create a checklist. Now I think if you go to functions like media or education you will find them led not by experienced and educated news media or social media professionals or by actual educators, but rather by human resources or financial analyst personnel. In the current NASA it has become in vogue to place leaders who not only do not know the technical aspects of what they are responsible for, they also do not know anything about the space program.
A job description that is perfect for a politician’s kid.
They already hired the President’s son’s brother in law to be the Deputy Chief of Staff ….
Without going over all of your links, how does this play out for NASA hiring post-doctoral researchers? I.e. people who have just gotten their PhD in relevant field of science. Even the job title implies a requirement for a post-doctoral degree.
As you mentioned, civil service is weird, but in virtually all big companies (i.e. ones with HR attorneys) it is stated as “X degree or equivalent experience and skills” or words like that. Post Doc positions are weird, because they are explicitly academically oriented. In some places (NIH) such positions aren’t employment, nor civil service – you’re paid as a grantee, and you get a 1099. Similar for intern positions at NASA, which not only require a particular academic standing, but require a particular GPA – because they are explicitly educational programs as defined in federal law. For the post-doc, in theory, someone with no academic credentials could apply – if they had a sufficient body of published work and demonstrated skills. Getting published without the credentials would be challenging.
A few.too many unqualified workers on the job might be why NASA seems to have a lot of trouble getting the job done in recent years? Musk seems to be solving that problem. Musk could become the future of the program or maybe he already is.
I wonder how many of the folks he has building the new Starships actually have college degrees. The engineers yes, but the folks doing the actual welding and construction work? Especially the ones who taught Elon Musk about welding large structures?
My experience is that you need some supportive and directive management who know what needs to be done and who don’t get in one another’s ways, and you need arms and legs in the form of experienced technicians who can get the job done.
NASA’s leadership base is very thin. None have designed or developed anything significant in human space. They spend a lot of time arguing and going in circles and as much as anything else they lack confidence to be able to get the job done. NASA has also done a very poor job of ensuring that their [contractor] technicians have continuity of experience. Between nonexistent leadership and no practical abilities, that has gotten us where we are today.
Musk took a couple of key NASA leaders and developed many new ones; he has the people who can do the job.
Here’s the NASA Watch story on Associate Administrator Inclán’s appointment: http://nasawatch.com/archiv…
Keith, I know that all administrations use some appointments as political rewards, but has the NASA AA for Communications position been used that way in previous administrations.
The NASA AA for comms is always a political pick. Always.
I think any post at that level is political, in the sense that it’s a presidential appointment not a promotion within the civil service. But some of those appointments are more political than others. For example, I believe Dr. Zurburchen position as Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate was also an appointment by the administration. But his background is space physics and not anything political. In that case, the appointment probably (almost certainly) was just following the recommendations of people within NASA (and other scientists outside NASA.)
I guess the question was how political have the Communications AA appointments been? Are we talking about political in the way the Ambassador to Iceland is given away as a reward for making campaign donations, or is it political in the sense that the President had to officially make the appointment while really just approving a recommendation which came up from below?
Thomas Zurbuchen is NOT a political appointee. He applied to an advertised civil service position and was hired as a result. No White House involvement. Full stop.
Ok, but I’m surprised. I thought hiring and appointment policies were the same for all Associate Administrators. Why is the AA for Communications a presidential appointment while the AA for SMD is a civil service position?
You “thought” ;-). Why is it the way it is? Because that is the way it is.
Asking why things work they way do is part of my job. I do it by habit and don’t limit that to physics. Across the entire federal government, positions above a certain level are appointed by the President and approved by the Senate. I’m curious what determines that level, if it isn’t the row in the org chart. Did Congress go through position by position, across the whole federal government? That sounds unlikely, but stranger things have happened. Did they leave it up the the executive branch? I can’t believe that, since it’s a blank check for bypassing approval by the Senate. I’d honestly like to know.
*requiring* a degree basically gets you in trouble for potential “disparate impact” (Griggs vs Duke Power). You can say “degree or equivalent experience”. Or, if professional licensure requires a specific degree (if you’re hiring a doctor, they have to have an MD or DO to get a license to practice).
There are plenty of technical people doing highly technical jobs without a STEM degree, particularly in software – so clearly, it is possible to gain the necessary knowledge and skill without a 4 year stint of formal education in the field. For people in their early 20s getting their first job, a college degree is a “signal” that you can manage your own life to a certain extent. However, it’s also possible that you could demonstrate that with an actual job.
OK but then why does NASA go on and on about the value of education – and place such a strong emphasis in its outreach for getting a good college education to be prepared to enter the workforce and work on space projects if the agency does not even require college degrees from people who apply for jobs?
Well, nothing says that having a degree wouldn’t make you a better candidate. It’s just that not having a degree doesn’t exclude you from the pool. It’s walking a fine line about what are called Bona Fide Occupational Qualifications (BFOQ) that might have a disparate impact on a protected class. You have to admit that there could be a talented autodidact, or someone who almost finished college but didn’t get their degree because they couldn’t pay the library fines or they got thrown out for something unrelated to either education or “acceptability as an employee” – perhaps who had 10 years successful work experience, and they’d potentially be perfectly qualified for the job, except for the degree.
Education has been alarmingly decremented in America; value being measured by job salary. This misses the point: a wide-ranging education makes better citizens who are informed, have a sense of perspective4, and know how to think.
That switch occurred when employers started to expect schools to train their workforce and schools started doing so. And then the government followed by requiring schools to report how successful graduates were in getting jobs. The results is schools going from educating citizens to training workers.
It is also why I started teaching courses in economic and business history, so the business students my school graduate would understand where the technology and products they take from granted came from and why there was an industrial revolution in the 18th Century that generated a Malthusian Discontinuity that ended several thousands years of human living at the subsidence level. It was to make up for the technical and historical illiteracy that still had graduate from K-12 schools focused on training them to pass standardize testing instead of educating them like they should.
I’m not aware of anyone at NASA who actually knows why NASA and the programs are the way they are. You’d need a historian who also had some broad knowledge of how the program actually works.
All organizations go through an aging process just like people do. Unless something major like a merger or bankruptcy causes an organizational wide reset they just tend to get bogged down by bureaucracy and risk avoidance as they get older, both in terms of how long they have been around and the average age of their workforce. Often organizational behavior becomes ritualize instead of functional. Most of NASA problems are the result of 60+ years of accumulating of rules and procedures along with the very high average age of its workforce. So that historian would need someone with an understanding of organizational behavior to help them understand NASA. Both Boeing and Lockheed are showing the same signs of organizational aging. Indeed, that is one of the defining characteristics of “Old Space.”
Perhaps the folks that did the job description this opening is based on just forgot to add the requirement of formal education. C
A college education does not guarantee that a person knows what they are doing. I think experience counts for a hell of a lot more than a piece of paper. I’ve known several people without a degree who were tops in engineering. They learned by getting their hands dirty. Some folks are not cut out for the academic path, while others who do get degrees sometimes can’t think and apply what they “learned”.
When I applied for the job I had at NASA I was required to have a college degree. It would have been impossible for me to do my job without my undergraduate and graduate training. Was NASA wrong to require a college degree for my position?
I wouldn’t want NASA to hire someone with a college degree in philosophy or mechanical engineering for the job you held, not if that was their only qualification for relevant knowledge or experience.
In any case, I’m not sure about what job you were originally hired for by NASA or the qualifications, so I have to ask. Did it require a post-graduate degree? If so, would someone with a bachelors in biology and two decades of work as a lab technician or something similar have been considered as good as a PhD when it comes to qualifications?
Gilbert Levin, of the Viking labeled release experiment fame, didn’t have an post-doctoral degree until he was very far along in developing and managing that experiment. As I understand it, he was originally a public health worker in Los Angeles, who had a good idea for identifying bacteria in water by supplying nutrients with a radioactive isotope in them, and that led to the idea of using the same technique to find life on Mars. He didn’t go back to school and get a PhD until people told him NASA wouldn’t let him be the PI on a flight instrument if he didn’t PhD.
Levin sounds like one of those guys who over a number of years worked and became educated in that field, and was recognized by many as that guy in the Water Dept who really knows his stuff. I’m sure many can name various people without degrees but worked in the field and we pay attention to what they say and recommend.
A college degree helps particularly if you are just starting in the field. I know for myself getting a BSEE degree took me twice as long as typical but overall it was a good investment of effort. However, in this case I think NASA can use someone like Miles O’brien, Scott Manley, or Keith Cowing (their college education may or may not have specific courses pertaining to this specific position). But the question will they be able to say what they really think?
Just remember – none of the people you mentioned are employed by NASA to do out reach strategy.
Nor is Bill Nye and that may be NASA’s problem. And this may be an indication someone at NASA is trying to fix it by reviewing what skills are actually needed for the position to create a bigger pool of applicants.
I’d tend to agree. NASA has public affairs types who mainly seem to be more like reporters, asking questions of astronauts and experts, and they have astronauts and experts, but I don’t think they have people who specialize in telling people how things work, or why things happen or happened, which seems to be what Nye, Manly and Obrien do.
There were some who grew into that sort of job in the past, like Edgar Cortright, who was a center director, but who also wrote NASA educational books in the 60s and 70s.
I’d think they would have one or two people like that. But they would need someone who actually knew the stuff from an insiders perspective and who could explain it clearly to the public.
See my lengthy post further up near the top, replying to fcrary (4 days ago) replying to me replying to… A cultural mindset change is needed on top of all the other specific fixes.
Or they could outsource it to SpaceX who made space cool to kids again. Have you seen all the photos of model SpaceX rockets kids are now launching? When Elon gets the Starship into orbit folks won’t care about the news from NASA ?
Von Braun was another one of the NASA types in the 1960s. He wrote articles for Readers Digest, Popular Mechanics, etc. He wrote books; history of the program. He appeared on TV-had been doing so since the 50s and Disney. He gave lots of speeches and helped to organize conferences. He had a mission and that was to sell space to the public. He also was not only a center director but recognized as a leading technical expert and manager. All of these did a lot to mitigate his prior background. I cannot think of anyone like that in NASA today.
von Braun was also a Nazi SS officer and used slave labor to build his rockets. None of what you list mitigated his background. And he never apologized for any of it.
I think at the time, in the 60s, a lot of people did not know the details of his background and they thought he was the guy running the show. In many respects he was seen then as the only continuity in the program from its ‘origins’ to the then present day. He was held in high esteem.
In the context of this post, he personally had the experience in R&D; he had the education and th technical knowledge and he was able to communicate it to all audiences. He could do it in writing, on tv and in person. Who at NASA can do that today?
No one seemed to raise the von Braun ‘problem’ until the mid 1970s after his career at NASA was over.
The von Braun question was raised constantly over the years.
When von Braun died in 1977, Jimmy Carter commended him. His NAZI party membership and role in slave labor was almost never mentioned. The DOJ Office of Special Investigations was established in 1979. An investigation into Paperclip personnel started in 1981. In 1985, von Braun’s SS and party record, security reports and immigration status emerged and that was when his role became widely known. Until then the Army and NASA hid much of the record. -Neufeld
Dude. I do not give a damn. He was a Nazi SS officer and used slave labor – many of whom died horrible deaths. You will not be using NASAwatch to whitewash his resume. Stop.
He went to college. He has college degrees.
Not at all, but your job involved more direct knowledge of technical areas. Here we’re talking about being knowledgeable in social media, it’s essentially going to be a public relations kind of job.
And the messages that are putout reflect NASA’s various scientific and technical activities. Surely one would hope that the person crafting the “messages” understands what the messages say.
You can stop looking for the conspiracy here. This is a Public Affairs Specialist position, not a science position. The federal government does not require a degree for administrative management positions. Related experience is required. A degree and related experience is required for higher than entry level professional positions, such as scientists, engineers, medical officers and accountants. This part of the federal qualification standards has been in place since the late 70s. This isn’t news or anything that should cause you to be indignant.
Not sure where you are getting the “conspiracy’ thing. Having covered NASA for 24 years I can tell you that an understanding of the science and technology inherent in everything that NASA does is important otherwise how can you understand the “message’ in the “Messaging”? No one is i”ndignant” except you, it would seem
Your repeated comments regarding this position not requiring a degree seems as though you are indignant to me, as do your comments about the “dumbing down” of America. That isn’t the situation. The dedicated NASA employees that work in mission support use their technical expertise (in this case public affairs) to partner with scientific and engineering subject matter experts to do their jobs and represent the agency. As a NASA employee for almost 30 years, I see people from different disciplines work together every day and understand how these employees work together.
I obviously do not agree – and I am a former NASA employee who has been doing social media for 24 years. But who cares what I think.
I understand you don’t agree. I am explaining why the vacancy announcement doesn’t REQUIRE education. That doesn’t mean that the person selected will not have some type of related education. More importantly, the selectee will have experience that is related to the position. The hiring manager (possibly with the help of a panel) will use their best judgement to select the person with the best background
Why are astronauts required to have college degrees? Why was I required to have one when I applied for the job i had at NASA? Why does NASA go on and on about the value of education – and place such a strong emphasis in its outreach for getting a good college education to be prepared to enter the workforce and work on space projects if the agency does not even require college degrees from people who apply for jobs?
The position does not require *any* education. This is due in part to stupid Trump changes at OPM. But the end result is that NASA can no longer seek out people with actual training (that is what education is) that can be quantified. This will lead to a dumbing down of how NASA communicates with the public.
With a decade more experience than yourself I know I am indignant that someone would be hired for the position described without the appropriate education, let alone with no education.
If you had 30 years of experience in federal HR, I would imagine you would not be indignant. These type of positions do not have education requirements.
They should.
Please – no rah rah talk about dedicated employees. People who do not understand science and technology are ill equipped to engage with the public about science and technology. I have seen NASA PAO people unable to answer even the most basic science questions when queried by the news media where the media actually have to explain the science to the PAO person in order for them to understand the question. I am not calling for them to have PhDs but a basic college education with science classes should be a prerequisite.
I am guessing that they have already chosen the person for the job and they wrote the description to fit that individual. It’s pretty common practice; corrupt but common. If not let’s see the last several similar job listings and see if they also got by without an education requirement.
You can look at the previous postings and would find no education requirement on those either. Federal agencies cannot require education for Public Affairs positions.
Which explains why the government is so bad at explaining itself.
I would add that positions like this that have not been around for long are often populated by people who did not receive formal training along the way. Their jobs did not exist when they were college age. I’ve seen this repeatedly in the tech industry. There may be great candidates who came from other disciplines and whose skills were learned on the job, jobs that they may have had to invent themselves. Specifying an education requirement could backfire by barring the best candidates because of their non-traditional path to the skill set that’s being sought.
So they consider this communications position administrative? Like secretarial work? Odd, that is not what the job description says.
No it is a rather important position that reflects everything that NASA does- everywhere. The commenters have decided that it is not important.
Administrative and secretarial work is very different. They are looking for people who can manage. Specifically, judging how well the people doing media relations are doing, and if they aren’t doing it well, tell them how and why to do better. And making sure those people pay attention and actually do better. That’s not secretarial work and it isn’t an easy job. The important question is how someone in that position would know how well the people he’s supervising are doing and what sort of useful advice/orders he could issue. I don’t see how someone who did not understand the content could do that. And that, for NASA, means someone with some sort of knowledge or education in technical fields. We can argue about whether that inherently means a college degree (and, if so, a degree in what) or just lengthy work experience. But I think _some_ sort of science or engineering experience is needed.
You need a college degree to reach 328 million people?
Bill Gates reached billions of people with Windows. Mark Zuckerberg reaches billions of people with Facebook. Larry Ellison affects billions of people through all sorts of corporate software. Michael Dell has affected billions of people. Steve Jobs affected billions with the IPhone. The list goes on: Travis Kalanick, Jan Koum, John Mackey, etc.
None of them have a college degree.
But they hire people with college degrees.
I think that Elon has a college degree (or two), but you don’t need one to work for him! https://www.businessinsider…
The post I made was about hiring at NASA – not SpaceX.
The sort of job we’re talking about really involves two things. Being able to “reach billions of people”, as you put it, and what you communicate once you’re reached them. For that second part of the job, I think knowing about the subject is critical. For some things, that doesn’t require a degree or technical experience. For others things, like most of what NASA does, that knowledge is necessary. (And some of the people you mention do have the technical knowledge, even if they don’t have a degree to “prove” it.)
If they want someone who can develop media strategies, tactics, products and messaging, that means they need to be able to organize; they need to know the subject matter; and they need to know how to communicate. Organizing means they probably have prior project management and integration education and /or experience; subject matter expertise would mean knowledge of space, earth, spaceflight, astronomy, perhaps physics; perhaps history of technology; maybe not all of these equally but education and/or experience to have confidence you know the subject; how to communicate means mass communications, or media, or education, and a verbal and written communications portfolio. I’d think they would want someone with a science or engineering degree and some kind of a communications degree too and with prior program experience. No degree? in about 99% of cases I’d say they were not qualified.
And honestly, there are so many people with this kind of education and experience, why would they opt for any less?
IG should investigate NASA.hiring practices. If NASA IG is unwilling there is an OPM special prosecutor who will.