Some developing thoughts....
- Dan is clearly a Cranfield fan, as am I! But, City is still good.
- The difference between "face fits" and "qualifications" is an interesting one. Being seen within your industry / company / community as a "safe pair of hands" without doubt should, and in the western world *usually* does, mean vastly more than paper qualifications. There are certainly parts of the world - the middle-east particularly where the person with the right bit of paper will always trump the person with years of relevant experience, but most places that's not true. A sample of two, but comparing myself and my wife: I've got a BEng and PhD - both in aerospace engineering, my wife has a BSc in building technology and an MBA. We both do pretty well for ourselves, and I've done jobs where the PhD is essential to the role (as it is basically a research licence, in the same way that a CPL is a licence to fly an aeroplane), and we've both managed reasonably large "stuff" - but I don't think that anybody has ever either queried my lack of a formal management qualification, whilst the only thing that it's been considered relevant to for my wife is when she teaches management theory in a university: she also oversees large building projects, and there it's all about her experience and skill, not her management qualifications.
- However, there's an interesting thread at the moment on the Society of Flight Test Engineers bulletin board. A chap there has a BSc in computer science, went into the military, was trained by a military school as a flight test engineer (FTE is the person who in a flight test environment manages the test pilot, and often flies with them to manage the trials components of a flight test whilst the TP manages the actual aeroplane), in which role he's been working in the USA for 18 years. The US immigration people have just refused to renew his visa on the grounds that the USA has plenty of people with 30 year old computer science degrees, so he clearly can't be anything special. IF, say, he'd done a relevant MSc at some point in the last 20 years, it might have given him the essential credibility, not with his employer: but with external bodies like that.
So basically the right reason to do these qualifications is to use them to learn stuff, and then to use what you've learned and also (never discount this) the network of people you built up during the learning process. BUT, there will be occasions when having that qualification can be really useful.
G