Petamocto said:
I completely disagree with you on both the officer and NCM lanes. I will not be so bold as to say that there has never been a case when a diploma has mattered, I know that in the vast majority of cases it does not.
For an officer, having a diploma gets you a big fat zero points on the merit boards. Either you have a degree (or more) or you have nothing. In the case of a tie in points, I can pretty much assure you that they would look at who has performed better in their jobs.
That's not surprising, given that the goal is to have a fully degreed officer corps in the CF.
For NCMs, last time I checked it was time in and trade qualifications that got you promoted to Cpl, and then the addition of other courses like PLQ and time in that got you promoted to MCpl. Ditto for 3A and 3B.
I can pretty much assure you that someone bearing a two-year diploma in Electronics Engineering Technology from a community college or CEGEP will
probably be granted conditional QL5 and Acting Cpl or LS upon graduation of BMQ if they enrol in the LCIS Tech, ATIS Tech, NE Tech (A), NE Tech (T) or NE Tech (C) trades. They will also
probably be given a $20,000 recruiting allowance. There are other trades where similar offers are made to semi-skilled college grads.
Coming in as a Cpl or LS puts you four years ahead of your CF-trained counterparts, and starts the two-year clock for eligibility for promotion to MCpl or MS. Completing PLQ can be done as an afterthought once one gets promoted to MCpl or MS.
Bottom line is that diplomas most definitely do matter in all sorts of places in the NCM world. There are even points awarded at the national level PER boards for post-secondary education.
Even in the extreme case of non-specialist pay category MOSIDs, such as the combat arms - if you have two similarly-scored Cpl infantry soldiers, and one has a community college diploma (in basket weaving, even!) and the other does not have a diploma, the diploma holder will get the nod because of the points for post-secondary education. I've yet to see a merit board scoring matrix that does not have a weighted category for post-secondary education.