A lot of job hunters worry about whether they are suitably qualified for a position. If the ad for your dream job insists that, say, only someone with a four-year degree from an accredited ninja school will be considered, and if you dropped out of ninja school in your sophomore year but have been working as a ninja for the intervening five years, you have good reason to be concerned about your chances of getting an interview. Just reading the ad, it's impossible to know: How important is the degree per se? Will your frontline work experience make up for the lack of letters after your name? One's lack of qualifications can very easily work against one, especially in a tight job market.

Unfortunately, the world can also punish the job seeker from the opposite direction. Search committees and human resources departments dislike the excess of letters after one's name almost as much as the absence of those letters. The polite way to refer to this is to say that the candidate is overqualified: they have too many qualifications.

The idea is counterintuitive, and the effect can be very frustrating for job seekers whose only mistake was to stay in school or to succeed in their career. There is some logic to HR's perspective, of course. For one thing, the overqualified candidate is a flight risk. If you are an MBA applying to be a barista at Starbucks, the person reading your application might wonder, "Is she just taking this job until something better comes along? Are we going to need to do a whole new job search? Are we going to have to interview, hire, and train another person as soon as she decides to move on?" The overqualified are viewed with suspicion: the assumption is that they are just slumming it; that they will get bored; that, even if they do stay, they will adopt some kind of arrogant attitude which will make the workplace intolerable.

There are some degrees, particularly at the graduate level, that make one overqualified for just about everything. An M.D. or a J.D. who decides for whatever reason not to pursue medicine or law will have a lot of trouble getting any other kind of job anywhere. A Ph.D. is almost comically unable to get a job outside the academe, especially if his background is in the humanities or social sciences. And God help you if you were ever an executive -- a CEO, a CFO, a COO, or similar -- and decide to go through a career change. The Best Buy that would cheerfully hire a baboon as a cashier suddenly gets cold feet when looking at that kind of résumé.

Some people deal with the problem by removing extra qualifications from their résumé when job hunting. (In my experience, "just delete it!" is always the first piece of advice that well-meaning friends blurt out when hearing about the job woes of the overqualified.) This has led to the strange situation where résumé fraud actually goes in both directions: people don't just pad their CVs, but they also censor them. But even if you don't personally ascribe any value to honesty -- and I do -- there are a lot of risks involved in this sort of liposuction, and I don't recommend it.

The more important task is to make your experience at doing that other thing relevant to this thing, the thing you want to do now. (Graduate instructors don't tend to teach their students how to do this, since most of them still operate under the outdated assumption that every student in a given program is being trained for only one possible career. This is no longer true, if indeed it ever was.) There are many good resources to help the "overqualified" job seeker, including the WRK4US mailing list and blogs like Sabine Hikel's Leaving Academia and Julie Clarenbach's Escape The Ivory Tower.