This isn't correct. You can work as a researcher without a degree, certainly in the UK. A general example would be an associate professor at a business school with extensive career experience who might contribute to some papers. An anecdotal example is myself; I don't have a bachelors degree but during my masters degree I had some summer research work. I ended up not finishing the masters degree but did chat about the possibility of going back to do a part-time PhD.
In UK you can be associate professor without a degree?
Then you talk about your time "during a master degree" but you say you had not a bachelors... How can you do a master without a bachelors?
Now I understand why other members of academia, even when UK was part of EU, treated it as a special case for research positions. Btw not judging, just saying it is totally different of what I expected.
> In UK you can be associate professor without a degree?
Yes, in rare occasions! More frequently without say a higher degree. One that springs to mind is the current Professor of Poetry at Oxford University who read classics for their undergrad but with no further education. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Oswald
I know there are other examples but I'd need to google a bit to find them. Notable people who got a PhD without a Bachelors or Masters in the US include Wolfram, so it's not just in the UK where rules get a little bent.
> How can you do a master without a bachelors?
Experience in industry counts if its highly related. I was offered or interviewed for postgraduate courses at the University of Leeds, Oxford University, University of Leicester, and a few others. All in Software Engineering and I eventually accepted a part-time position on an MSc in Computer Science. A bit of rigmarole but not that much - I started the course at 25 with 6 years experience in tech. After some pestering I was able to help with some lecturers papers which led to the whole PhD discussion but dropped the MSc because it wasn't as rigorous as I hoped it'd be (I'm interested in the foundations of computer science and this was more applied). If it helps I've been to doctoral summer schools in both the EU and US without any credentials either!
Maybe the UK is the only place with such ways, I emailed Stanford a while back (I'm moving there this Summer, my partners a postdoc, and wanted to try audit some of their postgraduate CS courses) and got shot down pretty quickly!
I understand degrees being a requirement for medicine or hard engineering, but for research and topics of the mind it's just an expensive, multi-year hazing ritual into academia.
Plenty of good people go straight into industry after getting their BCs. (or avoid degrees entirely) because of this.
I don´t know for all the eu nations, but for those that I know staff researcher positions still require degrees (and there is a lot of competition to get those because they are even more limited in number than tenure track positions, just with far less requirements)
In mine in particular everyone has at least a Master Degree with some publications. One of two even got a PHD.
