Today a colleague reported that when exporting the roster Excel from the HR system, employees’ full-time first-degree information was extracted incorrectly.
I was completely baffled… 😓 I shouldn’t have taken on this HR system project in the first place — it’s full of pitfalls and gives no sense of accomplishment.
Now I’ll walk through the background and sequence of events of this issue.
The person’s educational background
For example, this employee’s educational background is as follows:
- High school, full-time, attended Xiangbei High School
- Bachelor’s degree, full-time, attended Northwest University
- Master’s degree, full-time, attended Northeastern University
But when I exported, I extracted the first full-time degree as the high school diploma. HR said this person’s first full-time degree should be the master’s degree, and this person’s highest degree is also the master’s.
What is “full-time first degree”?
I was very confused — I thought this person’s full-time first degree should be the bachelor’s degree…
I asked DeepSeek, and AI also said my understanding was fine (I recall AI code reviews in VSCode didn’t find an issue either). But reading on Zhihu, some professional HRs say that “full-time first degree” actually refers to the highest full-time degree.
In other words, this person’s full-time first degree should be the master’s degree, not the bachelor’s.
Cases where the full-time first degree differs from the highest degree
There is another situation. For example, another person’s educational background is as follows:
- High school, full-time, attended Xiangbei High School
- Bachelor’s degree, full-time, attended Northwest University
- Master’s degree, part-time, attended Southeast University
In this case, the person’s full-time first degree should be the bachelor’s degree, not the master’s, because their master’s degree is not full-time.
However, their highest degree is the master’s, even though it is not full-time.
Non-full-time includes
- Adult education
- Self-study (self-examination)
- Correspondence courses
Of course,## What counts as non‑full‑time
- Adult education
- Self-study examination (zikao)
- Correspondence education
Of course, I can’t tell the difference between these three at all…
About the Author 🌱
I am a developer from Yantai, Shandong, China. If you have any interesting topics or software development needs, feel free to email me at: zhongwei.sun2008@gmail.com for a chat, or follow my personal public account "Elephant Tools", See more contact information