Personal story here: during my first year as a BA (Classics(Latin)) at the Uni of Canterbury (NZ), I was knocked off my bicycle and came to, more or less, almost a full week later with a Traumatic Brain Injury, an Extradural Haematoma they cleaned out an hour or so before I shuffled off the mortal coil. As the information the hospital gave me was decidedly inadequate, I picked up Dr Oliver Sack's The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, discovered that there was a whole heap of material about people in my situation, and promptly ordered some of the books he mentions in it. I later worked out that I'd given myself the equivalent of Third and Fourth Year papers in Neuropsychology, and a paper in the medical science of Neurology (Surgery). The books included Guyton's Basic Neuroscience: Anatomy and Physiology, AR Luria's The Working Brain, Dr Muriel Lezak's Neuropsychological Assessment, and Springer and Deutsch's Left Brain Right Brain. Most neuropsychologists, starting with the neuropsychologist who managed my recovery, have treated me rather as an ungraduated colleague - and you know, the rule is it's when the professionals treat you as one of them, that you're actually one of them. But it means nothing, because although it helped me mightily in conquering the subsequent 5 years of clinical depression - easier to deal with the "personal demons" when you know they are not real - the work I did, didn't involve pieces of paper bearing the title of BA or BSc in Psychology.
During those five years I did some largely voluntary work computer-cataloguing school libraries. Finding I couldn't get any work in spite of proving I had the attitude to get up and enter the details, I thought I'd learned enough to get and make my own work as a programmer of library systems. To do that, I needed to know a lot more about databases, and the like. So again, I bought simple nightime reading, books like Andrew Tanenbaum's Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, Comer's Operating Systems Design: The Xinu Approach, CJ Date's Database Systems: An Introduction, and Elmasri and Navathe's The Fundamentals of Database Systems. I read but didn't buy, Tanenbaum's Computer Networks. I thought after reading all that, that since the daily rag and the computer press were moaning about computer network skills shortages, that I should do this short course on networks. My bank wouldn't loan unless I had work at the end of it; none of the HR companies would suggest any company who might offer me a part-time job as an assistant network administrator. Etc.
So that's my life story. It doesn't seem to matter if you actually know the material - and as an ungraduated neuropsychologist, I might have some professional opinions on the meaningfulness of the postgrad Organizational Psychology Diploma ... Clueless seems to be too tame to describe HR policies.