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Tech Training Schools Going Bust
superflippy writes "The Associated Press reports that many tech training schools which opened during the last few years are now shutting their doors. During the dot-com boom, there was the perception that a few months of computer training could lead to a fabulous job. Now, it seems all these schools have produced are unemployed people with student loans and dubious certifications."
1. Kid goes through course
2. Kid does well, but doesn't really learn
3. Kid gets job $63,000/year
4. Kid has no idea what to do, but was able to talk his shit up.
5. Kid goes to teacher and begs him to help
6. Company pays teacher to do kids job $15,000
Cost to company $75,000
I know of this personally. Pretty annoying if you ask me. The kid actually still has his job too.
A friend of a friend asked me to help him with a final project for one of his classes at ITT Tech. This was a project in ASP for an online bookstore. He was nearing completion of his associates degree in Web Design, and when I got there to show him things, he knew nothing at all. Not even HTML... When I asked him about that, he said he "sorta learned it a while ago". Last I checked, HTML was the staple of Web Development, no? All of his pages that he had made so far were all autogenerated by FrontPage. Goes to show you what good a $30,000 2-year associates degree at ITT Tech is worth.....or rather worthless.
How could I say to men: "Speak louder, shout! For I am deaf!"? -Ludwig van Beethoven
I spent 10 months at "The Chubb Institute" gaining a certificate in Network and System Security. During the 10 months, we started with basic A+ cert type information, and worked our way up through Linux and MS ISA Server... none of each in enough detail to actually get a job done.
In fact, we spent 1 week learning Redhat where we installed the OS, Installed Samba, and FTP.
Then we spent 4 weeks (5 hours a day 5 days a week) learning how to write resumes and interview.
Somehow I feel like Linux is more important then what color my suit is for the interview. (blue vs. grey)
Lastly, they promised "Job Placement" - however, the only calls that the Graduating Security Class received were helpdesk positions.
My question is... if the Network Security class... the most esteemed program at the Chubb Institute is getting calls for Helpdesk positions... what positions are the helpdesk classes getting?
Janitorial?
I used to work for a small computer training center. I got to teach people on worker's comp how to repair computers (fun when they were just there to collect the check and didn't care about the class).
Basically, they were told by their rehab people that our three-month class would get them a nice 40K a year job, and they usually got really pissed when they found out otherwise.
Speaking of the original dubious certification, a 8-year old just got certified as an MCSE.
Finally I'm starting to see some justice! I have 18 years experience but have been out of work due to all the outsourcing and dumping of jobs overseas for the last 10 months. Nothing has ticked me off more than seeing so called private schools like ECPI and others advertising in the paper for IT and Cert courses. They advertise like there is a shortage for jobs, that they cant fill them fast enough... when all they have done is dumped untrained memorizers on the market and created a glut of available personnel. And if a business or HR department doesn't know better, the fancy paper gets these really untrained workers the jobs at cheap salaries (because they have to pay those 30K college course fees) I wish they all would shut down and go back to just being Testing centers like back in the Drake days... or am I showing my age again.
The downward spiral of recent years, beyond anyone's direct control: 1) The economy going to hell 2) The resulting layoffs 3) People with years of experience competing for entry level jobs 4) A lack of entry level jobs (why hire someone fresh out of school when you can hire a former sysadmin for Dell tech support?) 5) Companies not paying nearly enough as they used to for tech positions This is not the schools' fault. A previous poster used the term 'dubious certs,' and this is completely accurate. The problem however is not the curriculum, it is the way the students study. When I attended a comp training school a couple years ago, I cannot tell you how many students used mcsebraindumps.com and other sites where they can get test questions. The percentage was huge. As a result, these people just memorized answers and did not know how to apply anything they learned (if they did at all) to real world situations. When they got out into the real world, they broke more than they fixed. As a result, companies now view these certifications with a skeptical eye. Sure, you passed the test - but what do you really know? Prove to me you can make it - but how do you get the shot if a sysadmin with ten years of experience wants that tech support job too? Answer: you don't. These schools have tried to hide this and have been largely successful, but the truth is finally coming out.
even the fancy certifications were not enough
You said it yourself. The certifications are usually anything but fancy. Most of these courses depend on your ability to memorize things and take a test. I have read a couple of the certification books and it doesn't even get close to teaching you any basics regarding the subject. I gave up pretty quickly.
The sad part is that the acronyms are deemed very important. My company actually sent out an email a little while ago urging everyone to put their 'acronyms' (MCSE, CISSP etc.) in their signatures because it creates a very good impression and I am talking about a reputed company.
I have a couple of friends who did take these certification courses, managed to get through and are doing good. WHY? The certification gave them a foot in the door and it was their persistence and hard work after that. Anybody with the idea of going through these certifications assuming that its going to get them a steady job for their life without any more effort is probably misled.
My 0.02$
Free XBox, PS2
I think it is great that you are an employer that is willing to consider applicant that do not have a university degree.
As a 'letterless' software engineer I find this to be pretty uncommon. This is incredibly frustrating to me because during the 6 months I was unemployed (Im pleased to say this is no longer the case) I was passed over by many-a-position that suited my skills perfected purely on the basis of my lack of a university education.
YMMV, judging by your sig you are obviously an educated man but when I think about the truely outstanding technical people I have worked with during my relatively short career so far I find that that majority were those without the education.
Im not sure exactly why this is, but my theory is that it is too easy to coast through a degree by 'going through the motions' and then use it to mean more than it is. Usually those without the degree had to demostrate a higher technical skill level before being considered.
I do however, take slight issue with your point about certificates. I have found some of these to be very worthwhile. I have certificates from Sun in their Java programmer, Java developer and Java web component developer qualifications and found them (particually the programmer) to be an excellent base-line skill test.
I have recommended to my current employer that all developers working on our software should either have the programmer certificate or be working towards it.
I dont attempt to leverage these certs too much on my CV but they are far from useless.
I dont think you should tar them all with the same brush.
"Are you happy with your job? Think there's better? THERE IS (cue music). Become a certified network engineer or software developer at MADSKILLZ. Technology jobs are still paying well - our graduates make as much as $100,000 per year! Student loans available, call now and we'll throw in a comlimentary scale model Porsche - just like the one you'll be driving after you become a certified network engineer or software developer at MADSKILLZ!"
Why is anyone surprised that companies that advertise get rich quick schemes like this are going under? Dear trial lawyers - better sue quick because the IT certificate industry is going to die.
-- $G
It was interesting to watch as other post secondary institutes and even other departments at our institute jumped on the IT bandwagon. When I left the program in 2001, our institute was graduating close to 500 IT grads/year, not to mention the local University and College graduating an equal amount. Then there were the private schools were pumping out MSCEs and CNEs and now Cisco engineers.
The fact is that the market is saturated and the gravy train is over. Our school is hurting because we receive funding from the provincial government based on graduate's employment placement rate (for example: 93% employed after 6 months in their field of study). For the first time in 10 years, I've noticed that the placement rate description has changed from 6 months to 1 year and they've dropped the reference to "field of study" from the statistics. The IT programs are really hurting for enrollment also. People are wising up to the fact that it is difficult to get a job in IT with just a piece of paper.
Sounds like Graduate School. I'd receive a "B" just for showing up.
I know I'll get modded down, but this guy is probably a product of India's certification schools, that pump out people with degrees, certifications, etc. with the express purpose of getting US tech jobs. They get very real education. I've run into many, many people like this, and worked with them, and they're the same. They may have a degree or certification, but half the Indians I worked with wouldn't know HTML from Cobol.
i have to confirm this; maybe from another point of view
...)
..)
when i was 20 years old, studying informatics at a university, i have found my first real job
i have got a chance to work on real things, and see my algorithms being used by real people, not just producing some useless results to satisfy a lector
i have decided to follow this chance, quit university and i was working for cca one year with a lower salary then i could get if i would finish university (3 years later
after one year, i have been known in the company; after two years, i have been respected in the company, and after three years i started becoming a key person in some projects
of course, one could say that i had an advantage, i started with programming when i was 15, i have participated at some international competitions on high school level and got some medals
but this fact was (maybe) considered only during the first meeting between myself and my first boss
i don't want to say that diploms and certifications are useless, i just think that they won't help you except for getting higher salary at the very beginning (unless you want to work in a public sector of course
company is not paying employees for the certificates they've got, but for their knowledge and ability to use it - and turn it into a profitable product
certificates can make your life easier from the very beginning but after couple of months, it all gets down to what you are really capable of
i am doing quite a lot of work with oracle; several months ago i was considering to get an oracle certificate
after some inquiries what do i need to know to get that, i have realized that i'm never going to make it
not because i'm stupid, but because i don't need to know all the things required -> i have the 'big picture' in my mind, i know how to read documentation, and i know how to use google
again; i don't want to say that the oracle certificate is a bad or useless thing
i have just realized that i don't need to keep all the things in my head, i only need to know where to look for them, and how to use them
it was the same at university; i was supposed to learn things of which i never use everything
if i would be supposed to learn how to use them, and where to find them if they are needed; that's a good thing
but if i should memorize them to satisfy some so-called exams -> what is it all good for ?
Wow... all these posts and nobody mentions the many fine public community colleges!
Quality of courses and instructors varies widely--and with open admissions, I suppose many students may lack aptitude. But you have reasonable tuition rates, stability, and accountability. Not to mention accreditation.
I just started teaching Visual Basic programming (yeah, I know, I know...) at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland. I feel a place like CCC is a pretty good alternative to for-profit private tech schools, although as a liberal-arts snob myself I am glad I attended a very competitive four-year private college.
As with anything else, there are good and bad community colleges. But I'm surprised nobody mentioned them as an option.
As a aside to this; I have been working on computers/electronics/ etc since the mid-80's; when the dot-com bubble was bursting, I was working as a network/security engineer for a medium large bank chain; I went on from that to running a 6000 computer WAN network. In the 6 weeks between those I decided, for the heck of it to get my MCSE.
When I finally managed to extricate myself from the nightmarish (EVIL coworker) government job, I couldn't find ANYTHING outside of a couple weeks here & there. I finally decided to just say screw it and retire from the field when a recruiter told me that they are taking resumes with MCSE cert & no CS degree and shredding them.
I experimentally tried out my pre-MCSE resume on a couple of employers, and got near-immediate hits.
I'm not saying this is the case now, and might not have been anything but a fluke then, but I still think it's weird.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
Are those that cross fields, venturing into new areas. Since you mentioned Linguistics and Comptuers, and those are two of the areas I'm studing I figured I'd chime in:
Right now there is quite a bit of research being done on computers and language. We want to make them speak it, listen to it, but above all, to understand it. This is a difficult problem, more difficult than most people think. I'll ignore the speaking and hearing part and just talk about the understanding:
To understand a language, a computer must not just have a bunch of symbols in memory that make up the words, it needs to be able to perform operations on those such as to derive what it meant. Well that invloved three fields right there, CS, linguistics and philsohpy. The CS of course is the actual implementation of the algorithms. But what algorithms to implement?
Well that's where linguistics come in. You need to analyze natural language and figure out how it actually works. Try and write rules that dictate what is and is not a correct utterence, how different parts of speech are usedm etc. Also you need to produce a database of words, meanings, parts of speech and so on. A lot of this has been done.
So what about the philosophy? Well the thing is, current popular linguistic theory doesn't work right for language as humans use it. It describes literal, direct speech only. Well humans aren't like that, most of our meanings are at least aprtially context dependant and not entirely direct and literal. So language philosophers are working on trying to develop empirically testable theories for how humans actually communicate, and how the process the different kinds of communication with ease. The field is called Pragmatics.
But this adds yet another part to the study. It's all well and good that we come up with a nice theory that everything fits in, but does that have anything to do with reality? Do humans ACTUALLY process language in such a way and does it really adiquately describe communications? So we turn to psychological tests to try and verify or falsify theories of language. Only through emperical testing of actual humans can we figure out how this works.
Those theories then need to be studied in the context of the actual spoken language and have rules developed, and those rules then need to be implemented as algorithms in a computer.
And that's just the beginning.
Thing is, this ISN'T an insignificant field. All the big computer companies like MS and IBM would LOVE to be able to produce a computer that people could speak to naturally and it would do what they wanted. Then there are people like the NSA that are highly interested in have a computer that can analyze the content of intercepted communication and do a real good translation and breakdown of it.
It's a field where there is quite a bit of money to be made, and a whole lot of work that needs to be done. However, what it really needs is people that aren't just one trick dogs, that have studied some in ALL of those fields (and others) to be able to work on designing and coordinating experiements and statical analysis of language to try and actually get a working system off the ground. Not just someone who knows code and nothing but code.
As a side note, I'm not studying this to go in it, just because I think it's a neat interdiciplinary degree to get. I'm a computer support guy by profession.
Most people don't. I happen to love all things technical. I happen to be good at it.
I'll also never have much of a job in IT. I have a rudimentary ATM155 network at home, not to mention all sorts of other L1's. Hell, I'm even building my own internet of sorts. I can do everything from the chip level up to relational databases...
And I'll never be more than a grunt. It's painful being a loser. Some days more than others.
Happened in India after the dotcom bust too. A lot of fly by night "computer education institutes" mushroomed overnight during the boom. Was a time when you could land a decent paying job, armed with a java developer certificate handed out by these institutes. The courses lasted anywhere between 3 weeks to 2 years, and yes they also came with a "job guarantee". No prizes for guessing, over 90% of them disappeared faster than they had sprung up. With the job market witnessing a lot of traction of late, I wouldn't be surprised to see a repeat.
Technologies come and go, and picking up a new one is just a matter of reading the manual. Concepts require hard-core education, and someone trained only in technologies often falls flat as soon as the technology falls out of vogue. Consider: how would you value someone with a resume that said they were familiar with Borland, DBase IV, and HTML?
Caveat: I am not saying that people who don't have degrees don't understand concepts. Rather, that the certificates focus on technology trivia, and thereofre you cannot tell whether the candidate knows the concepts or not.
Crispin
Count me among the MCSE-shredders.
I have observed a strong correlation between trumpeting MCSE and being a totally ignorant useless waste of skin, at least at the keyboard.
I have not observed that same correlation with Mexican last names (e.g., de Icaza).
YMMV. There is no need to remind me that there are exceptions; I believe you. When I have 1000 resumes to sift through, a quick filter like that is helpful. No way all 1000 are going to get a full read.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS