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Not Your Daddy's IT Force Anymore
Quill345 writes "The days of high-paying technology-based jobs right out of highschool are over. As writers for ACM report, the skill-sets required for jobs have grown over time. Academia has responded to the evolution with novel programs recruiting women and integrating IT into MBA programs. And as technology finds its way into every aspect of business life, the NSF is creating a grant program to fund service science, a blend of IT into other industries. Researchers at City University of NY are working on an NSF-funded project to infuse technology into Liberal Arts courses taken by students who are in primary tech-producer or tech-consumer majors. What are these crucial modern skills? Knowledge of laws like the DMCA? Interpersonal and group work skills? Experience with different technology platforms? The ability to discriminate between useful and useless information sources?"
That would be a great course to offer "potental" managers.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
While technical skills are important, the ability to work in groups, follow orders, and eventually lead groups are what will advance a career. Communications skills are a key component as well. Unless you want to stay a programmer / admin forever, and always be at risk for being replaced by a newer / cheaper model as your skills decay (or are perceived to no longer be up with the latest or simply too expensive); people skills are what will advance your career.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
The days of any hack with computer skills are welcomed to Fortune 500 is long gone, or at best is going away quite quickly.
Companies don't want people who can get the work done, they want people who can get the work done professionally. Well Documented designed to work with their buisness needs, not change their buisness requirements to fit the computer. There are a lot of Highly skilled and well trained college educated Technical Professionals out there. There is little reason to really hire an out of Highschool Techy guy just because he know how to program the buzz words.
A college degree at the very least shows a minum level of self control and professionalism. At least the person got up most every day to go to class and pass the exams. Vs. Out of High School who just went to school because they were required by law to go. Or a College drop out who just couldn't fit into an environment. Getting a Degree shows the company you are more then just what you want to do.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Uhhm, aptitude tests in the first place? You want someone with 20 hours a week experience for three or four years while in high school.
What you don't want is someone who reads a 1" column in Money Magazine of the top growth fields by 2011 and just throws a dart.
I've seen where nearly 40% of the incompetent tech staff that I worked around in 2001 jumped right into the field of health sciences.
They shouldn't have been in IT, and the nursing profession (and patients) deserves better -- these folks never "heard their calling."
I'm glad that women aren't denied jobs because of their gender, but I don't see why people are trying to force women into IT roles -- women can do what they want and it seems to be there's general disinterest on there part. If people want to change that, the best place isn't here in the work world, it's during the whole experience known as life -- especially childhood. Want women to be more IT savvy??? How about some more non-gendered video games (what girl wants to play "I'm a big strong man with a gun, oh look at me I saved the world"). Let's give Barbie a BlackBerry and a desktop running Linux? If you want to get people to be interested in something, hook 'em while they're young! I wish there were more girls interested in IT -- I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to cuddle after a nice LAN (especially if I've been pwn3d). I believe there are less than 10 female OMIS (operations management and information systems) majors in my class. Lame!
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
As writers for ACM report, the skill-sets required for jobs have grown over time. Academia has responded to the evolution with novel programs recruiting women and integrating IT into MBA programs.
Is it just me, or is this quite the nonsequitur? I can see integrating IT into MBA programs as a potential solution, but how does recruiting women into IT adress the problem? Clicking on the "recruiting women" link leads to an article titled "CMU uses game maker's characters to interest girls in computer programming" which is one of the most condescending ideas I have ever come across.
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
10+ years experience trumps every degree and cert that I have seen, unless the company has some made up rule about degrees and salary. There are just so many things that you can't learn in college and with a cert.
I've always heard that 80% of why you have and keep your job is people skills. I think that number is close to being true.
Also, somebody mentioned the people going into nursing and the medical field because US News and World Reports put it as a lucrative field. I think you need to have a passion for that field to really want to help others. I can't imagine a good healthcare provider who's in it just for the money.
"But isn't changing a program to make it 'prettier' and (supposedly) more attractive to girls just giving them the 'dumbed down' version of things?"
Is this the result of ages of sexist thinking when it comes to technology, or just a lack of understanding economics?
If you want more people to buy your cars, you make sure they're interested in buying them. You want more people to come to your class, you make it more interesting for them. You want to rope more students into paying $25,000 or more per year at your university, you have to find a way to lure them in. Who do you target? The largest group of people that you can "easily" modify your product for. In this case, hands down, it's women. Face it guys: they make up nearly half the population, and if they're not interested in IT and other computer related technology that's our loss.
You don't have to "dumb down" a class to make it more appealing to others. You just have to think about how you present the concepts, work, and training. Why assume that teaching IT has to be "boring?"
----- Connection reset by beer
If "Interpersonal and group work skills" are so important, why aren't they taught? They are not really taught at school - the sports field is not the office environment (sports metaphors not withstanding) and where the environment is closest to the office (ie, classwork) working together can bring allegations of plagarism and cheating. They're not a part of any university classes I've seen either.
I think IT workers get unfairly lumped as people with "poor interpersonal and group work skills", simply because people with a more introverted dispostion are attracted to it than to other professions. A lot people assume that just because you're quiet, you lack interpersonal skills, completely ignoreing the fact that a lot of extroverts aren't actually that good when it comes to interpersonal skills - all that talking is assumed to be an example of "good interpersonal skills" when it's actually a lot of BS and politics (with a good amount of backstabbing). Most introverts where I know work really well with other people, while a lot of I know extroverts (and especially the ones I know at work) are great at blowing hot air but don't work at all well with other people.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
"Graduate high school, get a couple certs "
That's pretty lousy advice. Considering you're basing this on your gf's story, maybe the lesson is don't specialize in something you think you don't want to do. Quitting your career because of uninsured people is a silly reason to piss away your experience and education. Who's going to hire someone who willy-nilly has random ethical problems? She comes off like someone who refuses to be part of the environment she chose to work in. What employer wants a flakey person like that? Here's some real advice:
1. Finish school.
2. Don't be a martyr.
3. Become flexible to adapt to different environments.
4. Have fun and make connections.
5. Remember a job is a means to an end not an end in itself.
Also, I disagree that the market is flooded with useless degrees and certifications. Its flooded with people competing with her for that payroll job. The person with payroll experience will win. This is nothing new. Whether or not they have degrees or certs is merely incidental. The entitlement attitude you and your gf have because you just have some degree isn't going to fly. Advising people to stop going to college because of your bad attitude is pretty ignorant and petty.
Maybe I'm not a representative sample of your general chick. But growing up (ie, from the age of 7 onwards) I thought programming was the coolest shit ever. I was that kid who would write never-ending batch files and add them into the autoexec.bat file of the class computer; who would unpassword protect program groups in win3.1. I went to computer camp.
What was the difference? I guess maybe that I was in a class filled with devious "gifted" kids. We were a sneaky, spiteful lot. Anything that we could "cleverly" ruin, we'd get kudos for from peers. We'd get in trouble, of course -- but it was social capital to have the reputation for being able to do things.
I think that a lot of the problem is not that computer programming isn't pretty. It's that it's stigmatized as nerdy; and girls internalize that they don't want to be nerdy. They need the opportunity to see what kind of stuff you can do with computers (ie, almost anything you want). They need to realize that it's a viable way to express yourself, and that it is a supremely useful tool.
Even if they don't go into computing, generalized programming skills are incredibly useful. I myself didn't (I had the choice between electrical engineering and linguistics; I chose the latter) but knowing how to design simple algorithms has helped me automate stupid repetitive tasks that my roommate does by hand. Having a basic understanding of java, perl, lisp etc. so far hasn't gotten me any jobs, but I'm happy to have it. Girls don't generally get interested in computers because there's nothing they get out of it socially (even guys, to a point, have some sort of machismo hacker culture to rely on, which I guess I tapped into at the age of 11.) Figure out how to develop that, and you'll see rates of female enrollment skyrocket.
Things will only get worse for compaines untill they realize that they can't get something for nothing.
I have been out of work for 6 months, this is an example "Help Wanted" that I recently read:
Minimum MUST HAVE requirements:
5 Years Oracle
5+ Years Windows System Admin
5 years Help Desk
5 years Citrix
7 Years C++, VB, (and a few others)
Salary Range: $20,000 - $25,000/year (Canadian)
They are trying to fill 4 jobs with 1 person who would work for $10/hour!
Computers are my passion, but with many places pulling shit like this I think I'll keep it as my hobby and go look for another career.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
The whole wave of off-shoring shows the first phase of this maturation process. If you can spec it you can out source it. If you can our source it then someone can generalize it. Once it is generalized then IT as an internal service goes away. In the not so distant future, IT functions will be turned over to the facilities department and the maintenance folks - same as heat, water, electricity, phones, etc.