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In UK, Computer Science Graduates the Least Employable
Rogerborg writes "The BBC reports that in the UK, computer science graduates are now the least employable of students leaving with a degree, 17% of them being unable to find a job within six months of graduation. Unsurprisingly, medics, educators and lawyers do better, but even much mocked communications and creative arts graduates are finding work more easily."
I'm in the UK, have a computer science degree (two, actually), and have never really looked for a job. I've had two books published (with a third coming out soon), and have no shortage of consulting work. It's the summer (the first one we've had in three years) and so I spend a lot of time sitting outside relaxing. Not sure why I'd want a job - I'd earn less, have to sit in an office, and have someone else telling me when I had to do work (instead of when I had to have done work by).
That said, I wouldn't employ half of the people on my undergraduate degree course to change a lightbulb, unless someone else was supervising them.
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It's a bit weird, as overhere I received news IT is picking up and infrastructure and maintenance jobs are still required; companies rely on their IT infrastructure and automation tasks.
I was talking about this with a friend and wondered how the industry would evolve, and wondering why and how many people would still pick up on information tech, as we used to have popculture around IT sparking and keeping our interest (hackers, matrix, the net, ...) while we had this "new thing to play with", visibly evolving tech, games we could improve yourselves and what have you.
These days, it doesn't seem "new" and I only encounter few students who are enthousiastic as "we used to be", and the online experience is a bit compressed to a few major sites (compared to the animated-gif glory of the turn of the millenium, where everyone had their personal webpage and everybody tried to create something).
Considering there's been a major risk in commencing IT studies (in the crisis, alot of graduates have been doing dishes instead of working, having their skills "outdated" and being replaced by the next batch of graduates the year after fe.) I got the impression it's an industry drying up and will be high in demand in a few years.
I'm really curious for other people's perspectives though..
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
When I left 8 years ago, most of the best grads were in sponsorship schemes with the likes of Nortel and Marconi - and as it turned out they all left with no job to go to.
Given the number of people who came out of these courses, and given the number of brilliant grads in my dept who had no job for months at that time, what hope have the 60% who scraped by?
Mutliply that by the huge rise in these courses available from UK unis and ex-polys today and it isnt a surprise that McDonald's has a continuous employment pool.
And the ridiculous thing is that I have been involved in trying to fill a backlog in recruitment for about a year and there are no candidates with decent experience in the market (it would seem). So its all about that first job still.
As a UK lecturer on a CS course I can confirm that this is part of the problem. The prevalanence of computers means that all Universities have expanded their computing facilities and continue to do so. This means they can offer more computing places, which means more and more people who don't really know anything about computers can enroll on a CS course. Lots of students stare blankly at you when you talk about directories as a tree structure, or tell them they'll be using a command line interface. They think that checking their e-mails, browsing YouTube and managing to cheat in their college computing coursework means that a CS degree will be easy. Gone are the days when a computing degree would be full of nerds and geeks. Now it's full of people that really should be out there getting a job instead of wasting time and resources in Universities that are financially stretched as it is.
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As the article submitter, I'm like to note that timothy actually corrected a factual inaccuracy in my original submission. In other words, he read the linked article and... well, there's no other word for it... he edited the submission.
I know, I know: I wouldn't have believed it unless I'd seen it myself.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
In CompSci in particular, a lot of people come in with no understanding of what the subject is really about. These people would be much better off switching to something else or going straight into industry, but the system is set up in such a way as to encourage departments to retain them and give them a poor quality degree.
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