IT Graduates Not "Well-Trained, Ready-To-Go"

coondoggie writes "There is a disconnect between students getting high-tech degrees and what employers are looking for in those graduates. Employers agree that colleges and universities need to provide their students with the essential skills required to run IT departments, yet only 8% of hiring managers would rate IT graduates hired as 'well-trained, ready-to-go,' according to a survey of 376 organizations that are members of the IBM user group Share and Database Trends and Applications subscribers."

Comments

Education vs. Training

[overshoot]

Many, many years ago the HR manager who hired me for my first job had a sign on his wall:

A four-year degree means a man is trainable.

Universities are not trade schools. Employers who are expecting any new employee to be instantly productive are deluded.

Last week I interviewed a candidate with a Masters degree and 20 years of experience in the industry. We'll probably hire her, but we figure that she could be productive in three months and won't be worried if she takes six [1].

[1] That's net. In other words, she'll be doing useful work fairly soon, but by the time she's 100% up to speed we'll have invested three to six months of her terminal productivity getting her oriented, etc.

Re:It's Called 'Experience'!

[istartedi]

This is just one small example of Greenspan's real mistake. Yes. His real mistake.

He stated that a belief that firms would act rationally was his mistake.

Rational actors are a funamental assumption of economic analysis, and all but the most blindered ivory-tower economists recognize that as a funametal flaw in the discipline. Recently, some experimental economics that pulls in the discipline of psychology has been done, so there's hope despite academia's tendancy to resist interdisciplinary study.

Anyway, I digress. Greenspan's real mistake was to buy into the fiction of corporate personhood.

Corporations don't act. They aren't persons. Employees and managers act, usually in their own self interest. Thus, the managers acting in their own self interest destroyed the firms and profited while doing so. As a collection of people all seeking their own self-interest, the firm serves the individuals that run it; but ultimately the firm itself becomes insolvent!