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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."
Most IT hiring requires experience! Noobs are OK for some stuff but there's no way for any school to train them for what everyone in the real world is looking for ('cuz we all want something different).
A degree is not a job training course.
End of.
Since when did employers expect college grads to be "ready to go?" The skills they say they want are taught in college, but are pure speculation until applied in a meaningful way. Maybe that is a cry for more/better internship programs.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
I attended a talk by an aerospace engineer and one of the first thing he realized about his first job is he didn't really know anything. His courses were merely a foundation for the rest of his career. It is this way in any technical field.
I suspect bean counting HR types are driving the data. They are seldom technically proficient enough
to have a clue.
Getting IT people with decent job history and programmers with the same is not going to
happen for $20.00 per hour or 40 K per year.
Translation: "Why can't I pay fresh college graduate rates for someone who does the job of an experienced sysadmin?"
Reason: because fresh college graduates are not experienced, since douchebags like you collectively refuse to hire anyone who doesn't have four years experience in everything.
And to be honest, it kind of makes sense from their perspective - they could hire a guy fresh out of college, invest a couple of years in training him, and then watch him fly away to a better position somewhere else. For some reason, people just don't stick around when their skills grow, but their position and compensation doesn't! How weird!
Employee retention? Internal promotions? What's this madness you speak of?
If they would stop requiring CS degrees the problem would get better. They require the degree when it is not really required for the particular job they are hiring for. Of course some folks graduating from privately run IT training programs have relevant education, but the vast majority of CS degrees are fundamental math and theory. They don't train people to be IT workers, they train them to be programmers and theoreticians. Good IT workers have experience. Experience is not something school gives, especially in this field.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
Some of the skills they are asking for are reasonable:
OK, fair enough. A CS program from which you can graduate without knowing programming in some language is pretty useless.
Some are less reasonable:
Sorry guys, while a graduate should have some basics in this area, you really need real world experience to develop these skills to a useful extent. Or possibly an advanced degree in which the student studied real systems.
And some are just too vague to figure out what they want:
Database skills? You want them to know how to design a database using nth normal form? The basics of SQL syntax? How ISAM works? How to use Oracle Forms? It's not enough to say "database skills". The other one is even more vague.
The list of "hard to fill" positions is pretty useless, too. Love the one about the security clearance... of course it's hard to fill, the only people with active clearances are those who are working or very recently were working on a job which required one. You want an employee with a security clearance, stop being cheap bastards and hire someone you can get cleared. New grads are probably easier here; less time for them to accumulate skeletons in their closet.
I remember seeing a job post 10 years ago that required 20 years of Java... do the math.
Once upon a time (1981) my then employer advertised for a programmer with five years of experience in 8088 (not 8086) assembly code. I pointed out that they were effectively screening out honest applicants, but they ran the ad that way anyhow.
Events proved me right.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
The point of a degree isn't to learn language X, then language Y, then language Z so that five years later their training is useless because things have moved on to language A, lanugage B, and langugage C. The point is to learn how a RDMS works, so you can pick up whatever particular flavor a given shop is using quick as well as easily move on to whatever "the next big thing is". The problem here is that you're expecting the university to make up for the fact your company has no training budget even if it causes long term damage to their students careers. You should be asking questions like: "Given a particular problem description, show me how you'd develop a properly normalized set of relations to capture the database". That's where the value is. Figuring out how to translate that table schema into whatever syntax your database tool uses is relatively trivial once that happens.
yet only 8% of hiring managers would rate IT graduates hired as 'well-trained, ready-to-go,'
I would rate only 8% of managers as having the skill to deduce what they are hiring.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
if you need "I need folks who are able to hit the ground running" you don't hire new graduates you hire old hands who have a few years of experience. This is just the old whining of companies not wanting to pay for training.
Unfortunately the market does expect more experience than any college graduate can get in four years. I started programming at fourteen as a freshman in HS and at 45 can honestly say I have thirty years of coding experience. I also jumped in on the beta of the up and coming MS .Net technology circa 2000 so actually have ten years experience with .Net.
I can only speak to programming but we should be exposing kids in middle school to all of the different languages and let them go to town if it is something that they like. Summer interning in High School would probably lead to a direct hire on graduation and they can get their degree on the company's dime. At the very least they will be three or four years ahead of any other graduate when they are out looking for work.
On a final note I can say definitely that no cares about a college degree if you have the required experience.
Readers of Slashdot, you need to ask yourselves what is more important: servitude to corporations who have zero loyalty to anything but their own bottom lines, or being members of an educated civilization which values critical thinking and creativity. If corporations start dictating educational policy and turning universities into glorified vocational training schools, we will have taken a giant step backward toward a feudal society. Repeat this again and again until you understand it: EDUCATION IS NOT JOB TRAINING! CITIZENSHIP IS NOT CORPORATE SLAVERY! Until you really appreciate this fact and act upon it, you will be nothing but a glorified cubicle serf. Without free, critical thinkers there can be no real progress, and we’re all living in a shiny, high tech Dark Age.
You need Cisco, Photoshop, and Flash to do a Joomla installation?
A better analogy than you think. Most mechanics will have no experience with upholstery besides sitting on it. Transmissions are also typically done by people who specialize in them. A mechanic's experience with stereos will likely be limited to removing and reinstalling them to get at something else. And they may not do air conditioning, though that's less common nowadays.
The key factor (imo) is whether are self-motivated enough to learn the college level material on your own.
I'd still recommend a degree. But only because it makes some of the future steps easier. But get the cheapest, fastest degree you can find. Any degree. You can improve it later.
20 years down the road, you have 19 years of experience in "IT" (13 years writing code professionally) and the people who went to college have 16 years experience in "IT" (16 years writing code professionally).
The difference will not be with the groups. It will be with the individuals who push themselves to learn more and to do more.