Slashdot Mirror
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."
Remember:
1) you get a BA/BS and you think you know something
2) you get a MS/MA and realize you know nothing
3) you get a PhD and realize that nobody else knows anything either -- and it's all ok; we shall muddle on together.
I fail to see why business should expect new graduates to be ready to work; at best when I review resumes I'm looking for someone who's ready to learn with solid abilities to analyze problems. A spark of creativity is a bonus too.
I'm a senior developer at one of the world's biggest software companies. The only reason I didn't move to management is because I want to continue writing code. I dropped out of college in the middle of my second year.
A degree certainly helps you get a job, and skips you past a few of the bottom rungs, but after a certain point talent and experience are all that matters. Its true that without a degree I had to work my way from tech support -> sysadmin -> software qa -> software development, and my friends who stuck with schol went straight to software development. However when I finally got to write code for a living I was already considered mid-level, and they were junior devs, and now ten years into the field we're all about at the same place.
Maybe my path wouldn't work for most people, but "you will die penniless and alone if you don't go to college" scare tactics just annoy me.
Noooo...I'd say what is happening is he is being trapped by the current HR BS where they just put all applications into a computers and playing buzzword bingo with them and he ain't hitting the correct buzzwords.
Sadly between that and the "hire NOT to hire an American" bullshit while there are plenty of jobs listed actually getting a decent one is increasingly hard, which is why I decided to take the plunge and open my own little shop. I'll never get rich but I make a decent living and don't have to deal with the BS.
Just look at the things some of these jobs are asking for and you'll quickly be able to spot the "How NOT to hire an American" bullshit at work. We are talking jobs asking for 10 years of Java, 7 of .NET, years of IT management experience and for a starting pay of $24k. Sadly just check your local help wanted to see how badly this "How NOT to hire an American" BS has spread, depending on the area you are looking at as high as 60% of the job listings being bullshit.
So the guy is probably just running into the same BS many of my friends with years of experience ran into, on the one hand you have HR looking for buzzword bingo, on the other how not to hire an American with bullshit postings designed to get them an H1-B wage slave. Either way you look at it it isn't pretty and these corps have no one but themselves to blame by gutting the market with all the offshoring and H1-Bs. You'd have to be nuts to be just starting out and pick IT over medical or legal right now!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Wholeheartedly agree.. Not long ago, I had to call the HR department out in a serious fashion. I was recruiting for a couple of Developers.. HR field the CVs, and pass them on. I ended up with a pile, and in that pile were just a couple that looked vaguely interesting, but on interview turned out not to have the goods. Shortly afterwards, I got a few calls from candidates who were asking if their applications had been received (which to me, they hadn't, and over the phone, they seemed pretty good fits).. I went and asked HR where these applications were, and was told that they'd been 'Pre-Filtered' through HR's own internal process for applicability for the role. After yanking out the ones they'd 'filtered out', I discovered several that were pretty much an exact fit. HR just didn't know the words that actually said what the experience was, so discounted them entirely, rather than leave the judgement call to someone who knew what was going on.
Needless to say, I hit the roof with them for wasting my time. I went on to hire a couple of those that HR had rejected.