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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.
It used to be a degree was paper that proved you were trainable. Now it seems the expectation is the paper proves you're trained. Its about as ridiculous to expect higher education to pump out fully trained systems people as it is to expect higher education to pump out fully trained executives. Higher education is to provide a well rounded education, and training to learn how to learn. The other thing I couldn't help but notice is many of the jobs on this list are the very items companies had outsourced to death. Nobody in their right mind would spend time training in these areas knowing their careers would be short lived. I think outsourcing is no longer the cheap form of labor it once was and wouldn't you know it....there is a shortage of skilled people her to fall back on. Is that a failure of education? Or a failure of management? I view it very much as the latter.
No one ever graduated with the wide range of expert-level skills and the absurd amount of experience required. IT employers want candidates to know everything under the sun, and to have known those skills at least since they were created. For example, I remember seeing a job post 10 years ago that required 20 years of Java... do the math.
IT managers need to get real. The chances that they'll actually find a candidate with real expertise in PHP, RoR, Python, MySQL, Oracle, Apache, Cisco, JavaScript, jQuery, UI/UX, Photoshop, and Flash is pretty slim (yes, I saw that just the other day).
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?
I went into the article expecting the usual bone-headed incompetent management drivel, but the last item on the list of jobs that are hard to fill still blew me away:
10. Active Federal Government Security Clearance
Seriously, any hiring manager that thinks it's the universities' responsibility to get security clearances for students as part of a degree, wow, that's a hiring manager that somebody should drag out back and shoot.
... and it's in the heads of the employers. How on earth can anyone train to be 'ready to go' when IT in particular, and engineering in general, is such a vast shifting quicksand. Are universities supposed to re-write their course material every 3 months? Where will they get information about new hardware/software being developed (secretly) now and due to be released before the students graduate? Do students have to decide before they actually start study which specific manufacturer of which specific industry they will be 'ready to go' to?
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.
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.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
IBM expects programmers coming out of college to act like experienced managers? That sounds pretty silly to me. As for having the skills "ready to go", you come out of university with a degree. You still need experience and seasoning. This whole thing is nonsense.
I am a development director for a business. It is astonishing to me how ill prepared new grads are. Most do not know SQL, most have never used a webservice, CSS, or any number if common relevant skills. I give a coding test to candidates. It involves a solution that requires a dictionary class and about 15 lines of code to loop through a flat file. It is open help files. 80% of new grads fail it. It is easier than most classroom assignments I had coming up.
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,
Seriously, IT graduates are not capable? No shit, maybe we should be asking why capitalist don't know shit either?
we need more tech / trade IT schools they can have better IT class work with less of the big university filler.
IT should have apprenticeship like other trades you don't see plumbers needing 4 years just in a class room to get a job.
The old university systems is not a good fit for the IT field.
Reasonably smart kids may aim for a college degree. Smart kids also know that it provides them with the means to quickly learn applications of it in their field of engineering, the same way getting a driver's license means you are ready to get experience with real life driving. Reasonably smart businesses know that too and invest on getting smart kids up to snuff on their internal processes, some of which wouldn't be even available to study out those same businesses (secret production methods still exist).
has college graduation been the equivalent of "training" ? I don't know a single doctor who, even after acquiring their MD would suggest that they are "trained" in a given specialty.
-- http://www.criticalassets.com
Not university graduates.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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
Ugh. I've tried recruiting employees from the local 2 year colleges, but what do they teach? Game programming. What the hell? There's a ton of good jobs for people that can write C# web apps pushing data in and out of a business data base. All it would take is a 2 year program that teaches web development, c#, sql, and business processes. That business process part is really important too. Your program specs are going to look like gibberish to you if you don't have a basic understanding of accounting, purchasing, and billing.
The 4 year programs aren't any better, and often worse. There aren't any in my area that teach on Microsoft. Lots of theory, little practicality. They, at least generally get some training on source control. They don't, however, teach business processes. Absolutely vital. You can't help the user if you don't speak their language.
(ok, rant over)
Owning a company with many IT employees I do see this a lot, people are not prepared for real world situations coming from Universities. BUT the classes in Colleges and Universities aren't there to teach how to deal with specific situations, they're almost always theory and very little hands on.
The requirements that I now employ in my hiring process, after going through a lot of IT grads, is for people to demonstrate their capability to trace problems and be systematic about troubleshooting issues. That's more of a thought process than it is something that can be taught. The employers that believe people are going to have the perfect training just out of school are just ignorant to the diversity of the term IT.
The February 2011 "Communications of the ACM" describes recent research showing that Computing and Computer Science education is not succeeding at teaching the basics. The good news is that the problem is now beginning to get useful attention in the form of actually figuring out how to teach programming (etc). Essentially they are beginning to use the scientific method to determine what works for teaching CS. Instead of guessing.
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.
In my experience, the quickest folks to get "up and running", are those with team experience. One of my profs, Arthur Lo, once said of his course, "Most students say that they get the most out of the lab exercises . . . I think that they get the most out of their lab partner." It sounds trivial, but it is rather insightful . . . the best newbies that I have worked with, had experience in working in teams.
"Hey, let's all of us work on a project together. We'll use a system like CVS so we can all see what's up. If some folks are better at programming, and others better at management stuff, we will divide the responsibilities, accordingly."
The worst case that I had, was a work student intern, who couldn't program himself out of a paper bag. I asked him why he chose to study CS. His answer: "Because I heard that you can earn a lot of money there."
Wrong answer.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I agree to a certain extent. The 'old university' approach isn't necessarily bad, it's just how business has latched onto it and expects the moon. They're still operating in a pre-2000 mentality, to a large degree: "someone with an IT/CS degree must be a computer genius".
Honestly, I'd like to see IT take the following approaches (in abstract):
* A two year degree gets you a technician job
* A four year degree gets you an junior engineer/administrator apprentice
* A two year degree with 2-3 years of experience is akin to a 4-year degree (in terms of experience)
* Six years of experience is akin to a 4-year degree
And so on. The problem arises where companies expect to hire someone with a 4-year degree and 4+ years of experience for trade school graduate rates (eg. 2 years school + 2 years of experience).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
but it sounds like I started off better. You can get experience on campus, that is what I did. Find a student job in IT or another department that runs its IT. But companies still weren't hiring me with my experience. I guess the degree in photography threw them off. I could have developed 1 job into a systems management job and another into a business analyst job after working as a contractor temporarily.
mod up a 2 year tech degree + on the job work is better then a 4 year degree that has a lot of bloat that is not needed to a basic level that is needed on the job. Most of the time you should not even need the 2 year part.
well the college degrees system is a bad fit as well and that is why you see lots of tech schools there degrees have a better fit then the old university systems and lots CS programs are to broad (next to the tech schools that have more a hands on) and have lots of non tech filler.
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.
doctors have residency that is job the training
I think everyone should be required to take a year of shop class in high school and learn to use basic power tools. It really pisses me off when I hire someone and they can't even use a simple tool like a drill. Latest example: we hired a kid who's still in school doing some kind IT background. About a week and half ago I asked him to hang up some coat hooks in the office. It didn't get done, it didn't get done, and then this morning I get an email that says something like, "I tried to do it, but I don't know how and I think you'll be better." Alright kids, putting a drywall anchor in a wall and screwing in a coat hook ain't rocket science.
----- obSig
Good for you to bad most HR wants that degree and then you have lots of people who can do the IT job but can't get it as they don't have that degree.
I not saying that degrees are bad but what you have is tech schools that put degrees that are not the same as other non tech school degrees and they you have people with no degree that can do a IT job.
But sadly what you see the people with tech and no degrees held back while people with degrees get jobs that have little to idea about the real work part of it. (over the no degree or tech degree people)
I completely disagree. In fact, I'm always happy to see programming job applicants with just a math degree who maybe have just started with programming.
People who can do high level math almost always grasp programming quickly and at a high level. I can teach design principles to a smart person who understands programming. Not always the other way.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
A study just found that at least 8% of hiring managers are totally and completely incompetent!
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I have worked with 3 students/grads of 2 local schools and I've never been disappointed. The schools really dig into the core of good programming, but also encourage research and understanding into other fields. One kid (an intern) had never seen or even heard of Python. He was able to pick it up in a mater of hours and write a bang out awesome app in about 6 days. Another one had a great idea and programmed an app that we pitched to the local and state EMAs and they loved it. Both of these could be worth thousands of dollars with some polish. Good programmers and IT start in middle school or sooner learning what they need. College / Tech School is just the polish they need to be ready for the "real" world. The problem is that we expect higher education to turn un-talented people into rock starts, and that higher education buys into it. Raise the bar for entrances and simply don't give out degrees to people who are good at taking tests only. Personally I've failed 2 classes before just because I didn't have a Windows computer, and I was a Linux student at a Tech school. The two classes were SQL and Web programming. I was required to have MS SQL server and Adobe Dreamweaver, nether of which was in the course description. When I found this out (after it was too late to drop the courses ) I complained and the teachers told me "that is what professionals use, so you must learn it". Funny, at this point I had been the webmaster/IT guy for 2 TV stations, 2 software companies, and then had started my own web development firm. Not once had I ever used any of those products nor had I ever paid for software. I just wanted a Cert to put on my resume to show to potential clients. Waste.
Kerry Hatcher | Owner | Hatch Media Productions
When interviewing for positions I don't even give the school a second glance, I could care less. What I look for is thought patterns and behavior that tells me this person is genetically predisposed for this type of work. Colleges work under the assumption that anyone can be trained to do a certain job, that is not however reality.
Got Code?
"Alright kids, putting a drywall anchor in a wall and screwing in a coat hook ain't rocket science."
Other than taking a week to get back to you instead of a day, this 'kid' is actually smart.
I would go for it in my own house, but not in somebody else's office, particularly when (as in 99.9% of the time) the building isn't owned by the manager.
In virtually any corporate environment the downside risk to not doing it right when it isn't your job (even if you think you know how) outweights the inefficiency of letting somebody whose job it is to do this do it (there is usually a facilities person from the company or building management) or letting somebody experienced take the blame for doing something nonstandard.
Your 'kid' has read Dilbert and has visions of HR marching him out sqawking "vandalism of premises".
You can always advertise for jobs such as "require IT skills X,Y and Z, and must have 1 year apprentice carpenter experience". Good luck with that.
If you didn't, it should not "really piss you off" any more than finding that your new hire does not actually know french.
Employers are getting a college trained employee at no up front cost to them. If they want something different, they can pay for it. For example they could write a contract with an entering freshman to pay for four year's college in exchange for four year's of employment at a reduced salary -- like the Navy does.
Funny..when I hire, we look at grades, and then course selection. That's basically used as an indicator of how self motivated a person is.
Not necessarily. The classes could have been easy and uninformative or they could have cheated, etc. I'd test their knowledge before I hired anyone.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
That's because what schools teach isn't what IT employers want. They want experienced people, true; but more than that they want people who are skilled in the tools that the employer uses. Colleges and unis will teach a person the theory and processes behind the tools -- OSI model, networking, packet structure, etc. But it won't teach them how to use the specific network management tools or diagnostics that each employer uses.
Ultimately, employers -- or at least, those IT hiring managers who are distant from the actual workers and clueful IT managers -- want the colleges and unis to teach these tools. They don't want employees with college degrees (and college student loans which will keep them looking for better-paying jobs) whom they have to take the time to teach what tools they use and what the nuances of their network are. They want IT monkeys who somehow instinctively know every facet of their networks and can push the right buttons on whatever tool you put in front of them.
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
I was once hired with the title "Telecommunications Mechanic" and had a decent amount of skill wiring systems up and what not.
It became apparent very quickly this was mostly a blue collared job - mostly involving metal work (which I also had experience with - custom building brackets and installing gear in steel). I came in on day #1 clean-shaven from the interview which makes me look 16. They assumed I had never used so much as a hammer before.
Towards the end I simply cut a straight line into a piece of sheet metal with a jigsaw, I shit you not - I got praised by the boss on the good job.
On the last day I wired up an alarm panel that needed to get done without being told to. "Where'd you learn how to do that? That's amazing." I simply read the schematics.
more internships less class room
why have 2 years class room and then 1-2 years internships maybe with some requiring education on new stuff in the field?
Shit flows downhill and payday's on friday, that never changes. But actually a lot of stuff changes in plumbing, though at a slower rate. You've now got PVC waste lines rather than cast iron, copper, or galvanized, also a new version of cast iron with a different fitting system. You've got cPVC and PEX supply (and polybutylene has been in and out) in addition to copper. Hot water recirculation systems have become more common, tankless water heaters also. All sorts of little changes too, in how the pipes have to be hung (particularly in earthquake-prone areas), expansion tanks, water hammer preventers, sizing, etc.
We just went through a little hiring process looking for a new bench monkey. We had a couple applicants that were about to/had just graduated from a local 2 year IT school, but we also had people who just did IT as a hobby. The applicants that did IT type work as a hobby could answer more of our questions than the IT school grads. To seal the deal, the IT grads were expecting 50k right out of school, but were less apt. I'll take someone with a passion over a person with a sense of entitlement any day.
Same song as always: America's colleges aren't turning out enough skilled people [ willing to work for developing-nation wages ].
Once upon a time the _company_ did the training; they hired someone that they believed had potential, knowing the new hire would --now get this, it's a radical concept-- _grow_ into the position.
To be honest, that was also in an era where there was little job hopping. Where the corporation knew there was a high probability the person would stay with the company for many years. In other words those new skills would benefit the corp doing the training rather than some other corp, possibly a competitor. Everything has a price, including job hopping. Which came first, reduced training or job hopping? I don't know but I expect they evolved together over time and both contributed to a cycle of negative feedback.
Now, the corporation the demands that universities be corporate training mills, rather than an institution of higher learning as universities were intended to be, so that the company doesn't have to spend time and resources on training. The most glaring example of this is the business school: corporations have pushed off their training on b-schools, with students not learning a whole hell of a lot in terms of critical thinking skills. Now they want the same b-school type of training to occur in other disciplines/majors.
Really, have you been to business school recently? I had the typical arrogant engineer's attitude towards business school that you seem to display. I thoroughly enjoyed business school in part because I was so wrong and my former ignorance made me laugh. For example a marketing class was not about using psychology to trick people. It was about using sound statistical theory to design a survey to rank needs/wants and to build a mathematical model to describe product market share. As a model it of course has its limitations but the approach in general was equivalent to what I saw i various science and engineering classes of the past. Not what I expected at all. In an economics class the externalization of costs was discussed and their impact on society and the ethics of doing so was discussed. Not what I had expected. In a strategy class sustainable resources was discussed. Not what I had expected ...
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.
Back when I was really a kid (7th and 8th grade, in the 70's), we had shop for the guys, and home economics for the chicks. Then the winds of change swept in and all pupils had to take both classes. In home economics, the teacher tried to put a mix of boys and girls at the kitchen. My group had four boys. What we cooked, you couldn't feed to starving buzzards. After one of the sessions, we had a school assembly. The guy sitting next to me, who was in my group, kept burping and saying, "It's coming up!" The gag was, that the home economics class never taught me how to sew a button on a shirt.
In shop, we had an old Italian guy. He loved his job, and when you came into his shop . . . he made it clear that it was his shop. When showing us how to use power drills, one of the chicks squealed, "I never want to use a power tool ever again! That's why I'm getting married for!"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I don't know about you guys, but my experience has been (working in IT in various industries for almost 15 years) that not only is much of what's already in these comments true (about the sheer ridiculousness of many of the requirements, the desire for colleges to be trade schools, etc.) is that if you want to honestly survive these days in IT without running your company or the benefits of nepotism/cronyism, that you have to be a lifelong learner and serious self-starter, even with mounds of experience. The IT person (doesn't matter if they're an infrastructure architect (hope you're reading High Scalability), database admin (not a noSQL/hybrid noSQL/SQL expert yet?) or front end developer (you should be a web dev blog addict)) who is not learning new technologies every year is in a boat nearly as bad as the fresh grad with no experience at all.
I don't personally have a problem with it since I love this stuff, but I've seen many people burn out over this (not just the long hours, insane demands, or managerial stupidity.) You can argue that "smart companies don't do this! They never change technologies every two years!" but stupid companies provide jobs, and that's what people need. There aren't any good solutions to this, since companies will do what they'll do, but it helps to be aware of it nonetheless.
What are 'high tech degrees'? I mean, I'm a computer science major - I would call that a high tech degree. But no, we are not being taught much about management - we have room that we can if we so choose, but I don't think too many do. Why? Because that's what the IST (Information Sciences and Technology) major is for. That's what they tell incoming freshmen - IST is management, Computer Science is actually creating things.
Now, I can't say if the IST people are good at management or not - but I would hope so, since that's pretty much what their degree is all about. I would say the issue is more corporations (and some universities - my own included in some ways) not understanding that 'Computer Science' is not a catch-all term for all IT-related needs. I can't tell you how many recruiters I've seen looking for computer science majors when that is probably not the degree they actually want for the kinds of work they're doing.
8% is pretty decent, considering most people working in the industry wouldn't even qualify as 'well-trained, ready-to-go'. At least with graduates, there's still the possibility of them getting there, as opposed to all the grossly incompetent veterans with too much ego to ever learn anything new.
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It's just as well though. If they managed to filter out all the half-man half-cabbage hybrids, 90% of IT people would be adding to our nations' homeless rolls instead of working, and the salary for IT type work would be several times higher than it is right now due to the principles of supply and demand. Most of those half-man half-cabbage hybrids do an "OK" job and are content to just chill out on the weekend with a cool Coors 64 ouncer and a week's worth of Jersey Shore backed up on the ol' Tivo.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The article is not all that clear on the hiring of college graduates versus the hiring of experienced professionals. This is evident from the author not being consistent with regards to specifying details. The gap between the college graduate and others is experience. If I were hiring someone, I would want someone with a PhD from MIT, a MBA from Harvard, a top secret clearance, CCIE, RHCE, CEH, ITIL, and a bunch of other acronyms and only pay them $40k. There not only is a disconnect between the college graduate and the experienced professional, there is a gap between the expectations of the hiring managers and what is reality.
Schools have 120-128 credits to which they can train students. Once you subtract the core requirements, you don't have much time with which to work on "customizing" a program to make students "adequate" for the job market. Is it possible that schools are as out of touch with industry needs as industries are with the expectations of college graduates?
Maybe programs need to be tailored more towards industry needs. For instance, you want a new college graduate to be your next DBA? Have the schools issue BSDBA... or BSISS or whatever. I think that most hiring managers are going to want a lot of the basics - 2 programming languages (1 scripting and 1 OOO), UML, SQL, project management background, technical writing, networking fundamentals, programming fundamentals, etc. Personally, I think that the industry is going to move towards wanting to hire graduates with BS in IT/IS and a masters in a specific area, say information security.
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." General James Mattis
It's terrible for your business reputation to be known to be good with tools. The kid was right from a career standpoint.
Also, drilling a deep hole in an office wall is non-trivial. Even assuming that the building owner allows it (which, in commercial leases, they usually do) you don't know what's behind the wall without checking. There are probably cables, pipes, and ducts in there. Did you use an energized wire detector? A stud finder? Check the building blueprints? It's probably not drywall over wooden 2x4s, either. Commercial construction is different, because the fireproofing requirements are higher. It could be a metal wall, drywall over concrete, drywall on metal studs, plaster over lath, plaster over brick, or other less-common options, including asbestos insulation. For most of those, a drywall anchor is the wrong fastener.
For something like a coat hook, adhesive hooks are more appropriate. 3M has some good ones.
If you want your employees to have shop class, buy them a TechShop membership.
Knowing how to speak French is something extraordinary in a large nation like the US where everyone on the continent speaks English except for Mexico and Quebec.
Basic carpentry and tool use are skills that everybody should know without having to be taught formally. I'd say he has every right to be upset that an employee lacks an important and fundamental life skill. It'd be like getting married and finding out that your wife doesn't know how to cook or clean or do laundry.
Ugh. I've tried recruiting employees from the local 2 year colleges, but what do they teach? Game programming. What the hell?
That must mean game programming has now crashed. After the "multimedia cdrom" crash in the 90s, they set up a program for that. Then after the dot com crash they set up the "web designer" program. I suspect in a couple years we'll be seeing a "myspace social media technician" program.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Well, maybe that's because everybody is studying computer science while employers are looking for software engineers, not scientists.
0x or or snor perron?!
Except for the nebulous "programming" just about everything mentioned in TFA is a trade, as opposed to something that a CS degree prepares you for (OT - just what DOES a BS CS degree prepare you for - more school?). I agree with an earlier poster that this is most likely a disengenuous complaint by upper management types who want universities to be glorified trade schools to provide them with low-cost fodder on someone else's nickel (OK, bags of nickels). Anyone who is not asleep these days knows that the Big Boys don't like universities, state universities anyway unless they are cranking out cheap labor.
And just what is meant by "programming" in this particular context? I suspect that the great majority of these positions are not what most of us would consider programming, but is more likely web design or SQL query design. Most IT shops don't use programmers, software shops do, but an IT shop is a bunch of mechanics (not meaning to be derrogetory here - have you seen the pay scale for a good mechanic these days/) and not a bunch of coders. It's a different kind of job.
How many computer science graduates are "well-trained, ready to go" to be software developers? How many future lawyers show up at their first clerkship "well-trained, ready to go"? Architects? Engineers? I'm not sure "IT" is unique in this regard.
Ahh the old your're in IT and since we hired you to maintain the network you should be doing manual labor jobs like move furniture and fix the coffee pot and drill holes in walls to hang white baords.
yeah I love that assumption on employers part.
Can we trade you your better private music laws for our better hiring of self taught IT workers?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I'll second the Accounting line position buttressed by tech route.
Accounting often has some of the trickiest software in an otherwise low-tech business, so you see a lot of these hybrid 80-20 positions. We have a back end IT guy, and I do level 1 helpdesk in between my "line" duties.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Thats just a technical skills list. No big deal? How about non-technical issues:
1) The environmental laws relating to septic tanks change occasionally and are different for every municipality you work in.
2) The plumbing code rules / laws change constantly for each municipality for appliances. So... your dishwasher now needs a vacuum breaker on the waste side. No, it needs a new, different type of vacuum breaker. Now you must hardwire the AC. No, it must connect to a GFCI plug fed by a lightswitch under the sink within 3 feet of the outlet. And now it needs to be fed off a dedicated 15 amp circuit from the electrical panel. And its all different at the city down the road. Ditto the icemaker in the fridge, which must, or must not, or can possibly have a needle shutoff valve or a ball valve or it depends. You need a building permit to add an outdoor faucet fixture, err wait thats just in the city to the east, here you need dedicated copper bond grounding conductors to hook up a hot tub, but not a pool, unless its grandfathered in.
Tradesmen actually make pretty good lawyers in their specific area of expertise.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Sounds like they need to do what UOP does with their civil engineering program: 2.5 years of study, then you get apprenticed out for .5 year, then 1 year of study, then .5 year of apprentice, then .5 year of study and graduation. I may have the math just a bit off as to when the 6 months of apprenticing are, but that's the basics of it, you end up with two 6 month breaks where you are working and gaining real-world experience for real civil engineering firms.
The downside is that it takes 5 years instead of 4, the upside is that you have 1 year of experience in addition to the BS degree and at least one and possibly two contact/references (if they don't just hire you for their own firm).
So– Managers of businesses are complaining that these college graduates aren't well prepared for the workplace, yet why do they seem to hold onto the notion that any high school kid can do the work they are asking of these professionals? Or at least, they seem to insist on paying their professional IT staff like they were only high school graduates.
I did some work with one company where the CEO brought in his fourteen-year-old son to build the company's web site. Later, he dragged in the IT staff on the carpet and gave them a forty-minute long tongue lashing because the web site wasn't working. There was no javascript menus, the purchasing system was non-existent. He complained that it looked amateurish! They all walked out on him after his tirade was complete. I guess it is needless to say that the company no longer exists.
Whew! This water sure is cold!
I cannot fully agree cuz I'm about to graduate but if there's one thing I'm sure about, it's that I haven't learned as near as much as I expected to learn @ uni. We tried to go to much into the breadth than depth, which in my opinion was the biggest mistake.
What degree does produce a graduate that is "Ready to go"?
University is not about job training. If employers are honestly expecting a recent graduate to be able to step in and run a department they are delusional.
If you look at recent job postings, you'll discover that the problem is because companies are looking for so-called "Drupalist" or "Wordpress/Joomla Engineer". If schools would include this in the curriculum, then the IT industry would be in a big trouble. Teaching specific languages to prepare students for the industry is bad enough. Schools should not teach CMS to Computer Science students. Time is better spent teaching the fundamentals of programming and architecture design.
Some way to teach experienced IT workers the difference between what they know and what the school teaches regular undergrads, resulting in the same degree, would be awesome.
2 year degree, work a bit, one to two semesters picking up the difference, and you've got a "four year degree". That'd be awesome. Certainly would have saved me a hell of a lot of time in my second shot at higher education (but replace "2 year degree" with "4/5 of a non-IT degree, abandoned when it became clear it would be worthless and I had a good job offer")
Probably not feasible, I guess, but man would that be great. It'd help with the debt problem, too, since people wouldn't need two years worth of classes (and debt) for maybe a semester's worth of actual learning.
The biggest thing I didn't get in college was how to plan a project and ask for what I need to make it happen. In high school and college, your time is pretty worthless to the school you're atttending, and they don't care much about new ideas or process improvements you might think of. When you get a job making 10s of 1000s of dollars, you're time is pretty valuable I didn't realize it in that way. My disk drive was slow? Who was I too ask for a faster one? Disk drives are expensive, right? Not when you're company is paying you to sit around waiting for the drive to act.
The switch from a mode of thinking you're on your own making the best of extremely limited resources to a mode of thinking about how to allocate large amounts of money is huge.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Have you ever helped rack servers? Guess what, there's a lot of trash that needs to be taken out.
Unless you're in a huge company where everything you do is so routine, and happens with such a high volume that there are "server room trash removal" specialists, the job falls to whoever is nearby.
Some companies make every job extremely specialized. Others make them very generalized. One thing remains true with either... You are there to do whatever they need you to do. Sure, anything major should have been in the job description, but if your inability or unwillingness to do all the minor stuff is impacting your performance, or others, they SHOULD replace you with someone who better suits the job duties.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I for one am sick of industry claiming reality and claiming the academic world is out of touch! Different perspectives of the same elephant but they think they can see the whole beast.... managers often seem to have this misconception on a wide range of ... actually I'd say this false reasoning and possible arrogance is a defining characteristic for management (I've yet to meet somebody who proves otherwise; other people seem to repeat similar complaints...)
There is so much specialization which changes FASTER than most every other field - it probably is the fastest moving industry. Picky details are all over the place as well as inconsistencies as new areas are made up by whomever defines the stuff through 1st to big market share - it can involve a new language, new techniques, new software, and its own terminology. If you WASTED the last few years of your 4 year college degree learning specifics for the current market some of that information will be of use for some students but depending on the jobs found you may find that gaining experience with .NET does you ZERO good when you go work on standards based web apps running on linux servers.
I think part of this bitching is their lack of understanding of just what the employer needs to be doing; they externalize everything so much its like they don't have an idea of what business is supposed to do and how the guys at the top are supposed to EARN those higher incomes. We are moving towards the extremes and more people are waking up to the trend as it gets closer to their self-absorbed lives.
Colleges are NOT business they don't produce "products" and this form of thinking is harming college and secondary level education long term. They are expecting colleges to compete for their specific needs like they are buying from a Chinese supplier -- they bitch because there are accreditation standards. I'm also sure too many of them DO NOT VALUE a "liberal" degree program and want to remove the approx 2 years of general college from the 4 degree and replace it with their specific demands-- because they have no interest in better well rounded citizens they want a PART, a COG, a specific brand of human resource to plug into their corporate machine. I've seen and read about how high school students have lower critical thinking skills entering college than in the past (10+% worse) and I think it reflects this school = business mentality altering the process. (standardized testing is like MSCE certifications - it means little in the "real world" and doesn't reflect actual understanding or skill.)
I've probably lost half of you so I'll stop; someday you'll get it I hope; or you'll be happy as a serf.
I can go on about how computer people are engineers and we should reclaim computer engineering from those electronics people and make that the college IT degree. Or how an apprenticeship program is best suited for most computer jobs and how it needs unionization like plumbers and carpenters (who use that to help maintain the well suited and traditional learning style; its not perfect but what is... its better than a 4yr college degree plumber.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Hi, Mr. Dinosaur!
The Mesozoic Era just called, and they want their technology back.
As long as you are not too busy, tell COBOL the Palaeozoic Era is still waiting at the restaurant, and is pretty drunk on wine from being stood up for their date, and needs someone to come help her into a cab.
--
This so sounds like a bunch of companies complaining that they can't get people to maintain old code...
-- Terry
You seem to asume I'm a socialist, very intelligent, whats that saying now, assumption is the mother of all...? I take it your american so you have no idea what socialism is anyway (whats that central bank for, why wont my government tell me? haha)? I on the other hand live in Europe, you know, the place where all these 'ideologies' stem from! Your assumptions about ideologies would seem rather adept if where not the fact that your probably unable to understand that all knowledge stems from indoctrination, what is your indoctrination exactly? Kill sand nigers is it? For oil now? 1948 and some kind ethic what now?
I can think of very few degrees that allow you to be effective from day one.
Teaching degrees come the closest I know of, but even there most first year teachers tell of the horrors of unpreparedness they endure.
Degrees are mostly supposed to give you the tools and framework. The specifics of a job give you the experience needed to be good at some subsection of what your got in school.
typo: 1948 and some kind of ethnic what now? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing search Israel!
Half the problem is that the 'higher education' 4-year-degree has two years of uselessness at the front-end: generals, followed by entry-level IT/CS courses that anyone getting into the field should probably at least have a basic grasp on, already.
The best way, IMO, to get 'schooled' in IT would probably be a year and off, alternating, for 5 years. You decide to do IT, so you go to a year of intensive generals - tutalage on the OSI model, 1-2 different kinds of programming languages (eg. C/C++ for the 'fundamentals' with a higher-level, "we like to use objects" language), and the hardware basics that everyone can use (hex/binary, how machines interpret code, different hw subsystems, and so on). Hopefully you pick up some of the basics of things like OS design and the like, as well (shouldn't be too hard, if you've got the proclivity). (Then again, maybe I'm just biased due to it being somewhat 'natural' and being quite entrenched).
Year 2: Good: now you've got your teeth wet, and have a pretty good idea how damn hard your life will be in IT. Hopefully, it was intensive enough to make about half the students drop out. Time to try to apply it. You work a year doing basic lowly "technician" duty. Hardware/software breakfix shit: you make a little money, but are overseen by an instructor who critiques your work, makes recommendations, and so on.
Year 3: Back to the grind. Now you get to learn some fun things, like systems design, resource contention, network/systems administration, proper documentation, project management, change control, and all the best practices that make IT work difficult and misunderstood. (I'm approaching this from a sysadmin perspective, because that's what I know; I'm sure there'd be another side for programmers.) CPU design, storage architectures, and so on would all get covered, obviously.
Year 4: more of the same, but half way through, (after a lengthy and exceptional 1-month break) you've got to actually apply the disciplines from year 3. Your schedule gets drawn out, and you're doing 'more of the same' while having to implement and maintain systems. (VT makes this awesomely simple and inexpensive, whereas in previous years it'd have been obscenely pricey.)
Year 5: time to apply it, all together now. You're supervising/managing projects staffed by year-2s under the overwatch of your 'professors'.
Everything changes so damn quickly in IT, a year is about as much time as you can pragmatically do anything in the field without growing 'soft'.
In my mind's eye, a 'year two' graduate would be the rough equivalent of current "2 year IT degree" type things. i'd much rather hire one such student than th crop of "this is how we administer windows; click.../write a vb.net app" schooling.
Such a regimen would at least increase the likelihood that the graduates would be competent and skillful. Having gone to a high school that was obscenely aggressive in its academia, I think this approach can turn a mediocre person into an overly competent one.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
A university is supposed to provide an education - which last a lifetime, not job training –which only lasts until The Next Big Thing comes along. People and employers looking for the later rather than the former should consider places like ITT, Devry, Charter, etc.
I suggest replacing IT with Construction and replace 'hang some coat hooks' with 'replace a hard drive' ?
Will the result be any better?
If you're hiring programmers you need to provide a good Development Abstraction Layer. I certainly would not want to be pulled off my desk to help with any handyman projects you have around the office.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
The 4 year programs aren't any better, and often worse. There aren't any in my area that teach on Microsoft. Lots of theory, little practicality. They, at least generally get some training on source control. They don't, however, teach business processes. Absolutely vital. You can't help the user if you don't speak their language.
You think a typical 4-year CS program is too theoretical? What exactly do you consider to be theoretical CS? My experience, both as a CS undergrad and as a CS grad teaching undergrads (at a different institution) is that most CS majors get one and a half semesters of theory: one course about Turing machines (which covers the absolute basics) and one course about algorithms (which barely touches on the theoretical foundations). Occasionally, a CS major will wind up taking a course on programming languages, which will expose them (in a minimal sort of way) to other theoretical topics (lambda calculus).
People with bachelor's degrees in CS may not receive much training in how to use specific applications that are common in the business world, but that does not mean that they are receiving too much "theory."
Palm trees and 8
A word to students and hiring managers: colleges are among the best places to learn a lot of skills that people need in the workplace, but the vocational training they are designed for is the academic world.
I worked one place where the main thing to know about plenums is that if you did something which required knowledge of them, the union guys would break your kneecaps -- or worse, file some sort of labor complaint. (and it cost hundreds of dollars to get a single cable run put in, as a result). That's valuable knowledge you won't get in most universities.
What most people fail to realize is that this is where professional schools come in.
When academics stop and the real job market begins.
In most other jobs of comparable skill, you have some kind of professional 'residency' period. Lawyers have articling. Nurses have their own programs... Chartered accounts and other have their own programs. Doctors have residency. Trades people have journeyman programs. And no, I'm not talking about coop placements... although that does help. The real difference is that real professional programs take training the next generation as part of the profession.
IT people will never be trained and ready-to-go as employers don't want to pay for the appropriate training and mentorship to go along with it.
So they take ill-prepared people and shove them into operations and things kinda work.
Let's not even get into outsourcing...
In just the technical realm, a lot of what we learn is theoretical, but there is not a lot in the way of practically applying it. For example, I've learned a lot of Java, and have had to use it for various classes, but not once has a professor told us what "ant" is or how to use it. A lot of these kids are just doing a javac and running the program, or using Eclipse. So people who can write a proof for the Halting Problem would not know how to compile a java package. I don't think it's bad to know how to write a proof for the Halting Problem, but some basic practical stuff has not been taught to us. We haven't learned anything about revision control. Maybe you should be able to get a CS degree without knowing anything about revision control, but the assertion that such a person is not "ready to go" would be correct.
On the other side, there are practical things one learns with experience. Most of it is common sense, but experience drums the lessons into your head if you forget. Such as - if you notice there is a major problem, after checking for a few seconds if its real or not, instead of spending a few minutes trying to remedy it, you should alert your boss - "There may be some kind of big problem, I'm looking into it". That way your boss can call his boss and relay the message "There may be a problem, so-and-so is looking into it". What you don't want is for things to go down, you spend twenty minutes trying to bring it up in isolation, then your boss calls you and tells you his boss called him and asked why everything was down and he told him he didn't know. There are lots of little things that are common sense, but get drilled into your head by experience and I guess it's difficult to teach that in school.
It's like saying most young criminals play video games.
Doesn't mean video games have any connection to crime, because the fact is most young people--criminals and not--play video games.
So most recent graduates are not well-trained and ready to go. Most people are not well-trained and ready to go.
I'm not the head of HR for a large multinational company, but I have been through the hiring cycle a few times. My experience has been the only significance of the length of a person's resume and the title of a position is to the salary that person will accept.
From college interns to senior personnel with decades of experiences, folks with a decent head on their shoulders will figure out what they don't know and the clueless fark-ups remain clueless fark ups.
In a world where companies seem to want short term solutions - training is important. They will throw you away when your training no longer matches their perceived needs."Our client is having issues - they need to expand to 1000 plus machine server farm and the latency in our product is killing them" "Sorry, that is not covered in my training"
TODO: create/find/steal funny sig.
No one will read this because is on the ass end of this conversation, but I just have to say this...
'well-trained, ready-to-go,' is a fucking welder, not a developer.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
He has every right to be upset that the kid didn't know how to do something that wasn't part of what he was hired to do? Do you expect your plumber to rotate your tires?
That's a big fat social science fail for the IT "journalists."
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
Could you link to some of that "experimental economics that pulls in the discipline of psychology?" I'd like to read up on exactly how/why corporate collectives are not rational actors.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
This article should be read with some caution: SAP, Oracle and SharePoint all require vocational training as these are vendor products! To be a "Database Administrator" also is requires vendor specific product training. An Oracle DBA does not automatically become a DBA for all other database servers. At least 4 of the to 10 positions require vocational training which Universities/Colleges cannot be expected to provide training for : they don't provide flavour of the month product training. This article simply points out that companies are too stingy to pay for their employees to get training! Someone else must do it for them.
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."
Computers were pretty much the domain of scientists and mathematicians until about the 1980s. Seems like BS graduates (business school, not bachelor of science) just expect "computer guys" to work magic because the hiring managers and others from the accountancy/finance/hr side of the companies, which is probably who was surveyed in these studies, just have no idea how a computer works and what is really required to make it work.
To look at it more neutrally, without my biases for math & physical science, and against business school, when expectations are that consistently not met, that's a clear signal that the expectations themselves are out of order. Even a business school graduate should be able to see that in those numbers.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
So they wanted surgeons so instead they hired a nurse? Anyone can pass the A+ exam, get CISCO certified, and 20 other certificates, it's not too difficult. But taking what you learn from that and putting into practice is an entirely different story. Even then, someone fresh out of college won't know very much about how the business world really works unless they've been actively part of it for quite some time. They also may not know the tricks of the trade or even have much exposure to real life scenarios. This is true for any major, which is why they get hired for less than those who have experience. However, there is a catch to hiring old farts... They tend to stick with traditional methods or know older things, but not necessarily what's new. True, they should be re-certified, or trained with the new stuff but sometimes the younger generation has a better understanding of it. There really isn't a perfect employee and it would seem that the one who knows everything is the biggest arrogant douchebag of the bunch. So you can't fire him because he does his job so darn well, but at the same time he's bringing down morale at the office (Grandma's Boy anyone?). Ah well, ces't la vie.
I can do that!
No, seriously, I can. That's the majority of what my (useless) college degree taught me, and then when I got out everyone wanted web programmers and I was SOL so I got into IT... which has done just about as well. Maybe you just had bad luck with your particular colleges?
So maybe I'm a bit late to the party, but most people don't seem to want to pay for a decent wage for graduates or experienced people.
I don't know how many people post ads for junior IT people with AS/400 experience when the last of those systems was produced ten years ago; or that they want junior people with reams of specialized technical certifications costing thousands of dollars -as well as- a diploma from a college or university and then only pay what a phone monkey makes.
IT departments have been cheapened and hollowed out and as someone who's actively looking for another position I can tell you that the people replacing those that have left need constant hand-holding. Our place alone hired an indian kid who couldn't follow a dialogue to update Flash to display a website and a former university lecturer from the carribean that didn't know how to reset a tripped circuit breaker.
But what do you expect when you pay peanuts and only offer part-time work, eh?
No, but I expect my plumber to be able to change a tire.
Also, drilling a deep hole in an office wall is non-trivial. Even assuming that the building owner allows it (which, in commercial leases, they usually do) you don't know what's behind the wall without checking.
We may hope the kid learned an important lesson about the working world: bosses will ask you to perform tasks for which you do not have training, for which you do not have the proper equipment, which may be dangerous, which are not part of your job description, which your contract prohibits you from performing, or which are otherwise unethical or illegal. You should refuse to perform such tasks; there are worse fates than unemployment.
Wow, just wow. Imagine if your coat hook hanging fool had managed to clip an electrical line while drilling those holes. You think it's bad now wait until OSHA runs a train through your office looking for violations.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
As I like to say:
Human Resources: "We took the 'Personal' out of 'Personnel'."
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Uh... have you been watching the news lately? Nowadays, being in a union and working for the government means you have a big, fat target on your back.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Woosh.
Rethinking email
When I was a supervisor for a team of software testers, I would often hire new college grads. However, I preferred those who majored in a science other than computer science. I wanted someone who looked at computers as tools, not someone who looked at computers as the primary object of interest.
The single largest skill that many IT students are lacking is communication. Of course the important skills include programming and database work, but sending students out into business not knowing how to compose a letter or give a presentation to even a small group of people is terrible. At the very least having the communication skills will make it easier for a IT person in almost all aspects of their job and for moving into management, where communication skills are arguably more important.
When I graduated high school, I attended a private, liberal arts college with the hopes of graduating with a degree in MIS (Management of Information Systems). I had obtained an IT job when I was 14, so I had a bit of experience in the IT Service Industry and knew what the real world expected of IT Tech's and IT Departments. By my Sophomore year, the only IT classes that my major required were how to use Microsoft Office. I was quite upset so I spoke with the Prof about studying GNU/Linux, Windows Servers, help desk skills, customer support, Mac OS X, e-mail, DNS, Internet, routers, and so forth (that list was kinda long, I know) ... as we had YET to touch on ANYTHING related to TCP/IP Networking or any of the items I listed. He refused stating that the approve course work would take us through VB.NET programming, Java programming and business management. I tried to debate the fact that we hadn't learned anything about what the real world expected of IT Tech's and the IT Department, but he shot me down. I gave one last ill-fated attempt at debating him and tried to bring to the table that before even becoming an IT Manager, you had to know what was expected of the department and the skills of a technician. He asked me to leave his office because I knew nothing. Wrong. By that point I had worked in IT for six years. By the middle of my Junior year I decided to leave because I wasn't learning anything that applied to IT. I have worked my way up here at the business I currently work for and just obtained a job at an ISP as a Linux Server Administrator. They were mostly impressed that I had 11 years of IT experience rather than having had a college degree. I recently exchanged e-mail's with a friend that returned to our college (who was in the MIS program with me) and he hasn't found a decent job yet. The MIS program hasn't changed.
My advice is that if you are going to go to college for IT, take a deep look into the program before choosing that school. While in school, get an internship because that's the only way you will have experience under your belt before entering the real world. I've been rather lucky, so take my experience and please learn from it.
Cheers.
The villains are the "think tank" that's asking the questions with a view to getting the desired answers to "prove" an extreme position. Those of you who studied classics under the Jesuits will recognize the survey's setup:
1 - Do you think college does a good job of preparing students for a sustainable CAREER in IT? (Let's say 75% Yes)
2 - Does college train graduates for the nitty-gritty specific requirements of your company? (8% Yes)
3 - Referring to question 2: fantasies aside, should college train graduates for those specific requrements (10% Yes)
#1 is the "honest" question, designed to make sure people answer #2 in contrast to it. #2 is the answer the questioner desires to "prove" and publish. #3 is used to target think tank fund-raising to the 10% who think college should be a trade school.
Honestly, folks, 8% is the tipoff. There are some clueless managers out there, but not 92% of them! Those folks were just answering the questions exactly as posed.
RECOGNIZE & RESIST these tactics. When you see non-peer reviewed (or anonymous) "research," THINK BEFORE YOU EMOTE and remember that most of the outfits who ask these questions have an agenda. When you are asked to answer loaded surveys like this, don't just toss them. See them for what they are and advisedly answer them incorrectly.
Sure, I don't disagree. Problem solving skills really are something a job candidate needs. But how do you, as the interviewer, know whether he/she has them? There's no university coursework in "problem solving". No one thinks they're bad at problem solving, so they won't own up to it in an interview. There's no "problem-solving meter" you can hook up to the candidate to measure his/her ability. Maybe "vague" isn't the right word to use, but problem-solving ability is at least very difficult to measure/quantify.
Unions were the 'things' that worked to give 'human beings' more bargaining power than an 'cog' or 'electronic chip'. They were one of the forces that raised raised wage-slave factory workers above the the levels
of the machines they worked along side.
Now we see the Corporate Right pushing against unions as being
'anti-competitive' on the world market. That's because they keep working conditions and wages of US employee's above that of a 'machine' -- with US workers being 'valued' more than overseas workers in terms of protections and wages. When it comes to pure dollars figures, unions are bad for competition, BUT do we want to reduce the US standard of safety and standard of living to that of the third worlds we are supposed to be competing against?
The problem is we (the US) doesn't require makers of our goods to give the same standards of safety and equivalent standards living in their countries as we require here -- so there is no way our worker can be competitive as the barriers between international markets continue to drop.
US workers ARE NOT that much brighter or better educated than their counterparts overseas. In some areas, yes, in some areas no. Increasingly, as US education standards and enrichment programs drop, it's moving to more areas where we are not competitive.
Yet the Wealthy Right (closely aligned w/corporate right), also believe education is a right reserved for the wealthy. This spells disaster for the US society of the mid-late 1900's of prosperity, and puts the society of robber-barons and land-mogels of the late 1800's and first few decades of the 1900's back on the map for being the future of the US. The middle class recedes back into the working class, and further separates from the leisure class and government becomes more and more the government of the 'haves', supporting them in keeping and maintaining what they have over the 'have-nots'...
It's a move toward lower financial equality in the US -- which is BAD and is the result of adulation of capitalism being allowed to run amok (starting from the Ronnie-Reagan-Greed is Go[o]d') generation. It won't be until greed is seen as bad, again, and the equality is seen as a virtue over greed, that this country will have a chance of returning to greatness.
As it stands now, we are on the road to being another third-world mean-nothing country in the world, except that we have very, dangerous politicians with an unstable (flip-flop) political system that seems to be engendering more violence-causing fundamentalist crazies reacting to anything that doesn't go their way.
At the top of all this is an increasingly corrupt government where top government officials (elected and appointed) use offices in the government as stepping boards to 'reward positions' in the private sector for favors done while in office.
This was mitigated, before, by long term government employees -- something that has it's own problems, but not as severe as the current ones. Regardless, one solution that needs to be considered is the prohibition of employment in any private sector job, **at first**, in any sector related to any government position you held. And if that is abused, then any private sector position at all.
Government service needs to stop being an easily abused stepping stone / revolving door to lucrative private sector jobs designed as rewards -- and the door into government from private sector needs to be examined more closely for areas of potential conflict.
Unfortunately, in the highest court of the land we have Supreme Court Justices making rulings on corporations and cases that they have a personal interest in -- where they refuse to recuse themselves. So the first step may be impeaching those transgressors to get in judges who have enough common sense to recuse themselves under such circumstances and to get those supremes, who it is now obviously, that they liked under oath to get into their office -- OUT of office (Thomas).
Having corruption in the highest court of the land is the worst place if we want to have justice in the land.
The whole deck is being loaded against the American people.