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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.
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?
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,
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?
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
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)
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.
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
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.
In response to your question, which came first, reduced training or job hopping, I'm pretty confident to say that 'firing on the spot', and 'downsizing in response to quarterly results' came first. When your corporate culture is based upon getting rid of parts of your workforce as easily as possible, the same workforce will soon adapt and refuse to be trained in corporate specific technology. They will go for employability, as the corporation has clearly indicated that you're an replaceable resource.
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
The point I was making up above that people are glossing over is that my coding exercises are open help files. I also do have a basic SQL query writing test I give experienced candidates because we are a small shop and like most small shops we have a jack of all trades need for our candidates. Both of these tests have a development IDE and a database IDE on the machine, with help files and internet.
.."for dummies" book should be able to easily pass this test. They are all aware before interviewing that there is a test. That they come unprepared tells me a lot about the candidate and that they can't figure stuff out given real job resources tells me even more.
What that means to me is that even if the candidate lacks specific domain experience, if given a few hours on an exercise with these resources they should be able to use their vaunted theoretical collegiate skills to figure out how to complete the task. Unfortunately the vast majority can not.
So explain to me, if after 4 years of "study", given technical documentation and a beginner level exercise (experienced people can solve my test in under 15 minutes) and you can't figure a solution out in less than 3 hours... why should I spend any time on you? Any candidate without domain experience, reading the job description and spending a weekend reading even a
The colleges are mostly to blame for not requiring real world exercises in school since theory is worthless without application. The students are also to blame because most of them seem to be too dumb to realize that they should spend some personal time actually writing code on their own if they expect someone to hire them to write code.
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!
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.
Heh, I'd never read that. Interesting, since I'd wager 90%+ of all IT work is in no way more academic than mechanical arts or skilled trades.
Hell, most programming isn't a ton different from plumbing. Send water (user input) to one place, fetch other water from hot water heater (database) and send it to the sink (screen). Requires about as much creativity. In both cases talented or experienced workers will produce better results than others, and in both cases a big fuckup can result in a mound of shit where you don't want it, but neither is particularly cerebral.
Very, very few people are engineering new water heaters, designing new types of pipes, etc. Most of us are slapping a gui on a database, shuffling information from one spot or type of presentation to another, or configuring equipment that we didn't and couldn't design. Very few of us are much more than information plumbers--even if we could be more--though I know many in the industry probably wouldn't like to acknowledge that fact.
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
If you have experience in PL/SQL and can't sit in front of a SQL Server management studio session with help files and internet and muddle your way through some SELECT statements, I don't want you. Someone who understands OO programming languages should be able to take the help files and be writing beginner level code within a few hours in a completely new language. That's what separates a knowledge worker from a replaceable cog.
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?
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.
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.