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Most IT Workers Don't Have STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering, Math) Degrees
McGruber writes "The Wall Street Journal's Michael Totty shares some stereotype-shattering statistics about IT workers: Most of them don't have college degrees in computer science, technology, engineering or math. About a third come to IT with degrees in business, social sciences or other nontechnical fields, while more than 40% of computer support specialists and a third of computer systems administrators don't have a college degree at all! The analysis is based upon two job categories as defined by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics: network and computer systems administrator, and computer support specialist."
Because in all those professions you can kill people (directly or indirectly) if you screw up because you don't know jack about your profession.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The truth is, most "computer support specialists" & "network administrators", & "system administrators", and I am one, are technicians, not engineers. Even some of the IT guys with "engineer" in their titles are really technicians.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technician
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer
And that's okay. Well, except for inflating the importance of the the job by adding "engineer" to the technician's title.
Technicians are important. Technicians keep technology running. Being a technician is a noble pursuit.
Engineers take what the researchers have discovered and create the technology, technicians deploy the technology and maintain it.
Seriously? "Its" is a possessive pronoun. "It's" is a contraction of "it is".
In all fairness, paper means one thing in the IT world - mainly getting through HR somewhere where you don't have connections.
I've got a degree. It didn't teach me a damned thing about IT, but I've got the degree. The degree helps get your resume through the HR drones, though, but not much else.
My blog
Our company's HR department posts the jobs, filters out the resumes, and passes only the ones forward that meet the job requirements we list as well as their fairly generic criteria. They also do some kind of pre-screening work, although I don't know what that is. That stops us from wasting our time weeding through a hundred applications from people who apply for any job, people who can't spell our company's name correctly, or those who claim "25 years Java experience." (Unless the resume was from James Gosling himself, that would be a hell of a thing to claim.) It's the managers and senior technical people in the departments who do the final interviews and make hiring recommendations. Over the last few years, I've only gotten a few "duds" from HR through this process - most were great candidates that I recommended we hire. This system works really well.
You might argue that we'll never hire the guy who is really smart but doesn't have a degree. And you'd be right - we won't even see his resume. It turns out that doesn't matter, because we still get a lot of very good people anyway, and I'm happy to work with any of them.
John