IT Graduates Not "Well-Trained, Ready-To-Go" 609
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."
Education vs. Training (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:It's Called 'Experience'! (Score:4, Informative)
In other words, you are incompetent bottom-level manager with ridiculously inflated ego.
Why that may well be the case with the above poster, I'm still going to have to agree with the "you're doing it wrong" part.
The OP said they have "years of experience" yet can't find a job and when they do have a job, they can't get promoted. If that is indeed the case I don't know that a college degree would help. There are literally a ton of jobs out there right now for people who can actually write code, and except for perhaps the gov't and maybe a few giant corporations, a degree isn't a firm requirement.
Re:It's a good disconnect (Score:4, Informative)
Several countries are starting to see that, and investing heavily on it (Brazil, Germany etc).
Your way to put it looks to me as if you don't really know how it works, at least in Germany. Because "starting to see it" points to a 1000 year old tradition. If Egypt or China call that "starting to see it", maybe one could agree, because they have a long enough tradition themselves. The main difference to the U.S. to me seems to be that the companies in Germany are responsible to train their futural workforce.
Germany has something that is called duales Bildungssystem (dual education system), where companies educate their futural employees in cooperation with the Berufsschulen (trade schools). For two to three years, depending on the profession, the pupils are working parttime at the company and are being educated in the school. After that the companies offer some of them working contracts, others are looking somewhere else for a job. Companies that are not training their own workforce will save money in the short run, but to them only the leftovers of the workforce are available. Thus about 50-60% of the workforce are trained.
Then there are the Universities of Applied Science (formerly known as Fachhochschulen), which are directed towards higher education, but are still strongly connected to the futural employers. They offer a very market oriented curriculum, train on and for industry standard products. A student at a University of Applied Science will work on his final thesis while being on a project at a company. So for at least half a year he is already part of the workforce before graduating. Also in this case the education is at least partly done within the industry (and paid for directly by the industry).
The school-only education you find only in the lowest 10% education level -- pupils who left school without finding someone willing to take them for the two or three year training, but have still to fulfill their legally required 10 to 12 years (depending on the state) school education and are thus going to a professional college -- and in the highest 20% of the education level, which are the ivory tower university courses.
So differently than in the U.S., the german companies are expected to train their futural employees. The U.S. companies are looking to me like lazy cats, unwilling to invest in people and complaining that the workforce supermarket doesn't offer the exact skillset they are looking for.
Re:It's Called 'Experience'! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It's Called 'Experience'! (Score:5, Informative)
This is just one small example of Greenspan's real mistake. Yes. His real mistake.
He stated that a belief that firms would act rationally was his mistake.
Rational actors are a funamental assumption of economic analysis, and all but the most blindered ivory-tower economists recognize that as a funametal flaw in the discipline. Recently, some experimental economics that pulls in the discipline of psychology has been done, so there's hope despite academia's tendancy to resist interdisciplinary study.
Anyway, I digress. Greenspan's real mistake was to buy into the fiction of corporate personhood.
Corporations don't act. They aren't persons. Employees and managers act, usually in their own self interest. Thus, the managers acting in their own self interest destroyed the firms and profited while doing so. As a collection of people all seeking their own self-interest, the firm serves the individuals that run it; but ultimately the firm itself becomes insolvent!