
An IT graduate now requires a breadth of skills - madmotive
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fbf20f4a-4c87-11dd-96bb-000077b07658.html
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gaius
IT graduates _always_ required a breadth of skills.

The mystery is why they now need to be told this, rather than showing up with
them already.

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biohacker42
Because there are very few software engineering degree programs. And between
the computer science degrees and visual basic factories there's a wide gulf of
nothingness where people who want to be good software engineers should be
getting their training.

In other words, I'm very happy with my CS degree, but I learned almost all of
my software engineering skills outside of the classroom.

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edw519
_I learned almost all of my software engineering skills outside of the
classroom_

Me too.

I _have_ to believe that this is the norm, not the exception. No matter how
much you learn in school, you're never completely ready. You'll probably pick
up much, if not most, of what you really need to know on the job.

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martythemaniak
Now asks yourselves this - how many of the skills you picked up during your
work experience could have been as effectively learned in a classroom setting?

I worked for 16 months in between 3rd and 4th years where part of my job was
doing requirements gathering. When I went back to school I had a course that
included a section on requirements gathering and I know for a fact it would
have made very little sense had I not done it for real beforehand.

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babul
Things usually make more sense when you implement your learning. Abstract
knowledge is often easily forgotten or poorly grasped, learnt knowledge less
so.

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martythemaniak
When I started school, they told us that 4 years of busting your ass in
engineering will do nothing but prepare you to start learning when you get a
job. Back in 1st year, I thought they were just trying to scare us noobs, but
only after a few years did I realize how right they were. There is such a
dizzlingly wide array of things to learn, you can't do much except learn the
basics.

As if learning the basics of your field isn't time consuming enough, companies
now want universities to do their job on top of this as well. Sorry, but
that's a bit like demanding that someone teach wisdom - it just ain't gonna
happen.

This is just companies whining and looking for ways to offload costs. The
missing skills they're complaining about can be developed very quickly (6
months to a year) by any competent grad that's put in a challenging-enough
position. The problem is, such positions are a bit hard to find - when the
days of paternalistic companies went away, so did the idea of hiring, training
and investing in new grads, and too many of the internships and coops that are
out there now are just cheap crap work.

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DanielBMarkham
Let's add: interviewing, negotiation, business cognition, written and oral
communication, facilitation, creative reasoning, etc.

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paulleviss
I agree with you. Its nice article.

