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<p>Agree. The article says that the new grads lack ‘job skills’. Companies don’t want educable people today - they want pegs that fit exact holes, and when the holes change shape, they won’t rely on a training period for educable skilled workers, they’ll hire more (cheap) new grads.</p>
<p>That is true, unless you enter a management training program the expectation is you can drop into the job and produce and companies have the luxury of being able to wait it out until the right person “drops into” the hopper. Not very easy these days to BS your way into a job by claiming you have experience in something you actually have no experience with.</p>
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<p>IMHO, if someone needs a bachelor’s program to learn basic MSOffice skills*…they have far bigger issues which may preclude them from a BA/BS degree altogether. Especially considering most tech-illiterate teachers/Profs insist on papers/work being submitted in MSOffice formats…even when there are comparable alternatives(i.e. Open Office). </p>
<p>I’d figure this would have been a more serious issue with college kids in my generation(Gen X) who attended college before personal computers/internet or in their very early days of the mid-late '90s. Considering almost every recent college grad/current student has been using various office suites to complete their work since at least middle school…with the exception of poverty-stricken inner-city/rural areas where personal computers access is still an issue…most college students/recent grads would be further ahead in this area than those of my era. </p>
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<li>The most basic skills could be easily learned by borrowing a “Dummies” type book from the local library and performing the exercises and curiously experimenting with various configurations/options.</li>
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<p>I wasn’t talking MS Office simple stuff :-). Purdue’s CIT program and many similar CT/CIT programs follow the usual Microsoft/Oracle/Java type curriculum paths for IT shops. </p>
<p>But, since you mentioned MS Office, take a look at what it takes to, say, integrate MS Office with Sharepoint, and for extra credit, throw in InfoPath, SQL Server and SSRS for reporting. In typical Microsoft fashion, the easy stuff is easy to do, but once you get into the programming part, the stuff is arcane beyond belief. </p>
<p>It’s simple - would you hire a CompSci graduate that is more in tune with requirements analysis, big project designs, coding in languages like Python and the like, etc. or a CompTech graduate that has spent the last 4 years on IT-shop staples like Oracle or .NET or ASP or PHP etc… Depends on your needs, and that’s the beauty of it.</p>
<p>The issue of ‘real skills experience’ is ancient, by the way. In the early-mid 80’s while we were learning all about Berkeley Unix, C, Ingres, and the like, (or busy with PL/1 on Multics) businesses wanted IBM mainframes, MVS, DB2, and the like. So, my college bought us an IBM 3090 monster. Then, Unix super minis became the craze and we bought some of these too (Pyramids, Alliants, yea). Then Sun workstations, blah, blah… It has always been a race between academia and business needs. Then, by the mid 90’s when Win95 came out that was pretty much the time where colleges stuck with their Unix systems while businesses moved more towards N-tier, and the rest is history… You may be able to ‘learn’ the basics from a book, but given how deep interviews go these days…</p>
<p>Now, why can’t I hire a new graduate that knows C++, Linux kernel, LTIB, BSP, etc?</p>
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<p>I think you were missing the satire in the post. Employers are caring less about your education and what you went through to get that education, and instead care more about the skills (tools) that you have experience with. These employers seems to care more if you know some obscure function in Excel, rather than sitting you down and trying to figure out if you have the intellectual capability to learn the job requirements and be a productive worker.</p>
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<p>Based on conversations with friends who hire in both streams for large computer technology firms…they tend to be biased in favor of CS/engineering grads and liberal arts graduates with strong demonstrated programming/IT skills or the potential to develop them. </p>
<p>They tend to shy away from CompTech/MIS grads as they feel their training is too narrow/vocationally focused and negative impressions based on their having been burned by their lower technical/critical thinking aptitudes.</p>
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<p>Oh, I got it alright. </p>
<p>My reply was meant to decry the increasingly common HR driven hiring culture in many corporations and businesses where they feel one must have specific/specialized training…even in areas that could be easily learned within a matter of few months by studying a “Dummies” type book from the library and practicing some exercises/experimenting curiously.</p>
<p>The hiring culture that is solely based on very narrow skills has been around since the mid-late 90’s and curiously coincides with the explosion of H1-B’s and the like. While I will agree that a CompSci graduate will have more broad knowledge and problem solving skills (I are one :-)) that’s not how most employers see it.</p>
<p>Ironically, many of these iconic American companies that used to tell us ‘we hire for potential, not for specific skills’ were the first ones to outsource their IT or software operations wholesale and throw their employees to the wolves.</p>
<p>My wife was once asked a question during an interview with an IT body shop that involved an answer in a **footnote **of the Visual Basic 6.0 reference manual… Not as a joke - I often ask such questions during interviews for fun or just to see the candidates’ reaction - but as a legitimate screening question…</p>
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<p>DS was hired into a job, with some experience (apps and media) this spring. (CMU grad, MS, Microsoft Research experience, working) “You’re just what we want,” they said. Low end of payscale, contractor basis for 3 months. Great we said, "you can continue to look for a better position with no bad feelings from either parties. </p>
<p>A week later they said, they would like to put him on temp status. No problem, either he saves for the payroll taxes or they do it for him, it was all the same. His MacPro computer.(???).</p>
<p>Three months come, his group manager leaves for new job. He prods company and they eventually say in, “two months.” We tell him that he should stepup his job search. t</p>
<p>His Review comes up. His earns full employee status. He is awarded with 30% pay cut. Shocked beyond @#$%@. He gets a work computer. “We told you so. Grinn it up or quit. You have the credentials to find another job, and you have the savings to do so.”</p>
<p>November, just before Turkey Week. Company is sold/bought. Everyone gets a raise. DS gets a **50% raise **, effect Jan 1. Shocked beyond @#$%@, again. He gets a better monitor.</p>
<p>He’s looking in earnest.</p>
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<p>That’s strange. I have seen paid summer interns produce useful good computer software work in three months. Yes, some of the three months is spent learning stuff about how things are done at the company, but one can become productive while learning that stuff.</p>
<p>What the trend to requiring exact prior experience really means is the following:</p>
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<li> Assessing ability to learn is difficult to do in a quick interview, so most interviewers do not try.</li>
<li> Employers have given up using the bachelor’s degree as an indication of the person being able to learn something new with reasonable speed.</li>
<li> In the absence of being able to tell which candidates will learn some new task in a day versus a month, the employer falls back to selecting on the basis of exactly the same past experience as what is currently desired.</li>
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<p>Did he gain benefits and the company paying some payroll taxes on his behalf in return?</p>
<p>A contractor who has to pay the “employer’s share” of payroll taxes and buy his/her own benefits (like medical insurance) would need a higher pay rate to come out equal to a regular employee with benefits.</p>
<p>Benefits: He did gain HealthIns. (very generous), 401k (generous), vacation (4 weeks). However, as a contractor he paid his own HI, IRA. But at engineer/developer’s pay, his lifestyle, savings/investment rate, and his age(26), these costs are relatively minor when compared to pay cut. He was snookered when he was hired on.</p>
<p>LongPrime - Your son’s story seemed to be interesting, but a bit too incoherent and confusing to really follow. At least, I couldn’t follow it. </p>
<p>If he got a 30% pay reduction followed by a 50% raise, and now he has benefits that are worth quite a bit additionally, isn’t he well ahead of where he started in both salary and benefits (and the benefits look quite substantial)?</p>
<p>And what are these random interspersed notes about computer hardware?</p>
<p>^ MrK;
We indoctrinated DS to be self-supporting. Benefits are just benefits to keep you at a job. Jobs can go away and you gotta be prepared to take care of yourself. </p>
<p>Health Ins, dental, vision =$2400/yr. net of taxes.
401k: He can get an annuity, personal retirement/investment acct but without the match. He’s been funding an IRA since he was 19. He has an investment account.
Vacation: When he was on temp status, he just wasn’t paid on the days he took off. </p>
<p>Computer stuff: Even when you are temp, you would expect that the company would provide you with tools for you do your job, especially if the work is proprietary and involves high quality graphics. Computer stuff not even close to 1/10th of his salary. They did provide him with a color printer that he help design parts for, as an intern. The company is however generous with free refreshments and sandwiches. Its a dichotomy.</p>
<p>LongPrime - That doesn’t change the fact that benefits have real monetary value, which must be considered in the compensation equation. The benefits you describe are worth quite a bit, and your son should be able to bank the extra money. Vacation, sick-time pay and 401k alone are huge.</p>
<p>An attitude of self-sufficiency is great, but it’s somewhat irrelevant here. If you need a horse, and your job gives you a horse as part of your compensation, well that’s a horse that you don’t need to buy, no matter how self-sufficient you are.</p>
<p>If they cut your pay so that you couldn’t feed the horse, what use is the horse_?</p>
<p>The pay reduction followed by a raise has the making of a SAT problem. Fwiw, the net is a FIVE percent raise. If the numbers are reported correctly.</p>
<p>In percentages, that is 100 to 70 to 105. ;)</p>
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<p>LongPrime - xiggi is right, it’s a 5% raise in salary (I got the same number). Your son has a raise, plus additional benefits worth quite a bit more. </p>
<p>You’re not making any sense; compared to what your son had initially, they’re giving him more money, an extra horse and a barnyard of additional free animals.</p>
<p>Think it through. Do the math.</p>
<p>You guys are missing the point with LongPrime’s son that he has discovered that the compnay is not to be trusted, and he now has the “work experience” to move on and apparently now gets it and has decided he needs to move on before the company finds another reason to change the rules in the middle of the game. There are companies and then there are companies. And this is one of the stinky ones. To me the fact that they have promised him a 50% raise means less than the fact that they still have him working at 70% for the next 6 weeks. This is a stinky company.</p>
<p>Whenever I read complaints about “these young kids of today,” I’m always skeptical, because as long as I can remember, people made similar complaints. Only the details change. I can remember when it was “college boys” that were the target of this kind of complaint.</p>
<p>Many employers believe colleges aren’t adequately preparing students for jobs.</p>
<p>Yet if you follow the link to that actual data 45% say that they perfer more job training while 55% say they like the board based approach to learning. Many is not most and of course everybody wants everything. Other statistics show that more than half think college are doing a decent job, but the largest proportion think there is room for improvement. Gee, really room for improvement on something involving flawed human beings. And somebody paid Lacy what’s-her-name to write this tripe for what reason?<br>
I could put together the same study to prove that 3.5 year of college students with limited opportunities to either work fast-food and retail or get meaningful co-op jobs has hurt their ablity to jump into the work force with both feet. Kids who have never so much as worked at McDonalds need more time to transition into the work force. There, where is my paycheck. Waste of taxpayer dollars to write this tripe in a down economy!</p>