October 30, 2023 at 12:00 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Degree Apprenticeships
October 30, 2023 at 6:49 am
Isn't the insistence on degrees merely a proxy for keeping people not like us away?
October 30, 2023 at 9:37 am
Isn't the insistence on degrees merely a proxy for keeping people not like us away?
I feel it is a lazy filter for "are they capable of studying unsupervised".
I've heard from several sources that the pain in navigating HR processes to promote someone is so great that it is easier to recruit a senior engineer than it is to promote a junior engineer. This makes for inflated salaries and a disincentive for recruiting at a junior level even if they are graduates. It seems every company wants someone with 10 years experience, regardless of whether the tech has been around that long.
Some years ago I was involved with the 1st tranche of graduate recruitment that the company I worked for had ever done. Normally we would recruit experienced engineers. Those graduates were some of the most motivated, talented people we had ever recruited. Some stayed with the company a long time and they all went on to bigger and better things.
One of the challenges with recruiting graduates and earlier is that you have to invest the time in their education within your organisation. You recruit because your existing staff are stretched thin and you need more staff to help shoulder the workload. A new graduate (or earlier) will take more of your time initially, but speculate to accumulate!
I heard from a CTO that there was no particular advantage to taking a Computer Science degree over any other degree. They felt that anything learned during a CS degree during year one was obsolete by the time they hit the job market. I'm not sure I agree with that but it could indicate that degrees as a golden ticket may be over selling it a bit.
October 30, 2023 at 3:25 pm
Sean,
I believe you are correct, that the insistence of a degree is, for some companies/organizations, "...for keeping people not like us away".
David,
I love what you said here. In particular, "It seems every company wants someone with 10 years' experience, regardless of whether the tech has been around that long." I have SEEN that! I remember a company advertising for a new software engineer with 10 in a technology that had only been introduced 3 years prior. I'd love to meet that time traveling dude.
And I've worked with a lot of people who don't have a Computer Science degree. Heck, I don't have a CS degree. My degree is in Mathematics. One of the best supervisors, and developers, I ever worked for had a History degree. Furthermore, I worked with a gal who was working on her Master's degree in CS, who couldn't develop software even if her life depended upon it. And yet, she got a software development job at Sandia National Labs!
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
October 30, 2023 at 3:34 pm
Isn't the insistence on degrees merely a proxy for keeping people not like us away?
I think someone thought this was a good idea and lots of people adopted it, thinking that college was actually teaching someone practical skills, or enough learning skills that the grads would adapt to us.
I'm not sure it's been proven at scale that college degree people are any better than anyone else over time. They might know how to work independently a bit better at first, but I think if we trained better, we'd see good results from anyone.
October 30, 2023 at 5:01 pm
I think I was probably unusual in that while I held a AB degree plus, the degree was entirely unrelated to IT or even business. I expect possibly the main value of the degree was the indication that I had the motivation to accomplish it. I did have real-life business experience in retail, bookkeeping, and credit management accumulated while working on the degree.
My take on the higher education these days is to make use of community colleges and technical schools which can be utilized to continue learning and training. Over my 42 years in IT, I continually took evening classes at two community colleges to help keep current and develop new skills that could be useful in the event of job changing.
I suspect now that I would give preference to a person contuing to persue learning while working over a degree holder with no practical experience.
Rick
Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) )
October 30, 2023 at 9:50 pm
I hate the college system in the US. Most people are going to college so they can get a good job. Most jobs require a set of skills or aptitudes that can be learned at a tech or trade school. For most jobs, a well rounded background is not needed. An IT professional does not need to know about Freudian Psychology. An historian does not need to know how to calculate a differential equation. The needed skills can be developed much more cheaply in a focused tech/trade school.
That said, I think a liberal arts education, built on early studies in rhetoric, logic, and dialects is a really great thing. We need to teach people how to think. But way too many of our current universities are not capable of doing that. 95% of the professors are simply pushing an agenda. They're not exposing students to differing viewpoints, they're just pushing a narrative.
Businesses requiring a college degree for most jobs is stupid. With advances in technology, there is no reason not to create much more effective screening mechanisms. We need to stop making universities an industry. They should be centers of learning and discovery that that are only indirectly related to business training.
Be still, and know that I am God - Psalm 46:10
October 31, 2023 at 7:07 am
I am now in my early fifties and I see the failures of taking university courses when one has no practical experience and the importance of practical experience. Not just for me but in others too.
In Switzerland, children are pushed into apprenticeships (or the university track) at 15-16 and this is also wrong. It is too early an age for many children. Wait until 18 or so they have matured more. All my 13-year-old wants to do is watch Mr. Beast videos on YouTube and he couldn't be arsed at the moment about Newton's laws of motion, the passé composé or geometry.
I was educated in Ireland and the education system there is very academic-heavy. It is great if you like learning, have a supportive environment and want to go study. It's not so great if you want to hone your woodworking or metalworking skills.
I would like to see secondary education being devoted to necessary life skills: sport, nutrition and why & how it determines much of your health, accountancy and being able to survive numerically as an adult, probability and being able to wisely interpret statistics, being able to think logically, an understanding of laws, law-making and government, one foreign language, history, geography as well as literature: poetry, drama & novels. I still remember the books & plays I did in school: Wuthering Heights, poems by WB Yeats & Emily Dickenson and King Lear. Learning how to write, how one writes concisely or clearly or floridly and how one puts an essay together and so on. I like trigonometry but it has not been any use to me. A knowledge of nutrition, on the other hand, has.
At this point the working world awaits most people. Now is the time to learn real-world skills. I would like to see the academic world integrated with the working world, so that one decides what one really would like to study comes from an appreciation of the working world.
I studied pharmacology because I had wanted to be a doctor in secondary school. In retrospect, I should have studied computer science or statistics, but I couldn't really have known that in 1989. Pharmacology was useful in that I learnt scientific rigour and all about 5-HT. But pharmacology was 40 hours a week (20h in the lab and 20h seminars) before hitting the library to go over what I learnt and read scientific journals.
The 4 year degrees that universities & technical colleges offer while people work would have to become an 6-8 years for a degree and one would have to work a 20 hour week. Added to this that many people are also starting families, taking out mortgages and the demands of both will be incompatible for many.
The potential improvement, though, is great: it would be superb if an apprentice carpenter could also get a degree in materials engineering over an 8-year period. Producing people with the advanced theoretical knowledge of a uni graduate with the practical experience of a journeyman is an almost perfect combination.
I would love to be able to reduce my working hours, take a computer science degree or a statistics but university courses aren't built that way nor are my mortgage re-payments. That being said, it could be a great offer to companies if they offered student-friendly jobs: say, 2-3 days at the office, 2-3 days at college for 6-8 years so that the paradigm of working, studying & apprenticing would be combined into one and it would allow banks to re-calculate risk.
November 2, 2023 at 3:25 am
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November 2, 2023 at 7:23 am
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