November 29, 2017 at 9:15 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Certifying Schools
November 29, 2017 at 10:51 pm
Fact. In most of the countries education is seen as profit earning business only. Respective governments should focus more on the syllabus and make sure children are grown with necessary skills as well as with good attitude and should provide opportunities to build their own career goals. For that student-teacher interaction should be more. Teachers should take their feedback and present to higher authorities so that the student's goal is addressed. Companies should identify them and provide opportunities to grow with them mutually.
______________________________________________________________Every Problem has a Solution; Every Solution has a Problem: 🙂
November 30, 2017 at 2:15 am
As an old manager of mine used to say, "do you have 10 years experience, or 1 year experience - 10 times". Do you seek out new adventures and challenges to learn?
November 30, 2017 at 2:33 am
I heard some good career advice which I really think is relevant to everyone
Find something that you love doing - get good at it - and then figure out some way of making money out of it.
Formal education is important but whether it has to be through a college I'm not so sure. Coming out of college with 30k debt is not my idea of a good start in life and I would almost definitely try and skip that route if I was faced with it now.
Online courses are so good now I would be looking for something that gives me a national recognized qualification in a subject that has real intrinsic value then hit it hard and really go for it get some on the job training and try and start up some of my own projects.
Now that every billionaire tech leader is virtually a college drop out it would be interesting to ask them - what was the value to you of the course? Was it the people you met did you just learn everything within a shorter period? Its interesting that a lot are MIT dropouts. Is MIT adding value or just making a selection from people who are already relatively finished and awarding them a badge?
No matter how bright these people are a lot of technical subjects have intrinsic complexity that is vastly quicker to be taught than to re-invent for yourself.
November 30, 2017 at 4:44 am
I'm not convinced a university education is the best way to become a brilliant developer (or DBA). What it can do is give you a good grounding in being able to learn and take on knowledge. It's also a chance to meet diverse people and start to understand the world better. If you think you don't need those two things I think you are somewhat wrong, but I'll accept you don't need to go to college to get them. You can end up a great technologist from any variety of routes.
November 30, 2017 at 5:14 am
University education need not make Developers or DBAs. They need to teach on how to handle life positively in spite of profit or loss. Basically, education centers should educate the students to live their life with satisfaction. I don't think anybody have a curriculum to be content and satisfied. It lies on personal values only.
______________________________________________________________Every Problem has a Solution; Every Solution has a Problem: 🙂
November 30, 2017 at 6:05 am
Formal education is great but buyer beware. Remember ITT Tech https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/07/itt-tech-shuts-down-all-campuses. Many of ITT Tech's students lost thousands of dollars due to the schools false claims about jobs.
I've learned more on my own and from joining tech communities (like this wonderful group) than I did going to school.
November 30, 2017 at 8:01 am
The healthcare, higher education, and banking industries are in bad need of reform. They seem intentionally structured to utilize whatever take home pay an average middle class person has after paying taxes, and honestly I'm not seeing an improvement in quality that justifies the steady increase in cost. Consumers, insurance companies and the government should stop "feeding the beast" which only sustains the current pricing model. What society doesn't need are more over-educated Uber drivers with $100,000 in student loan debt that they'll never pay off or a government program that sends every kid to university at tax payer expense. Instead we need a revolution that involves less expensive options at the provider level. For example, more industry specific trade schools, apprenticeships, and professional journeyman who go to school for a couple of years to get certified and then continuously learn on the job for the remainder of their career.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
November 30, 2017 at 8:21 am
Our education system is becoming a mess.
Even our top schools seem to be getting in the business of grade inflation, handing out high grades for mediocre or poor performance, but the competition is doing the same thing, so I don't see that changing much. A number of schools have been shown to be 'helping' graduation rates by providing a bunch of do nothing courses (including but not limited to sports scholarships). In areas outside the tech fields, courses are being rearranged and watered down to suit political and social agendas more than providing a firm education.
Costs are skyrocketing far faster than inflation (and not surprisingly the growth closely matches the amount of government money available). People can be saddled with enormous debt and useless degrees.
[Part of this can be traced back to a Supreme court case in the '70s, where the court ruled that the practice of giving aptitude tests to employees was somehow discriminatory, so in essence companies 'offloaded' their testing to the colleges. We now have companies requiring a degree for almost every job, including a great deal of jobs that can be done by any bright high school graduate. This has further pushed the poorer folks out of the job market. If they can't afford the money, or the four additional years of no income, they are doomed for life.]
Some have called for a return the the apprentice system. Specific trade schools could fill this requirement, many jobs in IT can be handled with a fairly intense tech training regimen, rather than a full bore college degree. While it will be necessary to set up some level of ranking the tech schools, and for transparency in cost and advertising, there is a real potential for getting people into a productive job market.
[Interestingly I know someone who spent many years as a trucker, but went back to school and gotten certified and employed as an X-ray techician]
...
-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
November 30, 2017 at 8:27 am
My experience is the same that a degree doesn't make you better or worse as as a technology professional. However, without a Bachelor's degree in something you may be passed over for jobs you could excel at but may be perceived as not educated enough.
November 30, 2017 at 8:44 am
Jack 49290 - Thursday, November 30, 2017 2:15 AMAs an old manager of mine used to say, "do you have 10 years experience, or 1 year experience - 10 times". Do you seek out new adventures and challenges to learn?
Sadly, I think these days it's 1 or 2 months of experience often repeated 30, 40, 50 times. One reason I keep pressing people to work and learn more.
November 30, 2017 at 8:54 am
jgavin - Thursday, November 30, 2017 8:27 AMMy experience is the same that a degree doesn't make you better or worse as as a technology professional. However, without a Bachelor's degree in something you may be passed over for jobs you could excel at but may be perceived as not educated enough.
This is slowly changing, as more companies see success from employees that didn't go college and perhaps gained experience, went through the military, etc. Still many of them require degrees beyond basic tech jobs (manager, director, etc). To be fair, the military often wants degrees for higher leadership positions as well.
Unfortunately, too many HR departments have degree as a checkbox.
November 30, 2017 at 9:36 am
My university degree (as far as software development is concerned) was and is of little value. The best thing it did for me in that area was introduce me to development methodologies that I still value 20+ years later. I would like to see one of the tech giants open their own university. Maybe they have? I'm sure they would do a better job and it would probably have a far more relevant curriculum. I think even UPS (the package delivery company in the US) has their own school in Tennessee because apparently our education system can't even train employees fit for their delivery service. Trade schools are much more deserving of our tax payer dollars IMO. Sadly, the popular perception is that these schools or careers are not 'good enough' and I couldn't disagree more; especially when compared from an ROI perspective. I believe the university model is broken, it's just another entrenched interest more interested in marketing it's lies and protecting it's public endowments than delivering a good education to it's students.
November 30, 2017 at 9:52 am
I may have a unique perspective on this topic - I have a BS in Business Management, went back to a tech school to get SQL certifications, and then worked for the school as an Admin for 6 years, until the school eventually failed.
They had something going when they were a school for professionals who had a desire to learn about technology. They had a mentor - technology-based-teaching (videos) hybrid model, and it worked well for me.
But after I was hired, then they decided that they needed to grow, and wanted to get TitleIV money. It required Accreditation, which was a whole good-old-boys-club of old-school bricks and mortar teaching philosophy. Then we started to get Students who were paid by the government to be there, rather than being self-motivated to learn. They needed constant baby-sitting, black out of social internet and streaming music sites, and uncounted kicks in the pants to try to get them to do work. Almost all of them failed. Because they failed, the government overseers required their money back, and the school went out of business.
All of this to say, self-motivation to learn is required for any good techie. You need to be both student and teacher - get an intern and teach them what you know, because even if they have the degree or the cert, they have very little real experience from those school situations. They may know the how, but they rarely know the why.
November 30, 2017 at 9:55 am
I'm not saying that a traditional university degree is not beneficial; it does make one a more rounded person, and I can understand why organizations would be skeptical of someone's qualifications for an executive level position if they didn't have one. For example, you can find books like "Lean C# In 30 Days", but mathematics, even basic applied mathematics, classic logical reasoning, and even business are not something most folks will ever learn on the job.
The thing is, if you can program a computer, then you can land a good paying job, and you're certainly in a better position financially than someone else without a degree or IT skills. However, if ALL you essentially know is how to program a computer, then the reality is that you're just a cog in the corporate machine or a widget that can be plugged into an IT project for $$ / hour until you're no longer needed. It may take you until the age of 30 or 40 to figure that out, but it's the truth.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 22 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply