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Silicon Valley is starting to realize that the huge talent pool of nontraditional candidates may be the answer to its pipeline problem.
The technology industry is now trying to figure out a way to attack its cultural and demographic homogeneity issues. One simple initiative is to begin to recruit talent from people outside of its preferred networks. One way is to extend their recruiting efforts to people who don't have four-year degrees.
IBM's head of talent organization, Sam Ladah, calls this sort of initiative a focus on "new-collar jobs." The idea, he says, is to look toward different applicant pools to find new talent. "We consider them based on their skills," he says, and don't take into account their educational background. This includes applicants who didn't get a four-year degree but have proven their technical knowledge in other ways. Some have technical certifications, and others have enrolled in other skills programs. "We've been very successful in hiring from [coding] bootcamps," says Ladah.
For IT roles, educational pedigree often doesn't make a huge difference. For instance, many gaming aficionados have built their own systems. With this technical grounding, they would likely have the aptitude to be a server technician or a network technician. These roles require specific technical knowledge, not necessarily an academic curriculum vitae. "We're looking for people who have a real passion for technology," says Ladah. He goes on to say that currently about 10% to 15% of IBM's new hires don't have traditional four-year degrees.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3069259/why-more-tech-companies-are-hiring-people-without-degrees
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2017, @04:29PM (19 children)
This is the beginning of a renaissance in the apprenticeship model: The path into a particular productive role in society must be well defined from beginning to end.
It's not just knowledge that matters; every successful career involves a great deal of social structure, a facet which the university model just doesn't provide very directly. It's being discovered that it just doesn't make sense to separate education from work.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2017, @04:46PM (10 children)
There is actually a very important reason to separate education from work, but there are many reasons to integrate them as well. What you're looking for are vocational programs more tightly integrated with actual work environments.
Vocational programs are great, but a broader education is important and makes people better prepared to handle the crazy diversity of modern reality. Too much of our existence is based around work as if that is the only thing in life which is important. For the good of society we still need to have a broad education, and I think K-12 does a modest job of this. I would love if it was easier for people to enter into jobs and on-site training / education was more highly valued. Perhaps it would bring back the idea of loyalty in the work place, people taking pride in their jobs instead of it being a soul sucking enterprise to make the investors more money.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2017, @04:58PM (7 children)
Come on, man. What a ridiculous reply.
Nobody is arguing against people being exposed to a broad education; this isn't a binary choice; it's not a zero-sum game.
If anything, having a stable, predictable means for keeping gainful employment improves one's chances of developing that broad education—especially in today's world, where you can just sit there and read through Wikipedia, or download any book.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2017, @05:08PM (6 children)
It helps to have teachers to guide students, and just reading online can easily translate to info in -> info out.
I wasn't trying to bring down the whole idea, but I can foresee people going into a specific vocation and eschewing a broader education. I mean, why bother? Lots of people only finish school because they feel its necessary to succeed. I guess my point is it would all depend on the implementation and integration with business can lead to all sorts of conflicts of interest.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2017, @06:04PM (5 children)
Even people who are determined to learn material well have been shown to forget that material in just a few years at the most. Humans aren't built to accrue broad information; the brain trashes stuff that doesn't get used directly. So, your entire notion of the value of a broad education is somewhat suspect; real learning is continuous exposure, and that occurs in working life.
Tacit in your response seems to be the belief that the current system of higher education produces people with a broad education; my experience in life has shown that college graduates are not that thoughtful, and there seems to be a growing consensus that this is actually the case—most people are graduating college without any kind of meaningful education, broad or specialized, other than a leftist sense of entitlement to the fruits of others' labor.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2017, @06:57PM (4 children)
I was not trying to promote one system of another, just highlight potential issues with a more work-integrated vocational program. I agree with both of your points except your "leftist sense of entitlement" since that is a problem with parenting not political ideology.
I agree we need a much more robust vocational system but it should not be a knee-jerk reaction against the perceived "elitist academia". The problem with standard college programs is that they have been stream lined for profit and many students are there just because they have to be. The deeper issue is standardized testing which is so popular in K-12, students just want the answers so they can memorize them and get a good grade on the test. That is near verbatim from some 6th graders I taught, and I couldn't get it through their stupid little heads that the grades don't really matter. Cause they do matter in this dumb system we've got.
Everyone should graduate high school, period. After that they can go on to vocational training, college, straight to the workforce, whatever! We need people in society with broader knowledge than Electrician, Software Developer, Accountant, etc. We need citizens who can comprehend issues and who have at least a vague knowledge of history. Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it, etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2017, @07:12PM (2 children)
The undergraduate university no longer represents the "elite"; that's the very problem, and this problem has emerged because the non-elite have been funneled into university with the hope that it would make them elite. Guess what? It didn't work; instead of making the lower classes smarter, it made the universities dumber.
Secondly, when you say something like "everyone should graduate high school, period", you are not really saying what you intend: What matters is not whether someone graduates high school (after all, total shitheads are put in a cap and gown every year, and then shoved out the door); rather, what matters is that a student prove competency. What you mean to say is that everyone should prove competency in some particular set of knowledge and skills, period. One way to do this is to attach that learning process to real-world, objective value (e.g., working a job that someone is paying you to do).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2017, @07:55PM (1 child)
First point: kinda agree, not totally.
Second point: nope!!! proving competency would be good for certifications or something and I believe all education should be free, putting people into debt so that they can learn how to become productive members of society is bass-ackward. Using broad standardized testing is the source of most of our education problems, around 2000 the bullshit requirements started rolling in and they have demolished education more than any previous program except possibly for Reagan. Taking away the ability for teachers to work with and evaluate their students is a bad thing. Education should be about learning, not real-world outcomes that earn profit for some business. Vocational programs already handle these details, they just aren't as widely respected, available, or accessible ($$$$).
I'm all for real-world integrations where applicable, but it is simply unrealistic unless the education is all online so that people can move closer to a participating business. Also, such integration wouldn't get enough business participation unless it earned them money or at least cost no extra for them and I don't like the idea of government subsidizing interns for businesses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2017, @08:24PM
That's the point. You are still engaging in the old, increasingly dubious way of thinking.
As OP says: "It's being discovered that it just doesn't make sense to separate education from work."
I mean, your "Education should be about learning" is basically a tautology.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @12:52AM
Everyone should graduate high school, period.
I don't agree. Everyone should obtain a decent level of education, but that does not necessarily mean they need schooling. Many people homeschool or self-educate, and that is perfectly fine too. You're confusing education with schooling, and currently, the latter often interferes massively with the former.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @12:49AM
For the good of society we still need to have a broad education, and I think K-12 does a modest job of this.
No, it does an abysmal job of this, since it's mainly focused on rote memorization.
And you don't need schooling to attain a broad education. Self-education and homeschooling are more possible than ever.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:43PM
For the good of society we still need to have a broad education
Who's society specifically? That would be an interesting society to participate in or join. Certainly your average diverse area isn't like that, but even whiteopia suburbs aren't like that. How about tribal African areas? Islamic cultures (Like Sweden or London)? Anywhere?
I'm well read, vaguely great books self taught curriculum for a lifetime. And its some good stuff and good for me. And probably good for others. However our culture does not appreciate education, in fact its strongly culturally discouraged beyond the sloganeering and "its all to get a great job" vocational level.
I'm just saying a culture of Katy Perry songs, Survivor and Maury TV shows, no books, pro sports, reddit and twitter social signalling, spending vacation at the beach, and hipster urbanite defining culture solely as "lots of places to get drunk and hook up" doesn't seem to cherish or benefit from or want education.
A lot of it boils down to education means learning ways to think and collecting piles of good things to think about, and in a culture that doesn't value thinking and strongly discourages it as much as possible, its just nostalgia-posting to pine away for some kind of American anglophile imaginary retro nostalgia for a thinking mans empire that probably never existed for most of its members and certainly doesn't "work" now.
For example what gets you laid more, red pill science or theologically devout hipster male-feminist liberalism beta behavior around women? It seems obvious which approach to culture is more successful in practice and which is more sloganeered nostalgia LARPing. Yeah it seems obnoxiously superficial yet isn't mate-selection kinda important for a culture? What does "The Big Bang Theory" imply about what stupid normies think culturally and socially about smart people? Because we live in a trivial culture, the examples are all going to look trivial, so the examples being lame proves nothing.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kaszz on Monday April 10 2017, @04:55PM
I think the basic problem is that the educational complex creates artificial barriers to entry. Then tries to guess what students need while providing a social space that caters to the wrong kind of personalities. All financed by crippling debt. Corporations then select from a impaired pool of talent.
The bottom line is that one has to look at plain skills and not much else. Or one will loose out to any competition that does things differently.
The bad news is that perhaps corporations isn't the optimal way to make a living quite soon. They are obsolete together with traditional educational institutions and nine-to-five jobs. If you are stuck on the moon base with a malfunctioning life support. What matters? Having the right exam papers or knowing how the oxygen recycling unit is designed to work? or high GPA? Having cool friends one light second away or knowing how to make use of a screwdriver and a memory oscilloscope on adrenaline? Being a "good worker" or getting the oxygen generator to work? Doing like the book says and the ISO standard specifies or being smart in analyzing conflicting information in solving a problem?
Now all workers be a good boy and kiss corporate ass so that you may earn some more fiat money to pay debt or be chased by the thugs.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hyperturtle on Monday April 10 2017, @05:14PM (5 children)
I don't know... I think it's that businesses may be afraid of being held responsible for having to pay salaries that merit the college education, and there is a lot of news lately about burdened people with lots of debt and a salary hardly capable of a living wage.
I am cynical enough to believe this is a shifting tactic where it is being admitted that the education most people get is not helpful for the job, and the pay demanded doesn't relate to the work being done, despite the education received.
The IT industry has had this for a long time; instead, there are 'certifications' one can get, and often, *if engaged with honestly*, can provide a manner of demonstrating a skill one has, and can be refreshed or easily replaced with another certification (or appended to or added on or what have you), where a generic college degree just gets old and eventually loses its meaning over time, aside from being a high bar to reach that creates expectations.
The invisible hand may very well be adjusting for the disparity and finding it is easier to embrace the concept of hiring workers without advanced skills for positions that may rarely, if ever, make use of them. It's costly to keep demanding this and now the news is making it look bad.
At least, that is how it looks on paper (no pun intended).
There are many things about college attendance, even unfinished degrees, that can add soft skills to people, skills that can help more than the degree itself. That can be difficult to measure. Many of those same skills are obtainable via socialing in peer groups and becoming well adjusted... just as valid skills and just as difficult to measure. But those same skills are much cheaper to get if there is no expectation in place because that person holds a degree and expects more money because of it.
But I also agree that some people are not helped by college, and only hindered, and further, get set with poor expectations that more than likely puts them into a financial hole. I agree the whole apprentice system needs to be revisited and provided as a choice, with the hope that arrogant exceptionalistm doesn't take hold and diminsh the value of such things.
Too many leadership programs for too few roles for leaders, that sort of thing.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday April 10 2017, @05:39PM (4 children)
"hiring workers without advanced skills"
A quibble, I guess. College doesn't really give people "advanced skills". If college is doing it's job, it is teaching people "how to think", or maybe more accurately, "how to think for themselves". Technical schools teach more skills, per se, than traditional colleges and universities. And, I think that's the whole point of the article. Execs want people with skills, who can walk into a working environment, and have some idea how to apply those skills.
If I may compare the tech world to the military, I broke in several newly minted ensigns. Those academy kids learned all kinds of stuff "by the book". And, large swathes of their knowledge was simply useless in the fleet. For that reason, new ensigns have virtually no authority. You address them as "Sir", but that's about all the consideration they get. If you're lucky, they are actually potty trained. The best ensigns begin to emerge as officers in 4 - 6 months, and the worst ones are weeded out within a year - and you have a full spectrum in between.
THAT is the sort of thing I've seen with college grads. They are hired at relatively high wages, just to be taught the jobs they are supposed to be doing. And, oftentimes, they don't make it through the first year.
My own son is learning all about that right now. His degree got him in the door, he makes good money, but it took him some months to learn the job. The higher ups are just beginning to trust his judgement now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2017, @07:06PM (3 children)
Anyone with a BS would beg to differ, and many other non-science degrees would also disagree. Running lab tests, learning advanced mathematics, advanced philosophical approaches, or even advanced knowledge and appreciation of women's studies can be very helpful for a job that actually uses those skills. The real problem here is we have an over educated but under skilled work force coupled with the "American Dream" where anyone can go out and be a success!!
So, poor planning coupled with a society-wide delusion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2017, @07:15PM
And what do you know?! Governmental policy and funding is at the center of it all. Who'd a thunk it?
(Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday April 10 2017, @10:38PM
Anyone with a BS would beg to differ, and many other non-science degrees would also disagree. Running lab tests, learning advanced mathematics, advanced philosophical approaches, or even advanced knowledge and appreciation of women's studies can be very helpful for a job that actually uses those skills.
I think both you and the parent are talking about different aspects of our college system, which come out of different historical developments. Unfortunately, what we've ended up with today is an awkward blend that doesn't really serve the goal of "general thinking skills/broad education" or "job-prep skills" very well.
For those who don't know about this, the very idea of a college "major" is relatively recent. Until ~100 years ago, at most schools you just got a general "Bachelor of Arts" degree. More and more schools had begun to allow science-focused degrees, and some schools had a sort of "concentration," but the modern "major" was an innovation. College really was about a broad distribution of knowledge and ideas from the "liberal arts" (though even in the late 1800s it was already a bit more common to have "electives," rather than the standard set curricula that were common before).
Of course, things go back a bit further. In the mid-1800s in the U.S., you had the introduction of land-grant colleges [wikipedia.org] under the Morrill Act and other legislation, which created schools whose focus was on "scientific" and engineering enterprises, rather than just the liberal arts. With them came more focused practical education, and indeed until the early decades of the 20th century, education at such schools was often "apprenticeship-like," since the professors hired were often from industrial and agricultural professions, not necessarily having any advanced academic credentials. But given that science and related technical jobs were still a relatively small proportion of the workforce, these were often more like "professional schools" that we now associate with doctors and lawyers, etc., rather than the standard "academic" experience.
That division between the "practical" land-grant schools and the traditional "liberal arts" schools continued roughly up until ca. WWII. After the war, things like the GI bill really encouraged a significantly larger class of Americans to go to college for the first time. A lot of traditional colleges and universities were faced with increasing enrollment from the middle classes, who wanted "practical training" to get ahead, rather than a bunch of Shakespeare, Spinoza, and Caesar's Gallic Wars.
Meanwhile, though, the more elite of the land-grant schools had undergone a different sort of transition -- they had become more "academic." They wrote textbooks for their professions. They created new kinds of academic degrees. They founded research journals and increasingly published academic articles within them. Traditional universities increasingly started hiring faculty in many of these disciplines. University training thus came to focus more on the traditional classroom even for "practical" degrees, rather than the apprenticeship/laboratory model.
Then came the 1960s, unrest in universities, upheavals in social mores, questions about the "canon" of traditional Western liberal arts, etc. Facing protests, many colleges decreased their focus on the standard "classical" curriculum that had more-or-less been a foundation of university education for a millennium. The "major" came to be viewed as a path toward a career, rather than an academic focus. In the 1950s or 1960s, it was standard to be an English or history or philosophy major if you wanted to go into business; in the 1970s and 80s, many of those people instead became "business" majors. As a new generation of academics who had been raised in the 60s and 70s now became professors, they further broke down the traditional liberal arts curricula.
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So what do we have now? We have a higher-ed system that was designed around teaching "big ideas" for a Western canon that is no longer reinforced. We have a system which is supposed to encourage students to read and think on their own about these "big ideas," perhaps to broaden their mind, and classroom experiences designed around this old-fashioned system (e.g., big lectures). Meanwhile, though, we now sell degree programs to students at high prices with a promise of practical credential around a "major," all the while holding fast to these classroom models that were never designed to teach practical skills. Students rightly often wonder what the "point" is for all their "distribution" or "gen ed" requirements, when they're basically being promised a sort of job training.
But then when they show up to an actual job, they find it generally takes them 6-12 months to actually orient themselves and figure out what life is like in the "real world" of practice. They may not catch up to practical skills with a colleague who skipped college for 2 or even 3 years in the workforce, even though they may come equipped with a larger set of theoretical knowledge (that might be helpful occasionally).
What went wrong? My personal suggestion would be to stop the focus on "academic" classes for most practical degrees, other than those which are headed toward graduate study and advanced research. Traditional degrees focused on the "liberal arts" or whatever should return to a more rigorous curriculum with a broad focus, but for people who want a CREDENTIAL to get them a specific job, they need more apprenticeship/internship (or whatever you want to call it) opportunities, and less time talking about what they might do once they get out of school. Even relatively advanced technical degrees for engineering, lab tech level scientists, etc. could phase more toward the apprenticeship after the first year or two of college, maying trending toward 50/50 mix with apprenticeship/internship training in practical experience and problem-solving in the last year or two. Other degrees like business degrees... should probably be mostly apprenticeship. Having taught a lot of business majors who seem to have chosen that major only because they aren't actually interested in learning anything about ANYTHING, I can't figure out why most of them are in college -- so give them a couple semesters of classes to pretend it's something "academic", and then start hooking them up with real-world experiences.
Our lecture model of disseminating information from a learned sage never made much sense, but it makes almost no sense as practical training. The early decades of technical colleges in the U.S. show this, but again they dropped a lot of the practica in favor of the academic rigors that were the standard of higher ed at the time. What we really need are a lot more technical/professional schools. And then we need to raise the standards of "liberal arts" again to make it what it once was for broadening the minds of those who want to think about bigger ideas. And while we're at it, we need to drop the myth that "liberal arts" isn't about math and technical subjects: kids in the 1800s had their detailed training in Euclid, astronomy, etc. too. "Liberal arts" isn't about "humanities" -- it's about broad knowledge and broad interdisciplinary skills.
For those who are up to such rigors, we still should have university programs for them to study, but let's stop this weird idea that it makes sense to keep encouraging all kids to go to these bizarre hybrid schools that claim to be credentialing schools yet stick to old methods that aren't appropriate for teaching practical skills for those credentials. That's not what higher ed traditionally was about. But we could fix the system, if we recognize how messed up it is.
Unfortunately, we've now sold generations of Americans on the "American dream" which includes college, and we're now handing out student loans like candy, while an arms race of administrators at colleges is driving prices up while de-prioritizing actual teaching. (Just look at the rise of adjuncts employed by universities to teach, as well as their insanely low salaries.)
While I completely understand why tech companies may hire more people without degrees, what I really wish is that we had the type of schools that offered something that students AND employers seem to want, which seems to be something like the hybrid college/apprenticeship model I mentioned above. Then you'd have degree candidates showing up BOTH with some of the added theoretical knowledge college can provide AND some practical experience so they can launch into a job in the real world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @12:57AM
Anyone with a BS would beg to differ
Not all colleges are equal. Most offer an abysmal to a mediocre level of education and have many of the same faults that our K-12 system has (such as an over-reliance on rote memorization). The problem is that people do not truly "learn" the material while schooling, and that it's possible to actually learn the material without schooling. Yet, people continue to confuse schooling with education, revealing their antiquated thinking.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 11 2017, @12:50PM
This is the beginning of a renaissance in the apprenticeship model: The path into a particular productive role in society must be well defined from beginning to end.
I sure hope not. We don't need well-defined crap, we need people with competence and knowledge, and we need employers capable of employing those people. How that happens should be flexible, not via formal approaches that artificially restrict who plays.