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posted by on Monday April 10 2017, @04:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the talent-contest dept.

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


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday April 10 2017, @05:39PM (4 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 10 2017, @05:39PM (#491766) Journal

    "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.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2017, @07:06PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2017, @07:06PM (#491842)

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2017, @07:15PM (#491852)

      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

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Monday April 10 2017, @10:38PM (#491984) Journal

      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.

      ---

      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

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @12:57AM (#492041)

      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.