Reply to: Daily Mail: Ocado turns to Poland for IT staff; UK IT graduate shortage blamed

[BA to the Stars]

ironically the best intern at clientco is Polish. I'm keeping an eye on her in case plan b is in a position to recruit next year.

Does plan B involve a Pole dancing

[vetran]

There is nothing wrong with training the workforce beyond school especially when schools are doing such a bad job of it or when people mature at different times

I was a late developer (many reasons for this but poor schooling played a major part) and instead of doing A levels & degree (which I suspect I was mentally capable once I matured ~ 22 yrs old) I went to work, I then did an HNC part time. Perfectly acceptable for my career. I have paid enough extra tax to repay the Government's investment many times over.

Job related training in a lot of ways is superior to Academic training for the majority of the population.

By taking 50% of job applicants out of the job market for 6 years and saddling them with ~ £50K debt hasn't really made us more competitive.

The general opinion put forward by business leaders is that the 6 years of extra baby sitting and avoiding being on the Jobless figures hasn't improved the general literacy of the workforce.

I was quite happy with the top 10% academically getting degrees and the top 40% going for higher vocational qualifications such as HNC, the rest can do NVQs and get real benefit from these.

Unfortunately we are competing with the rest of the world who are happy to send their top 1% to work for minimum wage.

I work with a lot of Degree educated people but it tends to be the ones with serious on the job experience who muck in and create working solutions without a lot of meetings.

Those without a degree can think just fine! The ones with a degree just seem to think they are better at it, evidence suggests otherwise in many cases.

[formant]

I have some concern as to what extent Uni these days does teach people to think rather than just learn. I know it's meant to, but you do wonder when you speak to some young people.

And I also think universities need to do more to prepare students for the realities of work. Which is tricky since the lecturers are all by definition living in academe away from the world of commerce. But some training on presenting yourself, interviewing, talking to people, being managed and other such things would go a long way to assisting students to move into the world of work with more prospects than retail.

I agree that universities are missing out on preparing students for "what comes next". The uni my partner lectures at now forces everyone through an 'employability' course. I thought that sounded great in theory, but having seen the materials it's the sort of advice you can find online on how to format your CV and how to dress for an interview rather than hands-on input on what you can personally do to make yourself more attractive to future employers - what skills you could gain, etc.
I mean, a lot of people for example don't realise that in the workplace professional qualifications can count for much more than a degree. So your Project Management class as part of your Business Studies degree may be nowhere near as recognised as putting yourself through Prince2 certification, even though it may have even been more intense, detailed, etc.

Sandwich courses like MUN mentioned are a brilliant way of making sure people leave university with real world, relevant work experience. Sadly there aren't more such courses around, they're still not very common and can only be done in a handful of subjects.

[MyUserName]

I made sure I did a sandwich course and got to work for a year in a real company. I could not believe more people were not doing it, it was fantastic and absolutely made my professional life.

I went in with a maths degree and came out with a year's experience in C++, MFC etc from which I could take my pick of jobs. I hope universities still do these courses and promote them.

[Platypus]

I agree with all that you say, and good for you that you were smart enough to figure out the "what happens next" piece on your own.

I have some concern as to what extent Uni these days does teach people to think rather than just learn. I know it's meant to, but you do wonder when you speak to some young people.

And I also think universities need to do more to prepare students for the realities of work. Which is tricky since the lecturers are all by definition living in academe away from the world of commerce. But some training on presenting yourself, interviewing, talking to people, being managed and other such things would go a long way to assisting students to move into the world of work with more prospects than retail.

[formant]

Pesonally I think having >50% of young people in higher education when it doesn't get you a decent job, is equivalent to having people take on debt in order to buy their own way off the unmemployment stats. Pretty ****ing dishonest.

I think the way you worded it there - that's precisely the wrong way to think about the value of higher education. The notion that your degree will or should "get you a job" is fundamentally what's so messed up with people's expectations. That's why people wrongly feel that they're doing "useful" vs "useless" degrees. Those on "useful" courses lean back thinking that the degree itself will place them somewhere decent once they graduate, those on "useless" courses resign themselves to a life in retail despite their degree qualification.

People need to wake up and realise that their degree by itself, whatever it may be in, will do f*** all for them if they don't make it work, if they don't come up with a plan. The reason I got a job (as a Linguistics graduate) is because I figured out early that Speech Technology is probably the only field that's ever going to pay me well. So I specialised in Phonetics and Computational Linguistics in my Masters, taught myself Perl and Python and suddenly found myself without competition in a pretty small but lucrative niche. There's not been a job in that niche that I've gone for and didn't get. But because altogether there aren't too many jobs going around (and because what I do is essentially a kind of QA), I also got myself ISTQB certified to pick up testing roles if I have to. Because I wasn't going to do retail after graduation. Or customer service. Or admin.

My other half did a similarly "useless" degree - in Anthropology, all the way to PhD-level. Moved into the Civil Service the MoD and later the Cabinet Office working on terrorism and information warfare, then set up his own consultancy mostly doing business continuity and scenario exercises, and eventually moved back into Higher Education, though now lecturing in Business/Strategic Management. I'm sure most Anthropology graduates never move beyond their dreams of doing ethnography on some remote island or bush tribe, while serving coffee at Starbucks or scanning your shopping at the local Tescos.

Similarly, I've seen plenty of people with "useful", (often) science-based degrees, or "Management" qualifications struggle to find a decent job. That's cause they've been told their skills are in demand and somewhere along the line they forgot to learn how to talk, how to present themselves, how to write well (to a lay-audience), and how to sell their skills as transferable (because, really, what you do at university never directly translates into the working world).

There's nothing wrong with putting 50% or more of the population through university, there's never anything wrong with teaching people to learn, think, and work towards deadlines and milestone achievements.
There's everything wrong with thinking that that by itself is ever enough.

No, your degree won't get you a job. But good news is that you can yourself one anyway.

[MyUserName]

Why would people expect their graduate job to pay well enough that they can immediately buy a house?

My brother in law (not a graduate but still) was asking my advice about how much money to ask for in a job interview, I told him to tell them he needed enough to be able to rent a reasonable flat in the locality. If he had said he wanted enough to buy a house in the area in his early twenties I would have laughed my backside off.

Is this what they are being told to get them to take on all this debt at uni? If so then that is a pretty nasty fall they are being set up for and is going to screw the country over ... well it already seems to be doing just that.

[Ignis Fatuus]

Being cheaper elsewhere and not being enough here and are not unrelated. Lower pay due to outsourcing=less reason for people here to enter IT=more shortages=more need for outsourcing.

Cause and effect? Don't expect that to go down well in politics; and it's a bit long-term to make any sence to business.

[Ignis Fatuus]

I have done my fair share of graduate recruiting/interviewing. The graduates of today really are a deluded lot. Some were asking a starting salary of 30K odd. The expected salaries seemed to depend on how much mortgage they had to take to buy a house. The expectation level among graduates is quite high in terms of how much they can earn. The attitude was one of them doing me a favour by taking up a position in our company rather than actually being grateful that there were companies hiring graduates in this climate.

ISTM that being able to get a mortgage on at least some kind of home would be as good a first definition as any of a "reasonable salary".

I suppose the point is that even a decent graduate must not expect to start on a decent salary. The problem is, as others have pointed out, that undergraduates are sold the idea that they can. Obviously, why else would they take on such debt so early?

Pesonally I think having >50% of young people in higher education when it doesn't get you a decent job, is equivalent to having people take on debt in order to buy their own way off the unmemployment stats. Pretty ****ing dishonest.

[MyUserName]

I did a sandwich course and got paid about 12k for it in 98, learned C++ and MFC which set me up for life
I finished my degree and walked into my choice of 3 different software jobs at 18.5k. This seemed to be quite good at the time.
Most recent perm job was about 2 years ago and I was on 55k

As far as I am aware the only people from my year making more money than me was a guy who was an accountant for E&Y, I think he was on about 70-80k (but he works in London central rather than Hampshire) after he qualified in various things and Shane Williams, the rugby player.

[vetran]

I think it depends where we are. We discussed this exact topic today and couldn't think of a single firm that paid £50k for senior devs. Most maxed out at £45-8k and rarely pay over £40k.

Strange 2196 on Jobserve 2/5 of the jobs with that title pay £50K +. OK that includes top end of the range (£40-60k) but you have got to assume some of them get paid that.

Find senior developer Jobs with JobServe.com

[mos]

I prefer to visit the supermarket and reach for something fresher at the back of the shelf.

+1

[SantaClaus]

Shouldn't be too hard to boycott Ocado.

Every time I ever used them (years ago), the fruit and vegetables were always near their sell-by date.

I prefer to visit the supermarket and reach for something fresher at the back of the shelf.

[eek]

FTFY

I think it depends where we are. We discussed this exact topic today and couldn't think of a single firm that paid £50k for senior devs. Most maxed out at £45-8k and rarely pay over £40k.

[eek]

We have some really good IT graduates (or at least we used to have them in olden days ). Still it is unfair on UK grads. And why they cannot be honest about their real reason?
boycott Ocado!

ironically the best intern at clientco is Polish. I'm keeping an eye on her in case plan b is in a position to recruit next year.