Students, Interns and IT

We just had a government national budget today – I won’t be able to sit for a while.  I’ve been listening to the radio most of the day while working and I heard one good point from the talking heads.  One “expert” said that some of the new tax funds should be pooled for training of future new skills.  Here’s the scenario.

We have around 12% unemployment.  IT has gone into recession.  All sectors have been making staff redundant.  There’s nowhere for students to go after graduating college (what we call non-university third level institutions) or university.  There no where for re-educated working people to go to get that first piece of experience.  If our economy is to succeed then we’ll need these additional skills.  We can’t have a 205 year gap in skills that never developed.  I doubt Ireland is unique in this.

For any recent/near graduate who might read this I have some bad news for you.  Sure, you’ve gotten A’s in all your exams and your parents are proud and your lecturers called you a genius.  But …

You Know Nothing!

I’m sorry; I know that hurt but it’s true.  Your college education simply laid a foundation.  You probably learned about the OSI model in 5 different classes over 4 years like I did.  You probably learned about Token Ring like I did.  The reality is that you have few skills right now that a real business can use.  You’re simply putty that something will be made from.  For the first part of your career you will likely achieve little of consequence.  The same is true for anyone who got an MCSE (or whatever the hell that’s called these days!) on a re-education program.  You are what we call a paper-MCSE.  Lots of facts and answers for questions that have little real world use.  It’s a good start but unlike those TV adverts in the UK, you will not be earning £45,000 per year from day one.

Here’s how it normally goes.  You get a job where you answer phones, run cables, etc.  You’ll pick up a little as time goes by.  If you’re good enough then you’ll be delegated with more work, maybe a small project.  Then a larger piece of work and a role in a larger project.  It takes time; it certainly doesn’t happen overnight.

But this is where the problem is right now.  NO ONE is hiring.  There is next to no work out there.  I can’t imagine how bad it must be for this past years graduates.  They must feel awful after spending 4 years in classes, studying and doing continuous assessment and exams.  My class was mostly employed before we left our last exam – I got my job offer the week before our finals.  Graduates were in amazing shortage back then so we were thrown right in.  I was doing exams one week and the next I was porting code from Solaris to HP-UX in a team of 1 leader and 3 graduates.  I just can’t imagine your predicament. 

Anyway … back on topic.  The expert on the radio suggested we needed a national program for interns.  Company’s can’t afford the entire cost of staff.  The country can’t afford to have people sitting on the dole doing nothing and learning nothing.  What if we had a program where we met half way.  What if the person worked 20 hours a week and did work-related studying for half a week?  The government could reduce dole payments fairly and the company could have a part time staff member at a low cost.  The idea here is that eventually the recession will end.  Hopefully the company would then be in a position to hire and would want to take on the intern as a full time employee at full cost. 

I would add to the program: the program should be contingent on the person continuing to learn and achieve professional certification/passing grades in the training program.  That protects those who are investing in the intern, i.e. the tax payer.  The company should also be requiring the intern to be doing real work, i.e. not flattening boxes …. I’m not ruling out coffee making because we once had one poor chap who had to get us coffees and breakfast sandwiches every Friday morning for nearly a year.  It was a tradition in the department that the rest of us enjoyed 🙂

Who gains?

• The country because an educated person is developed into a skilled person.  The person that we invested in throughout their education stays in the country and hopefully will become another taxpayer.  They’ll also add to the educated workforce pool adding to our attractiveness to inward investment.
• The company because they’ve been able to take on skills and mould them.  That intern might just become a full time employee if the company can turn a corner.
• Finally, the intern.  They get real world work, not just lessons from 20 year old IT books.  They’ll work with more skilled people in their field and learn from them.  Potentially they’ll gain professional certifications while working and can see the relevance in the questions and answers, making the neurons create relevant pathways.

I would like to see something come from the additional taxation we’ll be paying from midnight tonight such as this.  But I’m afraid that instead of investing in these graduates we’ll see continued wastage.

If you are still in college now and are interested in a career in IT then do a few things to give yourself a leg up:

• Try to get a PC or laptop with as much disk and RAM as possible.  This will allow you to run some sort of virtualisation for labs.
• Seek out your Microsoft representative for your college and get your hands on MSDN Academic.  That gives you access to all the MS licensing for test and development purposes.  It’s great for labs and learning.
• Find out if your college has a professional certification program.  If you have the time then do what you can on the side.
• Check out the library for certification prep books.  MS Press is a good start.
• Yes, look at the Linux stuff too.  Learn about Cisco networking and firewalls (Todd Lamle is a good read).  If you’re a dev then learn about things like .NET, Silverlight, C# and Azure.
• If you’re post college then see what the local government training agencies can do.  Bring in suggestions.  Fás in Ireland used to do MS training and exams.  I know they cut down the numbers of their exam centres a lot about 5 years ago which was a pity – even though I was working I did my exams in there because they usually had more openings and their office was close to where I was living.

Best of luck if you are in this situation and keep on learning.  I promise it works out for the best if you do – it worked for me when I was out of work for a while and it was what pushed me up to be a senior engineer instead of just another IT admin type.  Hopefully the same will happen for you in whatever field you want to work in.