IT graduates still find it hardest to get jobs | Hacker News Reader

IT graduates still find it hardest to get jobs

computerworlduk.com

A Computer Science or Programming job is not the same as an IT job. There is a shortage of Computer Scientists and good Programmers everywhere. In contrast IT jobs (think The IT Crowd) are completely over-saturated. Having a bunch of certifications that say you know where to put a ram stick or connect a hard drive will only get you so far. IT jobs are more akin to mid point in between the 'real' computer geeks and 'normal' human beings.

In any case, there's plenty jobs for Programmers and holders of a CS degree. And off course, this fields prefer proven experience, so that might be another reason why people find it hard. Here's a tip though, proven experience doesn't mean proven experience in another company. Build something and prove yourself and it will be easy as pie to get a job.

A rather ill informed article that bundles all "computery" stuff together to arrive at some half-baked conclusions. I can tell from personal experience that there is a huge shortage of developers in the UK and fail to see how a decent developer would find it 'hardest' to get a job in the UK at the moment.

"recent IT graduates" != "decent developer"

Based on the evidence from my own school, I'd be inclined to state that recent IT graduates are unlikely to be developers at all, and if they are developers it is unlikely that they are decent yet.

You spend two to four years learning rote-memory crap from outdated books, then you get thrown into the fire where your mnemonics mean absolutely nothing. In the real world, IT folks are forced to wing it using critical thinking skills, which you don't usually pick up in a beige classroom.

"IT folks are forced to wing it using critical thinking skills, which you don't usually pick up in a beige classroom."

That sums it all up quite well :) The best of the best in IT know all they need to know out of passion long before they go into a classroom dedicated to that purpose.

It's been a long time now, but when I was first looking for jobs in IT after graduating, all of the "entry level" positions required quite a bit of experience. Luckily, I had already been providing IT support for an elementary school when I graduated, but it always struck me as odd that an entry level position would require experience...

Oh dear. I find that almost all job adverts ask for people with 2+ years experience, plus rather a lot of skills. There don't seem to be any aimed at recent graduates. My plan is to work whatever crappy job I can find for a couple of years, while making sure I genuinely practice website/webapp development in my spare time, so that eventually I will be 'qualified' for the majority of job postings (for developers/engineers).

Of course it often crosses my mind that the requirements are some sort of elaborate bluff and the abundance of expert programmers (in Scotland) is a complete myth.

Where are you looking for jobs ?

There are at least a couple of hundred companies recruiting for graduate level developers in the UK.

I'm guessing location might be the primary thing holding you back if you're only looking for jobs locally, have you considered looking for jobs elsewhere in the country ?

I'm not really looking at the moment admittedly, just concentrating on my MSc, but when I have a browse the job websites or notice boards that's the impression they leave. Plus I know CS graduates who have never managed to get a job with their 4 year degrees and don't work in IT at all.

But yes graduate programs is probably my best bet (I live in Glasgow which has a few big operations locally, eg JP Morgan), although I wonder what the ratio of places to applicants is. It just seems a shame that the normal job adverts are strictly aimed at experienced professionals, when an intelligent and enthusiastic beginner/graduate could probably pick up the skills needed relatively quickly; but I'm not complaining, I realise how greatly productivity varies from programmer to programmer and how risky hiring could be for teams/companies.

Check the graduate recruitment job boards and go to careers fairs.

By and large most mainstream job boards are dominated by professional recruiters, and companies don't generally use recruiters for graduate level roles, hence mainstream job boards aren't the place to look.

Generally applicant:place ratio for most grad tech roles is typically 50-100/place (that's for London; I'm guessing it might be less for Glasgow), but about 90% of applicants fail at the CV review stage. So if you make your CV compelling you've got a decent chance.

There are a lot of graduate developer roles available, the financial sector in London alone takes 500-1000 CS grads/year. Most banks recruit from across Europe, because they simply can't hire enough good CS grads from the UK.

Thanks very much for the info. Actually there was a careers fair and one of my classmates got a good job out of it straight away, without even having stay on for a full MSc (ie. not just Post-Grad Diploma). It was Black Rock in Edinburgh. So that was heartening. I think I'd fair better in interviews than a lot of people (CS grads I know can't explain OOP or design patterns and basic stuff like that), but perhaps my CV wont be the best. I have some experience doing VB scripting for a previous office job, but I hope to add a few pet projects/web-apps and websites made for acquaintances to my resume by the time I graduate.

P.S. I can pass the FizzBuzz at least ;)

The report seems to be available here:

http://www.hecsu.ac.uk/research_reports_what_do_graduates_do...

I think many mid-to-large organizations would benefit greatly from internal training or mentoring programs for technical people. The "thrown into the fire" mentality is really not necessary. It just happens that way because that's how the culture has evolved.

I bet that the ramp-up period Brooks talks about in The Mythical Man-Month could be greatly shortened with a reasonable investment in mentoring and training processes.

This article is wrong in several places confusing IT and Computer Science. IT degrees have high-unemployment, Computer Science degrees don't.

Treating both subjects as the same thing is incredibly shoddy, and I'd expect better from a magazine targeted at the IT sector.

The article talks about both.

The article is wrong, the study it refers to as being about Computer Science is about IT degrees.

I run http://universityreport.co.uk a university course comparison website which uses the same underlying survey data (collected by HESA) that the study used, so I'm intimately familiar with the data set. They're using a mishmash of data and most of the CS figures they quote are actually for general IT degrees.

IT jobs are skill jobs. Most new college graduates have practically no experience in their fields. This isn't so bad for most fields, but in IT, they will be competing with smart people that also have lots of experience and who are deeply interested in the field. While it is almost expected to enter certain fields with no real experience (Law, Medicine - Internships don't count) that expectation seems to be reversed in IT.

Isn't that quite reasonable since you can code all you want in your spare time? Something that is not really possible with law or medicine.

You can code all you want in your spare time, but if that practice doesn't map exactly to what a employers (or consumers) are looking for then it doesn't matter. I wrote a SNES rom-hacking utility in C/win32 while I was in college and that didn't impress anybody. After I graduated (2001) I spent 3 months stacking boxes of silverware on pallets until I got a job as a night-shift backup operator for $10/hr. After 6-12 months of that I was like, "hey guys I automated everything can I work days now?" And just kind of went from there.

And typically, even when you do have the skills an employer wants, actually learning their particular systems well enough to be useful takes another 3-6 months, because training and integration is completely neglected. You'll get "read the docs." Which, if you are lucky, will be a disorganized mess of wiki rather than a slow and nearly impenetrable sharepoint labyrinth.

It doesn't have to be this way. I'm sure at the best tech companies, it isn't.

I absolutely believe that it is reasonable. Given two equally smart candidates, one with good academic credentials and no experience, and the other with no academic credentials and a portfolio of work, I'd take the guy that has actually built stuff every time.

Why don't internships count ? - certainly in the UK for most professional jobs having an internship in the field is a huge advantage over other candidates and in popular fields such as banking, media, etc. having done internships is pretty much a requirement.

It depends on the internship. Lots of internships seem to be of the "do all the shitty jobs that nobody else wants to do because you are free labor" variety, and not the "trade the salary you deserve for lots of mentoring and training while we help prepare you for your career" variety. If the internship is Google's Summer of Code, that's one thing, if it is fetching Mountain Dew's and snacks for the guy that's actually building something, that is something else entirely.

Yes, though there's actually a lot of "do all the shitty jobs that nobody else wants to do because you are free labor"-type work in software, where you can learn lots exactly because you are getting your hands dirty. E.g. bug fixing.

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