Network technologies in higher education. The sad experience of finding young professionals

    I think it is no secret to anyone that over the past few years the demand for IT specialists in the labor market has been growing inexorably. Many educational institutions try to adapt to these requirements and try to introduce new specialties or increase the number of places for applicants to existing faculties.

    Despite all these efforts, the shortage of qualified IT specialists is only growing.

    This article is a kind of cry of the soul after several dozen interviews with various young candidates for the position of “Network / System Engineer” in a company that deals with system integration.

    image

    It all started when the company needed to dramatically increase the staff of system engineers due to the large volumes of future work. There was plenty of time, so they decided to hire promising young professionals - graduates of the Faculty of Telecommunications and the like. I will not name specific names of universities, institutes or colleges now, but there are plenty of them in our city. Naturally, we understood that the qualification of graduates would not immediately allow them to be used in projects and planned to organize internal corporate training, already in specific areas (cisco, checkpoint, s-terra). Thus, we would get specialists “sharpened” for our needs at very low costs.

    Of course, there are a lot of opinions and disputes about which experts are best to hire, experienced, not experienced, up to 30 or older, the article is not about that. I would like to talk about the level of training of our graduates. If someone is interested in this story, welcome to kat ...

    As already mentioned above, we did not have any special illusions at the expense of students and graduates. We perfectly understood that there was a serious work to train newcomers. The calculation was on the flexibility of the mind, a large amount of energy and curiosity of young candidates! Expectations did not come true ...

    The following are the main problems encountered during interviews with graduates:

    1)The first and most important problem is the lack of knowledge about the most basic things from the field of computer technology. A person cannot answer how the MAC address differs from the IP address. Doesn't understand why a default route is needed. Does not know the difference between a switch and a router. This immediately raises questions for the educational institutions that graduate these specialists. What could a person be taught for 6 years (master) at the Faculty of Telecommunications, that he does not even know the basic things ???

    2)High candidate requests. A person who does not even have time to find out what the company is doing, is interested in how much he will receive and whether career growth is possible. Moreover, he has obvious problems from point 1. Remembering my youth, I was ready to take up any work for almost any money, wanting to get at least some real experience and work experience.

    3)Frank lies in the resume. Looking at the resume of young specialists, you can immediately see such “tags” as: Windows Server, Confident Linux user, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, knowledge of the TCP / IP stack, work with Cisco equipment, D-Link, etc. When you start asking the applicant in detail, it turns out that he has no idea what the Cisco CLI is, how to look at the contents of a text file from the command line in linux, can a Windows server act as a DHCP server. Most recently, a person could not answer me the question: “How many levels are in the seven-level OSI model?”. WHY write in the resume what you have no idea about? Does anyone really hope that he will be hired for a beautiful resume?

    4)Lack of initiative. Turning our eyes to the first three points, we gave candidates a chance to prove themselves. They suggested completing a test task. Some refused immediately, saying that they did not have time for this. For those who agreed, we gave a link to the Young Fighter Course with a request to see the first 12 lessons, and then come to us again and complete the task. Most candidates took 12 lessons for more than a month, arguing that they have many other things to do. Naturally, we did not consider such “fast” guys.

    As a result, out of 20 interviews, we could not find a single suitable candidate and in the old fashioned way took a person who was a good friend of one of our employees. Vouched for him. We gave him a course and a mission assignment, which he had easily done a week later. Now a person has been working with us for 4 months and gives great hopes. Actively studying new materials and completely independent. He did not graduate from universities (he graduated from the Energy College).

    I was very surprised at the quality of education at our universities and institutes (perhaps this applies only to our city). To study for several years and enter the labor market is completely unprepared. Is there anything sadder? Something is wrong with this education. Maybe students do not want to study? Or maybe the training program is too weak and relaxes young professionals? I will not raise the question “Do you need higher education or not?” Referring to Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. But something I just have to note. It is clear that the knowledge gained at the university is completely insufficient for real life. Therefore, I wanted to appeal to teachers and students.

    To students. As Steve Jobs said: “Stay hungry. Remain Reckless. ” Do not spare yourself while you are young. Stay up late at the computer studying new technologies. Sign up for online courses. Now a huge number of FREE courses from the most famous educational institutions in the world. You can learn anything. Practice more! Fortunately, there are no problems now, you can use various simulators / emulators (talking about networks). Find a mentor for yourself. You have less time than you think. Voraciously absorb knowledge. The education you are given is simply not enough for a normal job right after university. Any person without a higher education, having completed two or three monthly profile courses, will have a good head start in front of you.

    I can not advise teachers, because I was not on their side and know little about the process of studying at universities. There is only one request - practice more with students. You can’t go far on one theory ...

    PS I apologize in advance if I offended anyone. All of the above is only the result of our own thoughts and conclusions and of course is not an absolute truth.

    Only registered users can participate in the survey. Please come in.

    Do you think that the level of IT education (in Russia) complies with modern requirements in the labor market?

    • 3% yes 71
    • 68.8% no 1583
    • 28% depends on university 646

    Also popular now: