Posted on 06/22/2009 12:40:47 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
OK, before you get your knickers in a twist, let's put the CEO's comments into context. Vineet Nayar, the highly respected CEO of HCL Technologies, one of India's hottest IT services vendors, was speaking this morning in New York City to an audience of about 50 customers and partners when he related a recent experience with an education official in a large U.S. state.
The official wanted to know why HCL, a $2.5 billion (revenue) company with more than 3,000 people across 21 offices in 15 states, wasn't hiring more people in his state. Vineet's short answer: because most American college grads are "unemployable." (In fairness to HCL, the company recently announced plans to open a delivery center in another state, North Carolina, and invest $3.2 million and hire more than 500 employees there over the next five years under a Job Development Investment Grant.)
Many American grads looking to enter the tech field are preoccupied with getting rich, Vineet said. They're far less inclined than students from developing countries like India, China, Brazil, South Africa, and Ireland to spend their time learning the "boring" details of tech process, methodology, and tools--ITIL, Six Sigma, and the like.
As a result, Vineet said, most Americans are just too expensive to train--despite the Indian IT industry's reputation for having the most exhaustive boot camps in the world. To some extent, he said, students from other highly developed countries fall into the same rut.
In an interview following his presentation, Vineet said HCL and other employers need to have a greater influence on the tech curricula of U.S. colleges and universities, to make them more real-world and rigorous. For the most part, he said, those institutions haven't been receptive to such industry partnerships.
More broadly, Vineet echoed the concerns expressed by other CEOs, including SAS Institute's Jim Goodnight and Cisco's John Chambers, about the failure of the U.S. education system to prepare the country's next-generation tech workforce (a subject Goodnight and others will dive into at the InformationWeek 500 Conference, Sept. 13 to 15).
Beyond the need to bolster competencies in math, the hard sciences, and basic problem solving, U.S. schools at all levels must place a greater emphasis on global history, foreign languages, and other subjects that prepare students for jobs and life outside this country. How many grads of U.S. colleges are ready or even willing to work abroad? Vineet asked rhetorically. "We need to define the American dream to be more global in nature," he said.
The cynical among you will counter that some American students, having seen tech jobs move to lower-wage countries or go to H1-B visa holders, have lost their appetite for process-oriented IT professions. But if this country's economic future is indeed rooted in technology--whether in health care, energy, transportation, or the tech industries themselves--then the status quo won't do.
Somehow where I am these people from a private technical school get hired and supposedly are in computers/IT. Everyone of them has been a big disappointment. It is scary at the basic things they don't know. For a long time I kind of regretted not going there but to a community technical college. Now I don't.
One didn't know what PC memory looked like or where it went on a board.
Another one who is supposedly knowledgeable on networking and installed parts of the main network which sometimes goes down for reasons he can't explain abd gets a big commendation letter to the big guy. Never mind me and one other guy (who is way above me technically) spent a lot of overtime terminating data and doing hardware installation which by the way works pretty darn well. Neither of us got the time of day.
These people can barely handle basic Windows operation. Office is above most of them. Forget print over IP or even setting a default printer for that matter.
I mentioned Linux to a few of them and got some puzzled looks. I'm no expert on it but can do some stuff without the books and cheat sheets.
All in the name of making everyone equal. Equally miserable is more like it.
It would do some good to encourage more students to study Latin--it would enhance their knowledge of English grammar and vocabulary greatly, and might even help their ability to think logically. (Of course that would be a detriment if they want to pursue a career in journalism.)
MS is offering 25/hr to experienced embedded WinCE SW devs
in Redmond. Thats less that the avg starting salary for
CS/EE grads in the US.
Too true.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. I’m thinking of technical schools the way they were in the 70s and 80s. I have a sneaking suspicion that the experiences you have encountered involve people who got either an A+ cert or a Network+ cert. I’m not surprised that they can’t find the ON/OFF switch on a ‘puter.
I’m also not too keen on a lot of what passes for IT folks today.
He sure explained why help desks are of little help.
When job candidates come in and toss this Degree and that Certification at me during an interview, I always reply "That's nice, but lets talk about what you *really* know. It says here on your resume that you have experience in... " More often than not, I get a shellshocked look. Maybe that makes me a tough interview, but if people say that they know something, they better know it, IMHO.
I've been through several hiring processes of late. The most recent was for a senior level engineer. I'm not sure what surprised me more - the number of resumes with blatant grammar errors / typos /cutesy BS on them....or the fact that the resumes were all pre-screened before I even saw them.
All I can do is look at these well-formatted pieces of crap and think "If this is your *best* work....something that you've supposedly taken some time to think about, proofread over, maybe ask some friends to proofread ...and they're still wrong! What does the work you do under pressure at 3am look like?"
Back in the day, A+ was useless. "This is a 1) Computer 2) TV 3) Banana .....Close Enough, you pass."
I have no certs. And I work with two different IT testing outsourcing units and I had to train both of them as to how to do their work and write a complete set of test cases.
In other words, we are training a culture of followers. The leaders have already been chosen but they need a population of collective followers so there won't be any trouble in the ranks. Knowledge leads to truth and truth leads to trouble for the collectivists.
LOL!!!!
I don't mean to be cruel, but it's a matter of scientific fact that the average person in the U.S. is ignorant of even the basics of grammar and syntax, and the less said about spelling, the better. But they can all spell “NFL” and “NASCAR”!
Note: I never graduated from college and possess no degree of any kind.
It’s “proofread”, not “proof read”, BTW.
It’s “affirm”, not “afirm”.
This is also why my admin casts a discerning eye over things too.
:-)
Most of these guys wouldn't beat A+ on the first try.
I way over-prepped for the A+ test. I burned through in about 10 minutes and it was so basic. Some of those minutes were just signing in and taking a survey.
I am looking at reactivating the certification thing. My comical budget probably won't support the full MCSE track. A few CompTIAs just to have them might be a start. I haven't priced any exams in a few years.
Well, we all need an editor!
We have a friend who is sent around the world to solve problems at the plants his company owns.
He says India and Egypt are his two least favorite places, no one will accept responsibility for errors. Time and money are wasted on the drama, shouting and shoving matches as everyone tries to pass the buck.
My brother is currently in a foreign country where he is working with nationals and he emailed me over the weekend with the exact same words in his complaint. He said the drama is incredible and he can’t wait until the end of the month when more Americans arrive.
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