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Question of the Day: Have you ever ordered a product online and received a fake knock-off?
How to avert an ICT crisis
- Thread starter tinman
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Scooby_Doo
Honorary Master
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Mental-Tree
Senior Member
Its all a lie. I studied IT and after applying for over 200 jobs in a month I got 1 call back for an interview... to me that says that there are way too many people going into IT.
bekdik
Honorary Master
What's the problem? An F in woodwork is far more lucrative than any real education ...
Entry salaries of R200 000 a year... BS. When you graduate from university you are instantly unemployable currently because no company, post recession, wants you unless you have worked before in their specific technologies.. i think the rationale is that it takes a graduate anything from 1-12 months to become ok to great(pending how awesome or just determined they are). Another problem with ICT in SA is this.. companies are looking for specialists ONLY. Quick open your browser to careerjunction, careerweb, pnet and find me a graduate position that does not require experience paying > 144k/anum. The specialist thing is a major problem in Sa because it kills future development of talent.
What i find fascinating about the problem in Sa is that there are plenty of engineers and ict graduates out there looking for positions but companies either look for insane university results(like 1/3 of these okes are useless) or people with experience but that same companies are quick to whine that there is nothing coming through lol.
This is the part where companies hr and heads need to be hit with rock.. hard. There is a HUGE difference between hiring engineers, cs hons, cs, techies and self taught people and typically you will see the difference the minute you ask them to do something they have zero training or experience with. Yet business will go for least cost, least training options and end up with technicians. Good luck with that..
_TrXtR_
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Sure it's not to do with lack of experience?
If you had 5+ years java experience, I can give you a job and pay you a reward just for taking it.
With 3 years, I cant help you one bit.
TrueTenacity
Senior Member
Maybe if companies paid their staff properly and treated said staff like people and not just a number there'd be more people considering I.T. jobs...
hyperian
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I started my current job straight out of university on a salary quite a bit higher than R200k pa, which has been the trend for my entire honours class ...
Mental-Tree
Senior Member
That's another problem. There's apparently a shortage of qualified ITC professional but companies are reluctant to hire people who don't have 2+ years experience. As a result, every year the number of unemployed yet qualified ITC pros increases.
That's why I did the smart thing and started my own company. I've already taken over five clients from the company I used to work for because I know what I'm doing and get problems sorted ASAP. The real kick is that I only have 9 months of "working experience".
AndrewAlston
Group Head of IP Strategy – Liquid Telecommunicati
Interesting article, and while I cannot comment on most areas of the ICT industry, I can say that it is true that there is a massive lack of skill in the networking arena (particularly in the service provider sector).
The problem however in this particular sector is that the skills needed for the networking arena are very seldom gained in the current tertiary education system. The networking taught is of a fairly basic standard, even coming out of the institutions with Cisco academies, and as someone pointed out above, specialists are needed, and are hard to find. At the same time, while you can take a qualified ICT graduate and train him in this area, often the graduates demand money that is simply not realistic considering the training that has to be invested by the company before the individual is actually able to perform the job function for which he is hired.
Consider this for a minute in the networking arena, you hire a guy outta university who may have taken some basic networking classes, and if you're lucky he was also put through a Cisco Academy (the kind that NMMU actually has). At this point you have a guy who knows enough (maybe) to run a medium to large LAN. If you hire him, and now need to turn him into an engineer with service provider skills, its going to cost you what is likely to amount to significantly more than his 3 or 4 university year in additional investment to train him, and then, even with the training, he's going to need a good 6 months to a year to gain sufficient experience to actually be useful.
As a result, the people in this particular sector who do get hired, are often not the ones that went through the tertiary system, they are guys who found a passion and spent weeks and months teaching themselves and playing on home brew networks and simulators with a degree of dedication that is seldom found these days. That in turn creates a compound problem, the ICT graduate doesn't end up with a job, the guy with no qualifications does (IF you can find someone like this, I've seen 2 or 3 of them at the start of their careers in the last couple of years, which is far to few), and further to this, the price the good guys come at is simply not affordable.
I know of people holding CCNP certifications (which you can do in under 2 months, at a cost of less than a years worth of varsity, with nothing but self study), that have NO experience, asking starting salaries of more than half a million a year, and scary thing is, there are some companies willing to pay that (thank god they are few and far between, there has to be SOME dose of reality in the market!)
The solution here in my opinion is more complex than just getting more students through the tertiary system and turning out more ICT graduates, I believe more focused, more skills orientated approaches are needed, or a way to impart skill rather than high level overview, and as I said, while I only refer to the networking arena above, I really believe that in that particular sector, that is something HIGHLY lacking.
The problem however in this particular sector is that the skills needed for the networking arena are very seldom gained in the current tertiary education system. The networking taught is of a fairly basic standard, even coming out of the institutions with Cisco academies, and as someone pointed out above, specialists are needed, and are hard to find. At the same time, while you can take a qualified ICT graduate and train him in this area, often the graduates demand money that is simply not realistic considering the training that has to be invested by the company before the individual is actually able to perform the job function for which he is hired.
Consider this for a minute in the networking arena, you hire a guy outta university who may have taken some basic networking classes, and if you're lucky he was also put through a Cisco Academy (the kind that NMMU actually has). At this point you have a guy who knows enough (maybe) to run a medium to large LAN. If you hire him, and now need to turn him into an engineer with service provider skills, its going to cost you what is likely to amount to significantly more than his 3 or 4 university year in additional investment to train him, and then, even with the training, he's going to need a good 6 months to a year to gain sufficient experience to actually be useful.
As a result, the people in this particular sector who do get hired, are often not the ones that went through the tertiary system, they are guys who found a passion and spent weeks and months teaching themselves and playing on home brew networks and simulators with a degree of dedication that is seldom found these days. That in turn creates a compound problem, the ICT graduate doesn't end up with a job, the guy with no qualifications does (IF you can find someone like this, I've seen 2 or 3 of them at the start of their careers in the last couple of years, which is far to few), and further to this, the price the good guys come at is simply not affordable.
I know of people holding CCNP certifications (which you can do in under 2 months, at a cost of less than a years worth of varsity, with nothing but self study), that have NO experience, asking starting salaries of more than half a million a year, and scary thing is, there are some companies willing to pay that (thank god they are few and far between, there has to be SOME dose of reality in the market!)
The solution here in my opinion is more complex than just getting more students through the tertiary system and turning out more ICT graduates, I believe more focused, more skills orientated approaches are needed, or a way to impart skill rather than high level overview, and as I said, while I only refer to the networking arena above, I really believe that in that particular sector, that is something HIGHLY lacking.
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I agree wholeheartedly. To be honest, few people who make it through the educational system really know what's going on (and can actually apply it).
midnightcaller
Expert Member
+1
We need more people with your mindset and attitude.
Creating jobs is the way to go.
Stuyvesante
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O Please...
I have over 12 years professional experience in the Information Technology field with no paper work behind my name. I am a jack of all trades by now, but defiantly a master in some.
I hired people with National Diplomas for contract work before and when it gets to the job you need to train them how to do the job, but WHEN YOU apply for a position your CV gets dump the moment they see that there is no National Diploma, BSc or B-tech degree behind your name. The Information Technology field is ridiculous when it comes to hiring. I can defiantly vouch that the person who trained themselves have a quicker understanding how new tech works and to provide support for that tech than some person that just came fresh out of university. How many of these college or university students really go for the passion or is it the money they after ? What I think is the main problem with companies that recruited information technology employees is that they do not have the experience or do not understand how to hire a person with experience in the information technology sector. It takes a iT-guy to know a iT-guy. The paper works means nada and the paperwork ain't going to fix the problem(tech).
I think the only solution to hire successful people will be to build a website that has a testing facility for each field in iT. Throw in some real life examples and problems to test the candidate and you will be shocked how many candidates there is out there that know what they are doing with or without paperwork.
Just me 2c.
I have over 12 years professional experience in the Information Technology field with no paper work behind my name. I am a jack of all trades by now, but defiantly a master in some.
I hired people with National Diplomas for contract work before and when it gets to the job you need to train them how to do the job, but WHEN YOU apply for a position your CV gets dump the moment they see that there is no National Diploma, BSc or B-tech degree behind your name. The Information Technology field is ridiculous when it comes to hiring. I can defiantly vouch that the person who trained themselves have a quicker understanding how new tech works and to provide support for that tech than some person that just came fresh out of university. How many of these college or university students really go for the passion or is it the money they after ? What I think is the main problem with companies that recruited information technology employees is that they do not have the experience or do not understand how to hire a person with experience in the information technology sector. It takes a iT-guy to know a iT-guy. The paper works means nada and the paperwork ain't going to fix the problem(tech).
I think the only solution to hire successful people will be to build a website that has a testing facility for each field in iT. Throw in some real life examples and problems to test the candidate and you will be shocked how many candidates there is out there that know what they are doing with or without paperwork.
Just me 2c.
I kind of agree with your post. But do you mean definitely or defiantly? Just asking.
^^vampire^^
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The IT training in universities nowadays is a joke. I did my Ndip IT at UJ and sailed through the courses, getting distinctions for every subject. The drooling messes that fraudulently managed to get into these courses and managed to pass shocked me to the core. The university made a screw up and people who didn't qualify managed to get in and a handful still managed to complete the course.
I managed to find the university courses easy because I'm a hands on and passionate programmer. I've been messing with computers since I was about 4 years old - I've done the old school programming, I've built the networks, I know how to sort things out. The "students" that are coming out of varsity nowadays only have experience of what they have read in the textbooks - I guarantee you 95% of the students that come out of varsity wouldn't know what a network cable is if you put it in their hand and told them what it was.
When i finished with varsity it took me 5 months to find my first job. I had aptly demonstrated my skills to potential employers fulfilling all their questions to great satisfaction yet they were absolutely shocked that i wouldn't work for R3000.00 gross per month. I had to fight to get my first solid salary of R6000.00 per month - that's R72000.00 per year, a far cry from R200k+.
Unfortunately that's not where it ends - I have to accept that I will be working in an open plan office with 30+ programmers because at the end of the day IT staff aren't real people. You will have to constantly change your employ as not being a real person means that you don't get "performance bonuses", don't get an increase at the end of the year (inflation will therefore make sure that in a few years time you pay to go to work and not the other way around) and not receive any kind of decent benefits. You will most likely spend your working life being under one IT manager and never get a management position - don't believe me? go to any company that employs a group of programmers - 1 manager, 30 staff under him. I work with 60+ year olds, still slave programmers who can't afford to fix their own 1997 ****mobiles.
I know people who mess around, have part time jobs in obscure industries like driving around to shops and do price tracking 2-3 days a week that earn almost double what I do. Others set up those LG TV displays in shops and are earning 40k-50k per month for 3 or 4 days work a week - another guy does the same things, just got a promotion and a 60k bonus. I work 5 days a week, over time (that they look at you with disgust for if you ask to be paid for), minor increases and no bonuses. I'm 25 and can barely afford a car, let alone a home.
This should serve as a warning to anyone considering IT: RUN AWAY, FAST!
I managed to find the university courses easy because I'm a hands on and passionate programmer. I've been messing with computers since I was about 4 years old - I've done the old school programming, I've built the networks, I know how to sort things out. The "students" that are coming out of varsity nowadays only have experience of what they have read in the textbooks - I guarantee you 95% of the students that come out of varsity wouldn't know what a network cable is if you put it in their hand and told them what it was.
When i finished with varsity it took me 5 months to find my first job. I had aptly demonstrated my skills to potential employers fulfilling all their questions to great satisfaction yet they were absolutely shocked that i wouldn't work for R3000.00 gross per month. I had to fight to get my first solid salary of R6000.00 per month - that's R72000.00 per year, a far cry from R200k+.
Unfortunately that's not where it ends - I have to accept that I will be working in an open plan office with 30+ programmers because at the end of the day IT staff aren't real people. You will have to constantly change your employ as not being a real person means that you don't get "performance bonuses", don't get an increase at the end of the year (inflation will therefore make sure that in a few years time you pay to go to work and not the other way around) and not receive any kind of decent benefits. You will most likely spend your working life being under one IT manager and never get a management position - don't believe me? go to any company that employs a group of programmers - 1 manager, 30 staff under him. I work with 60+ year olds, still slave programmers who can't afford to fix their own 1997 ****mobiles.
I know people who mess around, have part time jobs in obscure industries like driving around to shops and do price tracking 2-3 days a week that earn almost double what I do. Others set up those LG TV displays in shops and are earning 40k-50k per month for 3 or 4 days work a week - another guy does the same things, just got a promotion and a 60k bonus. I work 5 days a week, over time (that they look at you with disgust for if you ask to be paid for), minor increases and no bonuses. I'm 25 and can barely afford a car, let alone a home.
This should serve as a warning to anyone considering IT: RUN AWAY, FAST!
The_Unbeliever
Honorary Master
This.