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Teach Your Children Well


By SD Times News Team
September 1, 2005 —  (Page 1 of 2)
Is there anything less useful than a newly minted college graduate? Whether in programming, electrical engineering or journalism, book learning rarely maps directly into the real world.

That’s true not only because college grads lack the experience of working on real projects, being part of real teams, and betting their paychecks on real deadlines. It’s true also because the technologies, paradigms and tools being taught at most universities lag somewhat behind the state of the art.

Professors and faculty can’t revise their courses to take into account every new theory; that’s not their job, of course. Schools focus on opening young minds, laying a groundwork of principles and essential skills. What comes out is (or should be) top-grade raw material for a long and rewarding career in software development—not an analyst, architect or coder ready to assume a leadership role on a behind-schedule integration project.

That leads to a conundrum for software development managers. Do you hire recent graduates, hoping that their youth, enthusiasm and low starting salaries will overcome their relative lack of initial productivity, and knowing that you (and your team) will need to invest considerable time and effort in training? Or do you recruit more seasoned developers, paying more money but gaining the benefit of their prior work experience?

In the real world, of course, most development organizations do both, mixing together a variety of skills and tenures to produce a team that can hit the ground running but also learn as it grows.

The learning process can be jump-started, of course, by finding the right talent and the right places from which to recruit students. Many colleges and universities are helping new grads by providing real-life projects as part of the degree program. They’re also giving courses more relevance by requiring that faculty have recent industry experience, in addition to an academic background.

But even so, most employers need to be prepared to continue the educational process, not only with mentoring, but also with supplemental training on the specific technologies, methodologies and processes used within their organizations. Such training ranges from informal brown-bag sessions, to in-house classes, to online learning, to attendance at industry conferences and vendor seminars.


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