Keeping people employed?

[alaskaflyer]

I kind of disagree with Nick on the value of going to college, but I can relate to him as well. Without going into boring details, I will just say that I speak Spanish like a Mexican. Like a Puebla Mexican to be even more specific. I have never taken a class in Spanish. Because I am a white Midwesterner, as far from a Latino as one could get, I have a hard time convincing some people that I speak Spanish. It came up when I applied to be a probation officer. They noted on my resume that I said I spoke Spanish, but noted that it was not in my transcript that I had ever taken any Spanish classes. I said that I had never taken a Spanish class. Then they asked me how I spoke it then, and I had to say that I just do. Then they asked me how well I spoke it, and I told them that I didn't know, because I didn't know how to quantify it. That was not what they wanted to hear. It was interesting, because I got to thinking that in my circumstances, without it on a transcript anywhere, I had a hard time convincing anyone that I could. They did hire me however, but not before they talked to a couple of my references who told them that it was not an issue.

Why didn't you simply interview in Spanish?

 

[COFlyBoy]

I'd like to point out that some companies may require a college degree simply as a way to reduce the number of resumes that the HR department has to wade through.

I work at a big company and our HR dept gets dozens of resumes per opening. You have to have some criteria to cut that down. A college degree is an easy way to do that.

Also, trying to determine if a person has engineering expertise w/o a college degree is not necessarily an easy thing to do (in a 1/2 hour interview). The assumption is that if they made it through 4 years to get an engineering degree then they probably managed to gain some engineering skills. Not saying you can't get those skills w/o going to college, but the hiring company has to put in more work to figure that out.

 

[denverpilot]

I'd like to point out that some companies may require a college degree simply as a way to reduce the number of resumes that the HR department has to wade through.

I work at a big company and our HR dept gets dozens of resumes per opening. You have to have some criteria to cut that down. A college degree is an easy way to do that.

Yep, that was the point Nick and I were making... it's completely arbitrary and has no basis in reality. But that's normal for Dilbert-land.

Also, trying to determine if a person has engineering expertise w/o a college degree is not necessarily an easy thing to do (in a 1/2 hour interview). The assumption is that if they made it through 4 years to get an engineering degree then they probably managed to gain some engineering skills. Not saying you can't get those skills w/o going to college, but the hiring company has to put in more work to figure that out.

Great for an entry-level position, but at least in my group we never hire without about 3 hours of interview time, different interviewers, multiple sessions. The hiring manager gets a pile of resume's and usually does round 1 on the phone which is just to confirm the applicant's background, and then the marathon begins. We give an OBJECTIVE skills test and never rely 100% on certifications or stuff on the resume'... it's all way too easy to fake in the tech biz and harder to verify than simply saying, "Here's a test. It'll take 1/2 hour. You won't pass, it's hard. We're looking to see where you're at, so just answer to the best of your ability."

The test for our group has things on it ranging from rote memorization of H.320 and H.323 standards and how they relate to other ITU specs ("the Do You Know the Lingo section") to simple TCP/IP and netmasks, T1/T3 telco standards and practical questions, and some Database/SQL/DBA type stuff.

RARELY does anyone get it all. Teleconferencing is one of those multi-discipline areas where it all "comes together" and a new person who's been in a traditional job-role at either a telco or an IT department, won't know about 1/2 of what they need to know to survive.

If they're hired, they still have about a 3-6 month period where they'll have lots of "buddy" support from the team, so interpersonal skills are HUGE... way way way way way (did I say way?) more important than being 100% "educated", "certified", whatever. If they can't get along with their peers, they're never going to fully get up to speed, and they'll probably find themselves leaving in about a year... either of their own accord, or fired... and firing these days is difficult... as we all know. Companies are scared of their own liability now, due to decades of bad hiring practices... and probably rightly so.

We really feel the only way to really tell if they're going to make it in tech support is to toss them a test where they're in quite a bit over their heads and see if they can doggie-paddle. If they can do that, we can teach the rest.

You end up with a better employee down the road, too. The folks that come in with big heads from all their sheepskin are often intimidated by the core folks who've been doing this for 20 years or so, or they never quite get along with them because they don't respect "what they don't know". Especially the ones that come in straight from the "MBA in Telecommunications" degrees. They're usually the most entertaining to watch -- if their heads don't explode.

You know you're having fun when on your first day you ask for help and a co-worker says, "Get an IP sniffer trace in Wireshark and see if the H.323 streams all came up after the call negotiated." And they go... "Huh?"

"Here... let me show you... they'll show you some of this stuff in the next tech class, but it won't be blowing through town for another month or two."

Tech support ... fun, but it also sucks for some who can't handle on-the-job learning... with software releases changing the behavior of the core products every 6 months... classes are out of date before they're taught sometimes.

 

[TMetzinger]

Then what jobs are left for those who don't have a valuable skill? It's rather silly to imply that nearly everyone should have to get more then a high school diploma just to make it through life.

Guess they better get a valuable skill. There are still plenty of "manual labor" jobs out there, and plenty of upward mobility in those fields for folks who have knowledge and judgement gained on the job.

 

[Maxmosbey]

Why didn't you simply interview in Spanish?

I guess because no one who was interviewing me spoke Spanish. I assumed so anyway, considering they were looking for someone to take on their non-English Spanish speaking clients. I can juggle too.