Re: SAGE, certification, and you

[Sarah Sheehan <Sarah.Sheehan@haledorr.com>]

Bill Bogstad wrote:
> 
>         Yes, a college degree is helpful for many jobs and is unlikely to hurt
> much in any job.  However, what degree?  In recent reporting in the news about
> the lack of skilled IT staff and the dearth of CS majors, one point which I've
> seen reported (albeit rarely) is that only about 25% of people working in IT
> have a CS degree.  Even if you expand to include EE, CE, and similar degrees,
> I'd guess that you wouldn't find much more then 50% of working professionals
> have degrees that are remotely connected with IT.  Now, I suppose that this
> could mean that 50% of the people working in the field are incompetent; but my
> personal experience is that the type of degree someone has is not that
> strongly coorrelated with their competence with IT systems.  There are even a
> fair number who have no degree at all.  I suspect that in system
> administration the percentage of working professionals with non-IT related (or
> no) degrees is higher; just because of the way that many people end up in
> system administration.

There's another explanation for the low percentage of field related
degrees in the IT world - it's a recent field!  Not everyone went to
college after the advent of computing.  Some of us typed our college
papers on manual typewriters back before there were degrees in the
field.

My degree is in English Lit and yes, I am good at finding the irony in
many of my tasks but my years of experience are in unix systems
administration.  The nature of the job (unpredictable hours, constant
training, no predictable schedule firther than a few weeks ahead) keeps
at least a couple us from signing up for graduate classes in our field.