Just read this read feedback in this month’s CPA In the Black magazine:
I have been looking for a position as a graduate accountant for more than six months, and have been seeing employers who demand experience in an accounting practice. Experience, that’s all they want. Do they not consider other values? We need to start off somewhere, to gain work experience and then complete the CPA Program. Many of us are commerce graduates and qualified to work as professional accountants. Yet we end up working casually as waiters, drivers or admin staff – none of which is our preferred career path.
How is that a vicious circle? I guess new grads can never be experienced and employable if they do not have an opportunity to get experienced. Professional Accounting has always been the gateway course to get you permanent residency in Australia if you are an overseas student, because somehow we need more accountants. However, thousands of Accounting grads every year does not seem to relieve any drought — grads still cannot find suitable job, and we still need accountants.
The very same can be said about the IT industry in Australia. In July issue of Australian Personal Computers magazine, there’s an article titled “The IT Job Crisis”, pointing out there are simply not enough specialised and experienced IT workers. Lack of software developers has slowed down growth of many IT companies — at least I know that we are. So much work, but not enough hands (to type on the keyboard). However, thousands of computer science/engineering grads each year ended up doing non-IT related jobs because their profile just do not fit the bill…
Personally I do not think “lacking of experience” is an issue though. Companies hire experienced specialists as contractors to finish off a project, but to really build a development team, I would rather hire a bright graduate than someone with 10 year J2EE or 5 year RoR experience. They would have fresher ideas, would be faster picking up new technologies, and would be more open minded than many that are more experienced. Too bad that smart kids are even rarer than experienced specialists. Even if we have found one, he would be too smart to work in a small ISV…
(One new guy started at work today, whom we interviewed 2 weeks ago. We are still hiring though.)
Hmm so there is no hope for not so smart graduates then? :)
I am very interested to hear from someone who is at the other end of interview table, which is you Scott. How would you identify someone being smart? By his uni results or by his ability to articulate his thoughts?
Also are there any attributes beside smart-ness that you would consider?
I’ve been doing some thinking myself, if I ever in the position of hiring, I think I would be looking firstly at passionate people, people who really love what they do rather than people who “happen” to do IT course so “have to” do an IT job.
That really depends on the job on hand. In some circumstances, where a lot of hands are required, companies won’t be that picky so IT grads can hopefully land on a job to build experience. However personally I feel it is not easy to horizontally scale a development team — more hands do not usually mean more work done.
I am not the only interviewer for developers at work, and each interviewer has his own strategy and agenda. I think it is still important to check the university grades so you can filter out unneeded interviews. Also being a smart loner might not be a good addition to the team, where he/she is expected to work in groups for some projects. But sometimes someone who is “too socialable” can also bring undesirable distraction to the team.
You are right that “passion” is an important factor. It is not how they are passionate about the job, but how they are passionate about the technology. Sometimes it does not matter whether someone has years of experience or is knowledagable in certain methodology. After all IT is a dead boring industry that requires long hours of concentration, and you really need to be interested in it to keep on going.
It is not difficult to test whether someone has that passion. Easiest test — “do you have a pet project that you want to show us”? Or even “religious discussions” like “Vi or Emacs?”, “Linux or FreeBSD?” can help you filtering out those who are into technology from those who just want a job.
We’re constantly looking for good talent to work on the beautiful Gold Coast but it has been an uphill battle for as long as I can remember. It isn’t even that finding ‘experienced’ people is hard, finding quality graduates is even proving to be quite difficult.
Well. What do you expect from the Gold Coast?
It is a great place to live, but you simply can’t get good fresh grads. What do you have there? Bond and GU? Even for GU I think the computer science/engineering is not on the Gold Coast campus.
By the way I am in Gold Coast at the moment — coming here for a week for holidays.