Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> IT skills shortage -- fact or fiction?
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | More imported workers will be needed and we'll have to send more work
> | overseas to outsourcers... Baloney! The software doesn't know, of
> | course, that someone with good Windows administration skills can learn
> | Linux skills to become the new Linux administrator who's desperately
> | needed.
> `----
>
>
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/0/E5F071C651225E16CC257196001A0BF6?OpenDocument
It's tricky this, because it will cause arguments. But my experience of NT
types coming into UNIX or Linux shows that they struggle a great deal.
Not all of them, and usually not the more skilled or technically apt, but
there was a rush of half baked training courses sending out NT people who
could do most things, provided that it was something mentioned in the menu
of the course pamphlet they carry around with them.
When I get those night class 6 months to IT professional students in (they
send me a few each year) the first thing I do is give them some paper and
tell them to draw a block schematic of a computer. I wasn't looking for
detail, just blocks with cpu, ram, ports, some will add peripherals in it,
but I brush past that for now so long as the rest is there. But no, they
rarely come up with something even close. Fail.
So I talk them through that.
Then I ask them to map my network. They disapear for a few days, come back
and I know that it isn't going to be anywhere near. I also know that none
of them thought of mapping it from the inside. Fail.
So talk them through that.
I still believe that the best way into IT is through a compiler. You can
learn most about computers and networks from programming. So I start them
on a little assembler, that gives them the cpu architecture, they learn
that a register is a physical thing, they tend to see it as ... I don't
know what really, but from conversation its clear that they didn't know it
was hardware.
Then I take them to C++ or a script language.
I must be doing something right because I get a lot of compliments coming
back from their college saying how the students that had been with me had
accelerated a great deal, work with greater confidence born from a greater
understanding.
I haven't said that to blow my own trumpet, but just to show that training
students doesn't have to be difficult (I'm certainly not skilled in
teaching), all I did was put a concrete platform under them by teaching
them the basics, something the course should have done.
But giving them a course that is nothing more than a memory test 'See how
much of this course book you can remember for this weeks multiple choice',
does no one any use, its bad for the student and bad for the industry.
Retraining students that learnt on one of those courses to work on Linux is
not going to be easy at all. They will not learn more as they work, they
will learn how to put more of it into practice, but if something breaks
outside of that small experience, then its yet another call out job.
.
|
|
