Re: Re: Re: too many ?


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Posted by Rick Denney on May 05, 2003 at 12:24:03:

In Reply to: Re: Re: too many ? posted by js on May 03, 2003 at 16:07:06:

Don't assume that companies aren't also brain-damaged about the role of education.

Anybody who expects a professional to be skilled in the job upon graduation is bound for disappointment. In the days we call the "good old days", companies would put fresh college graduates on the plant floor or in the mail room to "learn the business." Only when they understood the product of the organization would they progress.

I design and plan traffic management systems for a living. Very little of what I learned in undergraduate school (which was a transportation engineering specialty at one of the top five transportation engineering schools in the country) was useful to me even after a year, let alone now. As an engineer with some experience, I'm now expected to develop new methods and to teach them to fresh graduates. I spend a lot of my time teaching and developing training courses just for that reason. Very little of what I include in a training program was in my undergraduate curriculum. Nearly all of it I learned standing out on a street corner next to an older guy, who would point his wrinkled finger at something and tell me what I was looking at. Very few of my college professors could have done that.

Even so, what I learned in college was even more valuable: How to make my own way technically, so that I would not have to depend on others to tell me what to do.

The companies that will survive are those who hire those who can, alright, but those who can learn. "Trainability" is the number one requirement in corporate America for fresh graduates. But you are right that it is a vanishing trait among recent graduates, and this is largely because they have been told their degrees are training.

Rick "who is a member of corporate America" Denney


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