Why doesn’t this diploma work? It’s broken.
I’m back. Sorry for the break in service but I decided it was time to get sick so I did. Feeling better and now it’s back to reporting about the Weak Interface!
(I’ll give you several posts this weekend to make it up to you)
I like it when anyone contributes their own experiences. A valued reader at http://www.anthonydamasco.com (check him out!) sent this. Read and enjoy, my comments in ‘[]’ and after.
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.. there a lot of things that are messed up about our industry [which is why this blog exists]. I’ll start with telling you about tech schools that rush you through a course and then give you a certification that means nothing in the real world.
Alright so I went to school about 5 years ago for website development, I pretty much knew html and stuff because I had made a lot of websites on my own. So I paid 15k for this 9 month course, and they told me that I would be earning college credits so that If I wanted to go to college later I could earn a degree using them.
To keep it short, the staff sucked, I constantly corrected the instructors, the courses were straight out of the adobe guide books, and I learned absolutely nothing useful. Oh and no college credits (they told be my last month there) I graduated from school and went on a few job interviews for web design and I was pretty much laughed at when I told them where I went to school. So I had to load trucks for UPS at night and do free web projects during the day to build a portfolio good enough to compete with people that had 4 years of school + a portfolio that they had built the entire time they went to school[We all need to be more like him, he wanted something and did what he had to to get it, can you tell I’m a fan?].
Schools like Lincoln tech, Chubb institute, Cittone institute, totally screwed everyone that I went to school with. Even to this day I see fresh out of tech school web developers working at restaurants and producing really crappy work that they were told, was acceptable.
One of the biggest problems with the schools are they are always 4 years behind, I talked to this guy who just graduated a month ago from the chubb institute, and he didn’t even know what “Web 2.0″ meant, or SEO, not even ajax, or that there is an actionscript 3.0 [if you don’t know these terms you shouldn’t be in the industry].
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Sadly this story rings too true. Countless hopefuls have burned money on useless schools. The truth is, in any industry, performance matters more than credentials. The normal idea is that you look at credentials and can infer how the person will perform. Unfortunately since these schools do not necessarily have to meet the academic standards that a University does, and the fact that no matter how inept the graduates are more will still sign up, there is no real motivations to deliver value. If you talk a big game in commercials, media, etc, enough people will mistake it for a real school and give you money.
I can’t say it enough: Ask professionals.
Universities work with industry to prep students with what they need for the industry. These schools don’t need to work with industry cuz they know how to “sell” the idea of a degree without actually producing anything.
Be careful. Be skeptical. Ask the pros
Until next time
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Thursday, August 14th, 2008