On Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:53:00 -0400, Gary Nolan
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Every 5 years our Information Technology program has a formal
> review to ensure that we are meeting the needs of the students
> and industry. Some of the many questions we ask are:
>
> What does industry want from our graduates?
> What are the careers that need to be filled and what skill sets are
> required?
> What are the right sets of competencies that our graduates need?
>
> This is where you people come in. With the collected years of
> experience on this list server I know there will be some
> extremely relevant and insightful answers to these questions.
> This is your opportunity to help future graduates of our
> program meet the world well equipped. You do not need to
> give answers to all the questions just tell me what you would
> expect/like a recent graduate to be able to do when they show
> up to work.
>
> If you wish to look at our existing program follow this link
>
> http://www.nscc.ca/Learning_Programs/Programs/PlanDescr.aspx?prg=IFTG
> <https://webmail.nscc.ca/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?
> URL=http://www.nscc.ca/Learning_Programs/Programs
>/PlanDescr.aspx?prg=IFTG%26pln=IT-NOCONC>&pln=IT-NOCONC
>
>
> If you wish to look at our college in general follow this link
> http://www.nscc.ca/<https://webmail.nscc.ca/exchweb
> /bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.nscc.ca/>


At the risk of appearing acerbic, to begin with anyone who would
expect human beings to deal with the uri's given above has no place
in in a business environment.  The value of Information mainly
derives from the ease with which it is comprehended.  The purpose of
Technology is to provide and increase that value.  Convoluted uri's
are just one symptom of the utter indifference with which most IT
educational programs treat these two critical business needs.

Deciphering the first of these resolves to the following:

http://www.nscc.ca/Learning_Programs/Programs/ProgramListing.aspx?list=category&cat=D15

Has no one at nscc read of a REST routing table? Really, is there
any good reason why that uri does not read something like this
instead:

http://www.nscc.ca/education/programs/i-technology

or even

http://www.nscc.ca/programs/info-tech and its alias
http://www.nscc.ca/programs/computer

After all, other than educational ones, what programs does a
community college publicly offer?  And why force people to go though
a javascript menu generator when a simple xhtml one suffices?  Many,
many business users have javascript from unapproved webs sites
blocked.  Why provide a user facing system that requires a risky
technology be enabled for it to work?  What happened to the idea of
graceful degradation?  This is what I saw when I first visited the
uri given above:

Server Error in '/Learning_Programs/Programs' Application.
A potentially dangerous Request.QueryString value was detected from
the client (prg="IFTG<https://webmail.nsc...").
Description: Request Validation has detected a potentially dangerous
client input value, and processing of the request has been aborted.
This value may indicate an attempt to compromise the security of
your application, such as a cross-site scripting attack. You can
disable request validation by setting validateRequest=false in the
Page directive or in the configuration section. However, it is
strongly recommended that your application explicitly check all
inputs in this case.

Exception Details: System.Web.HttpRequestValidationException: A
potentially dangerous Request.QueryString value was detected from
the client (prg="IFTG<https://webmail.nsc...").

Source Error:

[No relevant source lines]


Source File: c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary
ASP.NET
Files\learning_programs_programs\5346a5eb\1afbac11\App_Web_fskkrvgv.5.cs
   Line: 0

Stack Trace:

Charming in it not.  A wonderful introduction to an institute's IT
program.


What do I expect from an IT professional?

1. Curiosity.  Without that nothing else matters for without
questions there can be no new ideas.

2. Literacy.  If they do not read widely then their value to us is
minimal.  No one can afford the time to discover every important
thing on their own and new important things arise every day.  Too
many IT people seem to have stopped reading the day that they
received their certificate/diploma/degree.

Fundamental writing skills are equally important.  I cannot recount
the number of blind allies and total waste of effort that I have
witnessed, or been party to, that were caused in the main by poorly
written instructions or descriptions.

3. Professionalism.  No matter what the job is it must be done to
the highest possible quality and the person must learn and improve
from the experience.  Self improvement is the fundamental value of a
professional.

4. Courtesy.  I am unimpressed by the current acceptance of
over-familiarity and frequently abysmally low standards of personal
appearance and behaviour evidenced by recent gradualtes.  I have
interviewed university graduates that apparently had not even
bothered to shave and whose dress was completely at odds with a
business environment.

5. Some familiarity with past and present project methodologies. 
Since these change over time with some rapidity I do not place
overmuch value on a person's present technical know how.  It will
all be obsolete in a couple of years anyway. On the other hand, I
view with great suspicion people who do not have some solid idea of
how we arrived at the present approaches to systems design and
project implementation.

6. Some knowledge of several current enterprise DBMS's, such as
Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.

7. A basic understanding of how to approach programming with a
working knowledge of Smalltalk or Ruby, C or Java, and one other
language from a distinct family like Lisp or Fortran or Pascal.

My experience with graduates of the local university and colleges
leads me to conclude that these institutions do a fair job with item
7.  They do passably well with item 5.  They do a generally poor job
with item 6 (it seems that to most graduates there exists but one
DBMS and depending upon their institution this is either MS-SQL
Server, MySql, SQLite3).

But formal IT education seems not accomplish much of anything with
items 1 through 4.

-- 
***          E-Mail is NOT a SECURE channel          ***
James B. Byrne                mailto:[log in to unmask]
Harte & Lyne Limited          http://www.harte-lyne.ca
9 Brockley Drive              vox: +1 905 561 1241
Hamilton, Ontario             fax: +1 905 561 0757
Canada  L8E 3C3

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