GCSE and A-Level results for the UK were released recently to reveal that records have been broken again for the 14th consecutive year with more students obtaining higher grades. So why is it that so many are struggling to secure jobs despite record performances?
The recession is certainly to blame for part of this worrying phenomenon but for the web industry at least, there is another issue of concern – educational institutions. These institutions are offering more and more courses that are doing nothing but cramming your CV with the buzzwords of the industry at the time. There are two problems with this approach. The first issue is that trends on the web are usually measured in months and by the time you have finished your 3 or 4 year course, you are armed with nothing but antiquated knowledge and the techniques of yesteryear. The other side of the problem is that businesses who are likely to be around in a year are not looking for buzzwords, they’re looking for evidence of a deeper understanding which primarily comes from experience.
I began teaching myself how to build websites as a hobby and I enjoyed it so much that I decided that building websites is what I wanted to do for a living. At the time I was 16 and in the last year of secondary school and even then I realised something very quickly. That realisation was that most of the things I had been taught to date were simply not useful within the context of what I wanted to do. With this realisation I knew that I either needed to obtain the knowledge myself or find somewhere that offered it. I spent a lot of time researching colleges and courses and eventually settled on one that seemed to tick all the boxes at the time “Photoshop”, “Flash”, “Video” and this was in the year 2000.
At college I was taught that the web was a progressive place which would be dominated by this new technology called “Flash” and other rich content. We hardly bothered with HTML other than the bare minimum required for embedding the Flash content. This was indoctrinated in us for the 2 years of the course, after which I decided I needed more qualifications and so would be going on to university. After starting university, within the first month, I learnt that we would not be doing Flash at all because the future was ASP.NET and Search Engine Optimisation and so my retraining begun. Now, ASP.NET didn’t fizzle out in quite the same fashion as Flash did in terms of predicted web domination, but the open source movement was vastly underestimated and not catered for at all in 5 years of education.
After leaving university in 2006 with no sign of recession in sight, I found it extremely difficult to find a job in the industry. It took about 10 months before I found work doing what I knew how to do and it wasn’t in ASP.NET either. Luckily I had carried on with my first love, PHP, in my spare time and this was cresting nicely as a technology with cheap hosts popping up everywhere and with no complicated licensing issues which plagued Microsoft. Fast forward 4 years to today and now I understand why its so difficult for graduates in the web industry. As the company I work for looks for perspective new developers, I get to look at the CV’s and example code to see if the candidate is suitable for the role and I see exactly the same problem I was up against.
There is no shortage of applicants and I will probably get through 20 or more before finding a suitable candidate for interview. The CV is always crammed full of Buzzwords (HTML5, CSS3, Canvas, AJAX etc) and then the accompanying source code is a snapshot of industry best practices 10 years ago. The problem is that the code examples reveal that while the person is at least aware of a particular technique, they don’t know how to use it. We have interviewed people who had immaculate code examples, but when quizzed about why they did something a certain way, they can’t answer – what they were taught just happened to perfectly fit the one example.
So what can be done to remedy the situation? Institutions need to start teaching underlying theory instead of high level techniques. No specific language should be looked at until the students understand the theory behind writing code. Topics such as code reuse and maintainability should be first on the agenda. When students get around to writing code, it should be done using source control and issue trackers because these are the tools they will be using in the industry and these are not fads that come and go like most things that are currently taught.
From your point of view, there are a number of things you can do to improve your chances at getting a job. Add to your CV what development methodologies and workflow tools you are familiar with and not just the buzzwords. Contributing to an open source project way a good way to prove that you can write good code because it has passed peer scrutiny in order to be included in the project. Ensure that the source code you submit is sufficiently documented and that the thought process and reasons why things were done are clear. I’ve nearly disregarded code examples because there were no comments or explanation and it looked like a bad idea at first which the reasons later dawned on me. Above all, make sure you make it clear that you use a logical thought process to writing your code and that you’re not just regurgitating code without understanding why or even if it’s a good idea to do so.
