Jabo

Ok, so here I sit with this expensive little peice of paper that says I know a little about some field of study. Nearly every job I've seen wants 2+ years experience, or a specialized field of expertise. My wife has a degree in an unrelated field and she was up against the same wall. It doesn't seem to matter what your grades in school were (we both made high marks) they're just not willing to take a chance.

Can someone tell me what good is going to school if no one even looks at it other than to see what your attendance was? Not even temp agencies will give me any serious thought; the only thing I seem to qualify for is help desk, which I've done for 9 years now with lots of praise from my co-workers. Maybe I need to go back to school for something else; the IT field definately doesn't seem to have much to offer.

redfiretruck

O_O X_X. What degree did you get? O_o... I know nothing about this btw, just interested ^_^. Also what is a specialized field of expertise?

Jabo

It's an associates degree, and I'm not expecting to be a senior developer or anything, I mean, I'm not delusional with my expectations. But it just seems there is no ground floor opportunities in the IT field that lead in the direction I'm wanting to go. There's definately nothing to look forward to in my current place of employment.

10 months ago, a position "magically" opened up directly above me; position still hasn't been filled, and me and another guy have absorbed the responsibilities without absorbing more pay. This was after being told we would be getting new positions and more money as soon as they filled my current position.

I've tried a few times to find employment in programming since graduating and keep hitting the same old barrier.

Freaky Chris

this is one of the things that concerns me, if/when i begin my degree in computer science, will there be a job for me at the end of it?

I hope to do a sandwich degree though which should give me a good starting point as it means i have had 1 years placement, plus that placement would possible hire me.

But you are quite right most jobs are after a few years good experience, which is a major problem since no where is willing to give you the experience.

Chris

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big_k105

That is the catch 22 in pretty much every field though. All places want experience but without being about to get a job you can't get experience. After I got my AS degree I did manage to find a job but it was for an internship at a company I had work with before as a employee on the floor doing manufacturing work. And then I worked there for 5 years while I worked on getting my BS degree. Which got me the experience I needed to find a good job when I finished school. Try to find a place that would be willing to even give you an internship of some sort, or see if your current company has any programming jobs that you could do part time while you are doing your other responsibilities.

This is always going to be the hardest part of getting into a field, but if you can manage to get your foot in the door then you will find something that fits you.

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Grich

I have two jobs and I study, it sucks, believe me, it does. One is in retail, the other is at a surveyors firm that I do a bit of admin. Lately they gave me a bit of VBA scripting and Javascript, very little and basic stuff (validating input etc). I got that because I worked there for a while, I have been studying programming for three years now and I nagged the IT department for a bit of programming (I'm a good nagger).

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grumpy

This conundrum of employers wanting experience but not offering positions for people to gain experience occurs in every industry.

The basic reason for employers is money and risk: hiring someone without experience means a need to pay them and train them (i.e. cost) in a period when they are less productive (i.e. less return for the cost). Then there is risk for the employer: either the person does not work out (in which case the investment is wasted) or they take employment elsewhere (in which case investment benefits a competitor).

Contrary to popular belief, universities, colleges, etc are not required to offer training that makes someone immediately employable. An educational institution is about giving foundational knowledge, not about forcing people to apply those basics in any particular way. Even if the educational institutions do seek to make people employable, it is difficult because (particularly in IT) the industry follows short-term fads. A three year course in a discipline with "state of the art" that changes every couple of years will, almost certainly, have covered some things not relevant to employers when students have completed their study.

The net effect is that it is up to a potential employee to proactively do things to prove their worth and accept responsibility for their own professional development. Nobody else (parents, educators, employers) has that responsibility. Some common ways to address that are;

1) Find the rare employer who is prepared to invest in a new employee without experience and accept the risk of losing that employee once they become valuable. This often implies taking a job with government or public service (or in academia) but some larger companies also do it.

2) Get top grades from a top educational institution: this can sometimes make employers more willing to accept the risk due to inexperience. The catch is, different employers have different ideas of what is a good education (both institutions and subjects).

3) Swallow your pride and accept basic entry jobs (eg help desk) but, once in that job, proactively seek out additional work that goes beyond the job description and aim to do it well. In short, build up experience by doing better work than you are paid for. If this is noticed by your employer, it can get the foot in for a promotion (very few people are promoted to a position on the basis of potential: they are usually promoted on the basis of already working at that level and being valuable enough that the employer doesn't want to lose the employee). If it is not noticed by the employer, you have a claim of experience and demonstrated self-motivation when applying for a job that requires experience.

Grich

I completely agree grumpy. A grad should not expect to work for IBM or American Express straight away (it's possible if they offer a graduate position of course). You have to work from the bottom of the barrel to the top most of the time.

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MiKuS

i'm working a bottom of the barrel job in web development at the moment. my pay is shit and my hours suck i would rather work at mc donnalds and get better money but the thought of having over one year ecperience and about 2 months into my second year i've been told my pay will rise to a better amount (still shitty pay though) this is more incentive for me to persue my second year and get more certificates of knowledge. i believe having good degrees and 2 years experience working a shit job doing all the shit work, mainly debugging css to work on all browsers is beneficial, my prospective employers will think that i did 2 years of good solid learning at my job but little will he know i've been learning through hobby.

i got the job in the first place through being a cleaner, but not in the sense of sweeping floors; in the sense of cleaning up code and fixing noobish errors from the designers and their ide applications. in the interview i was told that when i proved myself worthy of moving up the ladder i would be moved up, and paid more - both of our php developers are older than 30 and also know many other languages and much more than i do. i respect the fact in a masochistic way, i find it good that only people who have worked from the bottom find it easy to swap employers, don't expect get great paying, fun jobs first off.