I’ve been getting a few contract jobs for freelance and technical writing as well as on-site service and support. The money isn’t bad. I pick up these assignments just like the rest of you–by conducting relational searches on the job board search engine.
However, I was mildly disturbed when I began to investigatea number of advertisements on the job boards asking for writers who could write technical papers, essays, white papers, and reports. I linked up with a number of other consultants who have done this work and read one article in a magazine plus saw a short (really short) expose’ on my local news channel about young people with jouranlist’s or english degrees making a living writing term papers and dissertations for rich college kids so that they can graduate from college with their Bachelor’s or higher degrees.
I found this disturbing guys. With all the crap the industry makes the rest of us do to keep up with their “so-called” developing technology (i.e. the endless adult education requirements, the costly certification programs that don’t do a thing for your career, and the continual haggling over training expenses), I’m wondering now how these same university and commercial schools–who bitched so loud and long about the experiential evaluation degree scams just a few months ago–aren’t doing a damned thing about shutting down these degree “escort services” popping up all over the internet.
As a hard-working member of a dying industry (American IT Professional…soon to be replaced by off-shore consulting shops), I was wondering how the rest of you feel about these yokels coming into our market sector with degrees and certifications that aren’t worth the paper they’re written on? And, what’s more, how can you tell except to wait six months watching the person destroy the information system before you find out that they never learned anything.
I recall a program sponsored with three million dollars in taxpayer money by Albany County here in New York. They retrained a bunch of people who had lost their jobs (carpenters, plumbers, electrician…even a pilot!) in Novell and Microsoft Server. My boss hired a bunch of them and they all came with certifications up the wazoo!
As the months progressed my friend and I found ourselves working 80 hours a week cleaning up one mess after another only to eventually learn that these “certified” people couldn’t negotiate their way out of an Introduction to Computing Science 101 Course!
Now I’m finding the same thing happening to me as an analyst. Thank God, I guess, that I’m cleaning up the messes left by previous “heavily-degreed” IT professionals. Who are these guys anyway. Not like the rest of you guys who post to this site, I’ll say. You all seem to know what you’re doing.
These people are making significant in-roads into this industry blurring the boundaries of professional utility by the very fact that many of them claim a college education or commercial training experience that was manufactured and not actually acquired through the diligent application of personal virtue.
And, by the looks of some of the disasters I’ve had to help clean up, they are gradually becoming in charge. I mean, these are real degrees from well-known Universities or authentic certifications from well-known, college-sponsored commercial schools.
What’s going on here? Or am I just caught in a time warp?
