I have always had grave doubts about the usefulness of university degrees in IT technologies. My reason for this is my own experience of working with, teaching, and interviewing degree holders. To be blunt, all (yes all) of the people that I have come into contact with who had university IT degrees, have been less than cute in IT technologies. They seem to be very sharp at management tasks and talking about this application or that application, but, if a systems fails they start yelling for a ‘blue-collar’ techie. You know, one of the little people from the village. So why is an MCSE less respected and valued than an MSc?
My argument is this, university degrees do not offer anything for those who want to work in IT infrastructural environments. That is, working with the operating systems and the incredibly wide and deep technologies that are involved. No they don’t!
Universities seem to have two main criteria for running IT courses. The first is ‘bums on seats’. University courses can attract funding, yes even these days. The second is industry’s voracious appetite for managers (viewed by many as the intellectuals of our industry – spare me!). My experience of managers is one that many will share. They are good for nothing. You can’t rely on a manager when anything goes wrong. They spend most of their time in meetings or taking trips to some exhibition or seminar (to sharpen their dull wits no doubt), if not that, then they are on a well earned break. If systems go down, the most important task for any manager is to find someone to fix the problem. And for this they get paid more pro-rata than the person with the skills and knowledge to sort out the systems. So why do universities spew out thousands of these intellectually muscled ‘experts’ every three years or so, who have little understanding of the systems that they are to use?
Those who work with the complex, and ever increasingly sophisticated network systems that the world depends on, have to gain their expertise, in most cases, by evolution. Some will take private/commercial training in particular technologies, some will achieve MCSE or similar status, but they will never be appreciated as much as those who have attained university degree status. Why not? The technologies they have learned about and work with every day, are equally as sophisticated and complicated as any that a university student will ever have dealt with. It’s because university is seen by society (count employers and recruitment companies as part of society) as the apex of intellectual prowess and home of the intelligentsia. A university degree, no matter how pointless it is in terms of usefulness (Indian Head Massage is important, I know this), will always trump an MCSE or any of the certification that is offered by the IT training companies and are now part of the world of IT. I include Cisco, Microsoft, ComPTIA and the many other vendor and non-vendor certification. None of these names, nor the technologies they represent are even heard of in a university course.
The question we need to address is why don’t universities offer degree courses in the infrastructural technologies that people who take an MCSE (for instance) are interested in? Universities turn out fresh-faced young hopefuls to be IT managers of various flavours, research and development personnel, application makers and various types of analysts. Fine and good, we do need these people. But we also need technical people to run the global systems that everyone relies on. We have them, but the perception is that they are second-class citizens in the world of IT, when compared with someone who has a university degree. We need to develop degrees for technical systems people. So that they can share the extra perks and respect that a degree brings with it.
Why don’t we have such degrees? Universities have a problem offering this kind of degree course. Who will teach it? The salaries paid to university tutors are not particularly exciting. Someone who has at least ten years experience in IT technologies, and is currently at the top end of their pay scale, is unlikely to give up a well paid job to work in a university. That is the problem that universities face. That and the fact that they don’t seem to have anyone advising them about the IT industry outside of application led technologies.
This does need to happen because the many jobs advertised every day in the IT papers and on recruitment web sites, state that a degree of some sort is required. I have seen job requirements that ask for a degree even if it is not directly related to the actual vacancy being offered. They just figured that if that person has a degree then they must be special. Maybe they just wanted to be able to say, “Hey look, we have a person on our staff who has a university degree. That’s gonna help our sales!”. Why is this the case? It’s because of that lingering perception of the kind of person a degree holder is. It is a false perception and extremely difficult to change. Therefore, we need degree courses in technologies concerned with network infrastructures. We need to go ‘beyond’ the MCSE, which is seen as a blue-collar certification. A sort of high-level vocational certificate. we need to raise the profile of our certication to degree status.
It’s interesting to note that, in the UK, the advisors to the government on matters of IT technologies, development and training, are all ex-university types. That is, probably, the reason why IT training in the UK is less than abysmal and bears little, if any, relationship to the requirements of the industry. It just spews out the same old rubbish about how important it is that everyone on the country goes to university, or something along those lines. This creates a gap between those who get a university degree and those who get some other kind of certification. I would like to see an end to this perception by encouraging our universities to offer courses that are the equivalent of the MCSE and such-like. This would enable our industry to move forward with fairness and not in the current two tiered structure, where those who have a degree are treated ‘more’ fairly and those who have an MCSE/MCSD (for instance) are treated ‘less’ fairly in terms of perception, respect and salary.
It’s not that an MCSE is less important or not useful. It’s that a degree will always trump it. And that is unfair and unjust. By having the opportunity to achieve a degree in the same technologies as those dealt with in the MCSE or MCSD, we will be raising the perception levels of our industry to recognise our importance. After all, we keep the systems running, secure and efficient. Currently, a university degree holder merely uses that system and knows nothing about it.
I realise that many people have both a degree and an MCSE or something along those lines. That’s great for them and good for the industry, and I know there will be exceptions where employer’s perception is concerned. But these are minor and do not balance my argument globally. We need to move our current certification structure from the vendors to the universities. That doesn’t mean that we should lose the MCSE/MCSD etc. It means that we institutionalise it. In doing so we will increase our kudos and change the perception that employers have of our current certification in relation to the university degree.
What are your views, experiences and opinions on this subject?
