Technology At City University of Seattle

One of the best things you can do is get an education, there are enough statistics and numbers on this one that shows a distinct increase in the ability to generate an income if you have a college degree. But what about the idea from Vineet Nayar, the CEO Of HCL Technologies out of India that American College grads are unemployable?

Nothing is going to cause a firestorm of controversy more than saying that graduates out of America’s technology colleges are unemployable. The problem is that is only part of the story, and to get the full story, we have to visit Vineet Nayar’s blog over at HCL, and read between the lines of what was posted at Information Week.

That implies that high quality talent needs to be available across the globe that can drive this opportunity. Unfortunately, that is not true. While there are good examples of some countries putting emphasis on changing their education system to make it more business ready or what I call “increasing employability” – in most parts of the world, education and employability are not in step with each other, resulting in significant investment being made by individual companies in training. The employability challenges are universal. This includes countries like India and China where there isn’t a dearth of education institutions, but “employability” issues persist. In the US, President Obama had mentioned expanding access to higher education as one of the basic pillars of America rebuilding itself into the superpower status it enjoyed . http://www.barackobama.com/issues/education. Source: HCL

While information week posted:

The official wanted to know why HCL, a $2.5 billion (revenue) company with more than 3,000 people across 21 offices in 15 states, wasn’t hiring more people in his state. Vineet’s short answer: because most American college grads are “unemployable.” (In fairness to HCL, the company recently announced plans to open a delivery center in another state, North Carolina, and invest $3.2 million and hire more than 500 employees there over the next five years under a Job Development Investment Grant.) Source: Information Week

In many ways, both are right, which is one of the reasons that the Information Systems, Information Security and Computer Science degree programs feature what I call “Work Ready”, in that the systems and processes you use here at CityU will emulate the same processes that you will find in a company. This has not been an easy task, but when students start in fall, they will be checking in and checking out code sets via source depot in all the programming classes. For those in the web programming classes, they will be working in an individualized IDE where they can work with IIS and Apache, MS SQL and MySQL. What you get here will meet the needs for understanding processes that real companies use. This is also the reason why we have started the advisory boards with people who work in companies to help guide our programs.

We do need to understand that IT (Information Technology) is global; we have a global pool of resources to choose from. While many businesses will rely on making a decision based on the cost of implementing a project, American grads are just as good as other grads in other countries. The core issues is what are colleges doing to address real world issues in IT, and how are we training students to meet those challenges.

The implementation of college, government, business, and the students is critical to the success of education, in this part I agree with Vineet. It is important to understand that any failure in any part of the process means that the student is not work ready. College is expensive, and that is just one of the realities of colleges. Colleges need to support their students and give them real world skills that can be immediately used by companies, regardless of the size of the company. There is much more to discuss on this, but I would also be interested in hearing your thoughts on this. Discuss here, let me know what CityU of Seattle can do to make you “work ready” or in Vineet’s words, “Increasing Employability”.

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