I worked in the CC system and I am a huge advocate to what they bring to market--a low cost alternative to primary institutions, cutting the high cost of a Bachelors degree by at least 1/3; but, those CCs were primarily focused on getting students to take their generals (call it what it is: an Undecided major). While this is great and all, most companies are expecting even their interns to have a 'hit the ground running' ability; right or wrong.
The only way for ANY college student to do this is through real-world experience (from an organization that is willing to take on someone very green or private repo work/portfolio). I am regularly asked by randoms on LinkedIn and/or my network as well as interns and/or candidates what they can be doing to improve their chances to get an internship or FT role. In those instances, I always recommend that these folks:
1. Come up with a project, end to end.
2. Develop the code and post it in a repo that can be accessed by companies during the hiring process.
3. Be able to explain the why behind the project, the entire process end to end, and--most importantly--why the work was important to do.
These are the items I believe will put those green students toward the top 20% of their competition in the market. I find entirely too many candidates who have a lot of coding and theory courses and not a whole lot of application of those learnings. By being able to show management of a project from end to end, be able to explain the development process coherently, and provide the potential business value it brings is a big way for those folks to stand out from someone who can just write code.
Many average four-year colleges aren't doing this for their students; CCs most definitely aren't.
Expecting college students to hit the ground running with whatever stack a company is running is bad and unreasonable and we should push back against it. Engineering, law, accounting, and medicine dont do this. Why should Computer Science? Dont reduce a university education into learning javascript frameworks.
I guess. I was never a programmer and I guess my last job was pretty nych hit the ground running--at least I was told I did. But not sure how much it's the norm.
I went to the University of Illinois. That’s a solid tech school pretty much across the board, often cracking the top five in a number of subjects, including CS.
But the real secret of that school was that, at least when I was there, they had too much computer hardware for the number of students.
The number of hours in a day you could show up in a lab and not have a waitlist was fairly generous. Which meant a lot of the smarter students had no problem working on their own pet projects.
From a “hit the ground running” standpoint, a lot of these kids were only bothering with a 3.3-3.9 GPA because time spent getting three more points on a test or homework was time lost from working on your project, or talking to people about theirs.
> I worked in the CC system; but, they were primarily focused on getting students to take their generals (call it what it is: an Undecided major). While this is great and all, most companies are expecting even their interns to have a 'hit the ground running' ability; right or wrong.
I haven't worked in the CC system, but I've been around the Belleuve/Seattle area CCs for many years.
And at least for those, there are broadly 2 tracks. The first is what you say - the first 2 years of a bachelor's degree track.
The 2nd track is a variety of certifications. Sometimes these are industry certs like Microsoft, Cisco, etc. And some of them are CC certs. But they aim to get people productive in 2 years.
The only way for ANY college student to do this is through real-world experience (from an organization that is willing to take on someone very green or private repo work/portfolio). I am regularly asked by randoms on LinkedIn and/or my network as well as interns and/or candidates what they can be doing to improve their chances to get an internship or FT role. In those instances, I always recommend that these folks:
1. Come up with a project, end to end.
2. Develop the code and post it in a repo that can be accessed by companies during the hiring process.
3. Be able to explain the why behind the project, the entire process end to end, and--most importantly--why the work was important to do.
These are the items I believe will put those green students toward the top 20% of their competition in the market. I find entirely too many candidates who have a lot of coding and theory courses and not a whole lot of application of those learnings. By being able to show management of a project from end to end, be able to explain the development process coherently, and provide the potential business value it brings is a big way for those folks to stand out from someone who can just write code.
Many average four-year colleges aren't doing this for their students; CCs most definitely aren't.