Cisco vows to give 4,000 Brit kids a proper IT schooling Networking giant Cisco has pledged to leave the UK a technology “investment legacy” after the Olympics that’ll deliver thousands of skilled workers for IT. Cisco is hooking up centres of learning across the UK and plans on opening networking academies in East London and the Olympic boroughs. Neil Crockett, managing director …
A case yes; a strong case, no.
Unfortunately, the burden of proof is on the plaintiff. Anyone making a claim would have to provide documentary evidence to support their assertion. Such a claim can be successful, but I would suggest that you be prepared for a fight; if they have a half decent lawyer, most evidence would probably be inadmissable. For comparisons, look at the results of cases where women have sued for sexual harrasment at work.
Perhaps this will change in years to come, but I wouldn't hold my breath in the mean time.
“Tech is a really cool thing to do” in places like Bangalore, he said. “The Indian graduates will work enormously hard to get into the Tata, Wipros, Microsofts and Ciscos in India. It ain’t like that here. We really need to get over why IT ain't cool. It's not a problem people have in other parts of the world.”
Exactly - it may be cool in Bangalore because loads of British jobs have been outsourced to India or offered to Indians on ICT visas who are then rotated in and out of the UK, so the companies concerned can avoid UK/European employment law and save a wad of cash. Statistics clearly show that IT graduates have the least chance of finding work and that's why nobody is interested.
Getting people who see the pound signs, and sign up to a course not because they enjoy the subject but because they see money in it is not the answer...
Having interviewed many people over the years, i have found that:
Many people have no real interest in technology, they see the pound signs, follow a course and are willing to simply accept what they're told and repeat what they were taught rather than thinking for themselves. These people are generally mediocre at best, and soon get left behind by technology, while trying to hold everyone else back with them.
And then you have the people who have a true interest in the subject, who will go out and teach themselves, who have a natural curiosity and will not accept what they've been told without investigating it for themselves.
The latter are almost invariably better, provided they aren't stifled by being subservient to the former...
I have also found that the most capable people, are those who started their computing use at a young age, and usually using systems from the likes of Sinclair and Commodore.
Modern computers, OSX, some modern Linux and especially Windows is _VERY_ bad for teaching youngsters...
You give them a system that shows them dire warnings "don't touch these system files, you might break something!" they will become afraid to experiment... And experimentation is the best way for a youngster to learn.
This is even worse if the computer is shared, as they will be afraid of breaking it and incurring the wrath of the other users...
And this becomes very clear when speaking to people, those who's first exposure to computing was one of these more modern systems are often far less inquisitive, and are willing to simply accept what someone tells them and are usually fearful of trying to find out for themselves.
By contrast, the C64 and Sinclair series kept the core system in ROM... No matter what you did, a quick power cycle and its back to normal. Similarly the Amiga although it loaded Workbench from floppies, one of the first things the instruction manual told you to do was make a copy of your workbench disks (complete with instructions on how to do so) and then encouraged you to play with the copies, safe in the knowledge that you can just make a new copy if you break it. All of these systems also came with manuals which instructed you how to use the system, and even how to start programming it.
What's needed, is more systems which actively encourage people to experiment with them and learn, given to kids at a young age... Hopefully the Raspberry Pi will go a long way towards this goal.
No problem with educating the kids in something that matters but please, please, please don't let two dinosaurs indoctrinate them with non-transferrable skills specific to their dying monopolies. What we absolutely don't need is more budding network engineers who have only been taught how to waste money on mountains of Cisco kit you don't need and network admins who think that Windows server is the only choice.
"according to Cisco – there are 60,000 vacant tech job slots in the UK"
Perhaps they are like the positions I keep seeing advertised that fall short of the mark. Like this one I saw last week: 1st & 2nd line support with commercial experience in developing .NET and SQL. £18-20k.
Is this a developer role or a support role? It can't be both because that would be paying £30k and up for a .NET dev right? 1st line support for £18-20k maybe, but then why would you go to all the trouble and expense to get paid that much?
The other possibility is that they are all team lead or senior positions and require so much experience that anyone not already in such a role doesn't stand a chance of moving up.
+1 I've lost count of the number of times I've applied for those sort of jobs, get a standard response back "we have had an overwhelming response for this position, but unfortunately, you are not suitable", only to see the exact same post advertised again!
"unfortunately, you are not suitable" is HR-talk for "well, we really want cheap inexperienced incompetants, not the skilled competant people we actually advertised for".
“We’ve got a bit of a crisis,” said John Lewis
Too right we do. Re-read this report and identify that the whole thing is London centric, yet according to the stats oin the report outside of london is where the focus needs to be. Why would anybody outside of London bother. There are no jobs, no investment, no training, no grants, no startup sweetners such as the Telefonica one reported some days ago or Tech City.
Its a disgrace.
It's about teaching the public at large that computers are more than combined Browsers/Videoterminals/E-Book-Readers/Gaming Devices. Just like we teach everyone a little bit of maths or English or Geography, people should know what a "loop" is, and how computers work in general. For example they should know that computers can output everything, they can "lie" to you if programmed that way. This is a concept very strange and unusual to the population out there.
It is simply necessary that the population at large has a glimpse of knowledge of that technology. After all we all have to make decisions in a world which is more and more influenced by computers.
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