No substitute for experience.
What we need are apprenticeships. After 40 years in the industry I can honestly say that paper qualifications are worthless unless backed up by real world experience.
Too often I have seen candidates with CV's littered with certificates, degrees and copious use of buzzwords. But ask them to create a MySQL table with an auto incrementing field or write a shell script to copy files over 60 days old to a backup folder and that are usually stumped.
When I was starting out the industry was so new that the value of your CV was who you had worked for; in my case NCR and IBM. Other, usually smaller, companies knew the amount of quality training you received from those employers and that, coupled with your job title and how many years in those posts told them all they needed to know about you.
Today, the youngsters get a degree from what what was a Polytechnic and they sit some on-line multiple choice exams. They then think they are ready for the real world - no they are not.
If you look at the code that Microsoft "sells us" you can clearly see that even they have few coders of quality with the amount of redundant code that is still present. And no one can write well optimised code any more; they rely on cheaper memory and faster processors to cover up for poor code.
That can charge what they like for the exams as, for me, a good interview will tell you if the person is any good or not.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
