In another blog I sponsor, there is an ongoing discussion concerning the failure of colleges to adequately prepare students for IT jobs. One theme that has emerged is our failure to focus on problem prevention and problem solving. In the world of software development, this is a key aspect of software development. In order to develop secure software systems, we must imaging from the start all possible opportunities for breaches and misuse and then design to prevent these problems as much as possible. Similarly in database design, we need to focus on they types of errors, common or otherwise, that can result in errors often difficulty to diagnose without problem solving training. Rather than merely focusing on “how to” do things correctly, I believe we need to place far more emphasis on understanding scenarios that that cause efforts or other faults. I am now going to include problem prevention and resolution in all of my course objectives.
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July 26, 2010 at 1:41 pm
Vlad Grodzinskiy
I don’t know if the problem is that students not getting taught how to do this properly. I think things like security breaches have such a large scope and so many ways to infiltrate it becomes very difficult to track these things in your mind. More specifically, without a properly defined process there’s simply no way to secure your software. I tend to think of myself as being fairly bright, but I always noticed that no matter what, I always forget something.
To put it simply, let a process take out the human factor. Teach students to create processes that help them create secure software, and make those processes (and or checklists) a priority. If a student has had to create a process and follows it for all his projects in class, he’ll probably need a process at work and will feel lost without it.
November 12, 2010 at 1:38 am
Mamadou Diallo
I do not really think that colleges are adequately preparing students for IT Jobs. I think that an adequate formation will be similar to the formation of doctors at medical schools.
As we all know, medical school students spent a big part of their learning time at the hospitals applying what they have learned in class. Likewise, some states, like the state of Massachusetts (if I’m not mistaken), have started requiring, at least, one year of residency to students pursuing teaching degrees. Moreover, some technical schools, in France, require that students spend the last year of college at the enterprise in order for them to be fully prepared for the job market.
In sum, I think that colleges should do more on preparing students for IT jobs by requiring them to spend a big portion of their learning time at the workplace.