Skills for IT Grads

Well for all my railing about Corporate America not hiring IT grads, I finally came across an article that explains some of the reasons why. ComputerWorld ran an article the lack of seven important skills that grads don’t seem to have. A list of these skills would be:

1. A fundamental understanding of basic business functions – basic finance, operations, marketing, etc.
2. Lack of experience with enterprise system integration – making existing systems talk to one another
3. Lack of knowledge about emerging technology – keeping up on tech like cloud computing and business intelligence
4. Lack of tech basics (fixing your own PC, working from the DOS prompt, etc)
5. Non familiarity with older (legacy) systems – mainframes and cobol aren’t dead yet
6. Lack of real world perspective – understanding how to provide a tech solution that meets the needs of the business
7. Working as a team

Now to me, that’s an interesting list, it addresses specific needs and forces graduates to pay attention. Maybe in my frustration of looking for a development job I missed something, or a lot of somethings. For instance, I can tell you that my resume only addresses some of these points. I do know that my resume has a current list of the technology that I have touched in the past couple of years. While at the same time I have removed some things that I believe are no longer relevant, such as PC repair and batch file writing. This list gives me ideas on what I need to do to tweak my resume and what I need to focus on.

For instance, even though I have been working in IT for 13 years, working at the school district has given me an oppurtunity to understand finance, payroll, accounts payable, human resources, etc. I even have a pretty good understanding of warehouse (from previous jobs before IT). None of that is on my resume.

I have years upon years of fixing my own broken equipment and patching stuff with batch files. I’ve even had to find ways to make existing apps crosstalk. These is stuff I have on my resume, but really haven’t gone out of my way to highlight it.

However, my resume is full of stuff like working with legacy apps, working on teams, and finding solutions to make tech work for business. But none of it is really pointed out all that well. So in essence, I have a ton of the soft skills available that gives me a bit of a leg up on other IT grads. So I guess what I need to do, is go sit down and tweak my resume some more but this time focus on the soft skills. Maybe that’s why I’m getting no return calls. It’s worth a try.