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IT in Schools

pickledseal

cowboy
Joined
Dec 6, 2004
Messages
4,933
Location
Upminster
I've ribbing my mates in the ICT Dept as they face the latest Gove initiative criticising the teaching and curriculum of ICT.

I wondered what Zoners thought... If you are a recent worker were you adequately equipped, are workers that join you ready to deal with the needs of the work place? Or do you learn on the job regardless and just need a basic level of IT literacy?
 
A basic level of IT literacy puts you above 90% of employees over 45 in my experience
 
Good, ICT when I did my GCSE's was a joke. Does it really take a year to teach kids how to use Microsoft Office when they use computers all the time? I'd loved to have learnt/wrote a programming language and made something.

In your that department, how many had qualified in computing or computing science as their primary qualification rather than ICT, because they might have to start learning.
 
Good, ICT when I did my GCSE's was a joke. Does it really take a year to teach kids how to use Microsoft Office when they use computers all the time? I'd loved to have learnt/wrote a programming language and made something.

In your that department, how many had qualified in computing or computing science as their primary qualification rather than ICT, because they might have to start learning.

I'm not sure mate.

I know in my old place they used to do an iPro course, but that, ironically was axed as it was too vocational.
 
ICT GCSEs/equivalent are largely pointless, most kids are already fully aware of how to make a powerpoint presentation and use Excel yet it is taught from scratch taking up most of the year, only thing I learnt from ICT was how to make a basic website, the rest of it I had already learnt from using computers at home or in primary school. The problem is we all use computers everyday now, yet the course assumes you know nothing about how to use one. Surely for things like Excel though if it's required for work it should be explained to you anyway?
 
The level of Excel knowledge from graduates starting at my place is, by and large, poor.
 
The level of Excel knowledge from graduates starting at my place is, by and large, poor.
In what way? Do you mean simple stuff like finding the sum of cells? Or more complex stuff like lookup tables (which was not explained very much beyond 'copy what I'm doing and put it in your coursework')
 
If you want to work as a software development just going to school/college/university is not enough.

You have to devote thousands of hours of your own time to become a good programmer.
 
The level of Excel knowledge from graduates starting at my place is, by and large, poor.

Despite what people believe #Excel is a specialised piece of software, its a training issue to learn how to use it , its a support issue if it needs repairing , integration or tweaking, the support guys now how to get it going its your HR department who need to book you on the course to understand all the in's a outs of its features (you dont ask a mechanic to teach you to drive) .

Getting everything out of it requires specific training (same for anyone using Sage range ) . Most of the ICT stuff was pretty bad , when i started in IT most of the best people were just hugely enthusiastic (or ex services) learnt themselves and added the professional qualifications as required.

An issue we have had in the industry has been the problem with specialising in areas (programming , support or network , hardware , infrastructural design etc ) , the industry itself used to prefer jack of all trades and very few masters as it was easier to pay just one person to try to do many job (and no we still cant fix your bloody photocopier call facilities ;-))
 
NR runs plenty of Microsoft courses, from basic Word to expert Excel. Depends on the job of course, but I would have thought that a basic understanding of these packages would be the norm for school kids these days.

Ah, 1985, programming a BBC Micro, knowing more than the teacher and finally being a hit with the girls who wanted to pass their O-Levels. Halcyon days! :happy:
 
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