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A few years ago I had to make several hires in cities away from the main operations of our business. These were technical positions, but not really highly skill
by grahamburger 10y ago
A few years ago I had to make several hires in cities away from the main operations of our business. These were technical positions, but not really highly skilled positions - think geek squad level proficiency. Many of the candidates came out of ITT, and to be honest they were among the best candidates for this level position, or at least they interviewed the best. I got the impression that ITT spends a lot of time refining interview techniques - amusingly, at the end of the interview each ITT candidate asked us the same 3 questions almost verbatim, I'm certain those questions were drilled in to them as part of mock interviews. They were good questions, I wouldn't have thought anything of it until the 3rd or 4th time it happened and I started to notice the pattern.
From that experience, I have a hard time writing off ITT + similar as worthless or even predatory. I don't know what these people paid for there education, maybe it was enough that they'll never be able to get a good enough job to get out of debt, but it certainly seems like it was worth something. These people were certainly employable, and IMO moreso on average than those from similar socio-economic backgrounds who didn't have any secondary education to speak of.
- korethr 10y agoHow many of them did you end up hiring? That's not sarcastic, I'm genuinely curious. My experience with ITT tech candidates was the opposite. When interviewing for a datacenter tech position, the candidates were hit and miss on basic sysadmin questions, and seemed to have never seen computer hardware before. To be fair, rackmountable datacenter-style computers look quite a bit different on the outside from the more commonly seen towers and laptops you'll find on a person's desk in an office. But once you open one up, basic components are similar enough that they should be easy to identify. DIMMs are DIMMs, hard drives are hard drives, etc. But when you point to a power supply and tell me that it is the CPU because it has all the wires, or tell me that the video card you're holding is a sound card, you should not have passed the computer hardware class requisite for your degree.
- grahamburger 10y agoWe probably hired ~7 altogether. Some were great, some mediocre as you'd expect. Honestly I don't know that they would have been any better at answering the questions you referenced, but I do think that on average they would have done better than others who applied but didn't have any secondary education. That indicates to me that the value of the ITT degree is >0. Whether or not the value of the degree is enough to make up for what they paid, I honestly don't know - although several of them had used military money to get the degree so they weren't really out much.
- walrus01 10y agoSounds like the very oldschool Novell "A+" training materials would have been a lot cheaper for them, and actually equipped them to identify fundamental pieces of x86/x86-64 hardware.
- chris11 10y agoWhat were the three questions?
- grahamburger 10y agoI wish I could remember. I think one of them was something along the lines of 'what would you expect from an ideal candidate for this position?'