Comments on: Survey: Generation Facebook's skills wasted at work

Many young adults are confident in their IT skills, survey finds, but businesses are not making the most of their tech savvy.

[Leria]

Too many business want a degree

or certifications that are, to be blunt, hellishly expensive to get. That is the main reason why the computer literate like myself are not going into the computer industry, because the education that they want is up in the high 30,000 dollar range.

[Tadmin]

Expensive?

That "expensive" dollar amount of yours is about average for a 4-year degree, according to collegeboard.com, so what's the complaint? I reiterate my question by pointing out that a CS degree can easily earn twice that in annual pay shortly out of the blocks. Note, though, that mere literacy won't earn much more than a secretary's job unless you're able to snow-job an illiterate company... which many have been able to do, thus explaining the sorry state of tech in many businesses.

[Tippy44]

Survey: Generation Facebook's skills wasted at work

Agreed. The cost of basic IT degree even at a public institution is astronomical. When looking at the "101" course levels which are needed to complete the degree - today's generation are way past that level. I know many fourth graders who are savvy with Powerpoint and Word. Employers need to recognize the true value of the young adults in the workplace.

[Tadmin]

Narrow view

Way past 101's? You must be talking about "IT courses" like in the MIS (or CIT as it's now called on our campus) curriculum. Why aren't all of these "savvy" students enrolled in a proper computer science degree program if they're bent on tech? Answer: because it's quite a bit harder than building a slide show or a spreadsheet or even a VB GUI. Today's "young adults" suck at tech just as much as yesterday's - they just suck at more of it.

[hunter_jc]

Outsourced.

All the corporations are outsourcing all the IT work. Of course they don't utilize IT local workforce.

[digitaleffection.org]

Be real...businesses don't hire for Excel or PP experience.

First off, PowerPoint and Excel aren't IT skills, they are basic business skills. As an earlier poster mentioned, we need to define IT skills as skills like DBs, programming, and server management.

Second, no one pays people to use PowerPoint. You get paid to build an informative, educational, or persuasive presentation USING PowerPoint. Content is what's important, not design templates.

Finally, the skills that business and technology employers value often come from outside of IT/CS classes. Businesses need problem solving, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication skills. While we do outsource a lot, much of what we outsource is commodity activities. Solving problems and working on a project team to innovate a new product will never be outsourced. But these project team jobs won't ever go to young people who think they are technologically literate because they spend hours on facebook, try to shortcut a college or technical degree, and fail to add real value to the businesses of the future.