- Plan Your Education
- Explore Education Options
- Prepare for College
- Pay for College
- Apply to College
- How to Choose a Major
- Education Search Tools
Employer Quotes
The quotes below are from employers in this industry: Information Technology (IT)
They are talking about this topic: Occupation-Specific Skills
The quotes below are about this issue:
A few employers are looking for knowledge of specific software and virtualization skills.
| "One of my peeves, I guess, is that there are a lot of waterfall traditional project management methodologies being taught and, frankly, I think that's just ridiculous. It should be swathed around. So, you teach Agile and you say, 'Hey, this is how they used to do it.' It's such a high-penetration rate today. There are a lot of people doing kind of in-between stuff, but I think kind of evolving that." | Central |
| "Mobile is another thing. It's really big and it's a high-demand market. And if you want to have better fulfillment rates with students getting jobs, I think having programs that have some sort of mobile aspect is important. I have seen that, and that's great within some technologies—even four-year universities have been doing iPhone courses." | Central |
| "The big thing that I see—especially in Minnesota state colleges and especially in [MnSCU college]—is that there's generally no focus in their virtualization tract like Hyper-V. Well, there's nobody in this town learning Hyper-V. I mean, it just doesn't exist here. You've got to be teaching virtualization as concept. VMware in the business side of the world for virtualization is like Microsoft on the software side. That's how big they are to the virtualization world. And there's also Zen and Citrix. I mean, you've got to be teaching knowledge of them and that person's got to have somewhat of a familiarity of what the differences are between them. Because, like, if we come for W3i we run VMR, that's what most of our systems run off of. And if we have candidates right out of college and they're saying they have Hyper-V experience, but they don't even know how to install VMR—which is not real hard by the way—then that's a little bit of a red flag, right? We can see that they have Hyper-V experience and they get the concepts and stuff like that, but it's one of those things where it should just be a more generalized track. In my opinion, anyway." | Central |
| "The thing that we look for is a set of very specific skills for IT infrastructure. And we work with software providers like Microsoft, VMware, and Symantec, so we're looking for very specific skills with those particular products. With Microsoft, we want people with experience in Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Active Directory. In infrastructure, we want someone with experience in Symantec. They have products call Altiris, Symantec, and Point Protection. So, we want people with specific skills in those areas." | Metro |
| "We also have a need for .NET as well. And we're looking for people who've had experience with high-risk proofing. It's difficult because it's generally—it's fairly new—but it's an important eCommerce tool." | Metro |
| "I do, extremely, a lot of hiring in the Java space, not just the peer development but also production support." | Metro |
| "Well, for example, we do a lot with Google. So, we do a lot with cloud computing and cloud-based infrastructure. And that is an area that I don't know of a program yet that has any significant discipline around it. At least we are not seeing any grads that are coming out with that experience...unless they do it at home." | Metro |
| "You know, when I talked to small businesses in the C level, what they are concerned about is that they keep hearing about this new cloud. Where they want to move everything out of the IT arena locally into the global sphere, and they want to know how the two can coexist. When they double-up the other and move it over? Where do you get the right kind of resources with the right background who could implement that? So, they are looking for somebody to come and tell them, 'You know, you have your IT within your company, and now you have to move it into the cloud so that you can keep some of these things. You can move, how about security networking?' So, they are looking at kind of a mix of someone to tell them if there's an easy step-by-step way that they can go into the future." | Metro |
| "This was not all that recent, it was late last year, but in the area of desktop technology and infrastructure, in the Microsoft space—in particular virtualization—the forward-working pieces of that technology, it's very challenging to try to find people in that area. We're talking the Citrix environments, the VI environments, the Quest environments—that whole toolset around managing thousands of desktops, right? I mean, it sort of makes sense. You're finding people that can manage one desktop, but that's not the problem we face. We have to manage thousands of them and it's a very different picture when you're dealing with thousands of them than when you're dealing with one." | Metro |
| "The other thing is the way that technology is going. Everything is getting to be virtualized now, so it's hard to just say, 'Okay, you're an Exchange specialist.' You need to have a really good handle on how Exchange runs in a virtualized environment across a very distributed network. The things that you need to understand are so much broader than what you do to understand them fast on the infrastructure side." | Metro |
| "I think what we're looking at is that my company's growing more towards virtualization and the people I'm seeing don't have that experience. They can get the training, but where do they get the experience? It's a Catch-22." | Metro |
| "I'm really around software engineers. Most the programs seem to have a lot of great programs that are focused on free PHP type stuff. We need people with .NET, Oracle, Sequel Server, true business stuff where they can land on the ground and go. And they need to understand basic Syntax." | Metro |
| "Maybe not taking a ten-year horizon because technology changes too fast. Maybe taking a five-year horizon. What's happening with SAP? You know, we are a SAP shop." | Metro |
| "I'm looking for Symphony engineers right now. I'm looking to pay them around $120,000 a year. Show me people that are good at Symphony. We are talking about a level of specialization that doesn't exist—in most cases they are not going to be coming from the school system with those core specialization skills—it's their years of self-developing them." | Metro |
| "We're talking the Citrix environments, the VI environments, the Quest environments—that whole toolset around managing thousands of desktops, right? I mean, it sort of makes sense. You're finding people that can manage one desktop, but that's not the problem we face. We have to manage thousands of them and it's a very different picture when you're dealing with thousands of them than when you're dealing with one." | Metro |
| "Yeah, virtualization is a big skill we're looking for in candidates who come in. People with experience in the virtualization realm, people with experience in storage area networks is big. Cloud computing experience and security and those types of specific skill sets are big for us right now." | Northeast |
| "Of all of the job applications that I've looked at for the support positions, I have yet to see an application where somebody listed knowledge and practical skills—unless this was somebody coming from another company—then, yeah. But you're talking about new people coming in. In doing some of the most rudimentary things that we need somebody to do like managing a few hundred work stations and work station imaging. I think they get some of the active directory stuff and maybe some of the other OS stuff, but the real industry standard or in-practice imaging and some of the basic functions of the work stations that you see across the spectrum aren't necessarily there. I haven't seen that there. I don't know if it's being taught or not, but I have not seen it. And it would help. It would certainly sway my decision if I would see that somebody's actually done that and has experience." | Northwest |
| "One other thing, too, is the business soft skills. I mean, there are spreadsheets, word processing, and all those basic things that we all take for granted as important. Not that it has to be Excel or Lotus or whatever. From the specific technology though, make sure they know how to use spreadsheets and word processing." | Northwest |