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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:
Respondents who hire IT technicians seek candidates who understand interoperability; that is, an understanding of how various technologies work together.
| "When I came out of college it was just, 'Do you know C++ or Java?' And that's so far gone. I mean, there are 20 different languages you need to know, and we probably use three or four of them in one project alone. And I think that's really the key. How it all fits together." | Central |
| "Basically, it's no longer just knowing how to write C Sharp or C++ or Java; it's knowing multiple different technologies and how they all fit together." | Central |
| "In our world, we've gone from a lot of analog—nailed up circuits to communicate—to all internet, all IP, and a lot of videos. So, the pipes need to be larger. But reality used to be when video was out or internet wasn't working great. You know, it wasn't the biggest deal. Now, that is the part that must be up at all times and must be redundant. And the equipment that's used must be understood by our technicians on a minute-by-minute basis. It can't be an attitude of, 'Well, let's call a veteran and figure out what we need to do here.' They need to understand the equipment much more than they used to. So, our world has changed a lot—the internet, IP, and video." | Central |
| "Where you're going with that is interoperability. Everybody's got a different device with different programming from a different type of code and we're supposed to make all of that communicate—make all of that connect—with each other. And our technicians have had to learn a lot about different pieces that are out there today." | Central |
| "I think what's massively important for graduates to understand is that the workplace environment these days is complex. There's a range of technology that dates from the 1970s through 2012. And we're trying to make it all work. We're expecting people to assimilate and understand incredibly complex operating environments and models and be able to make sense out of assignments that are—by and large—very gray." | Metro |
| "They might not know all of it, but they do get kind of what's out there and they always want the latest and greatest. Unfortunately, we do have the old technology in there, too, right? So, we have to understand how it plays together to be able to talk to them in business terms to be able to describe the new stuff and how it interacts with the older stuff." | Metro |
| "It's a skill that if you understand the reasoning—why things are there and how the components work together—it helps dramatically with what you're doing in a tech support position. And if somebody comes in with those skills—the more they understand the basics—that's what we're looking for." | Northwest |
| "As the network continues to expand to all the customers and people throughout the country, there's a higher level of skills required for people that work on these networks. What was considered an installation technician 10 years ago didn't require the skill sets that they require today. They have to have a certain amount of expertise in electronic equipment and provisioning and those types of things to make it work and troubleshoot it. Your customer, your home—there are many more electronic devices in your home today than there were several years ago that all have to interact and interface—if they don't have a good understanding of how these components work together they cannot solve the problem." | Southwest |
| "We have many engineers on our staff. Those are the people that have to look at the high-level designs. We lay-out networks from the central office all the way to the end user. We have to be able to understand all the interacting technologies. Anyone familiar with Cisco—there are various layers of communication within a network—and the engineer has to understand all of those in order to lay-out a design that will work most efficiently toward the given application." | Southwest |