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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:
Employers seek candidates who possess database and data analytics skills as well as knowledge of quality-assurance testing programs and equipment.
| "We're a ten-year-old company and—in our staff—we have a number of programmers and a database administrator and we've never had more than one IT employee in the state of Minnesota. All of our employees are remote, our programmers and our database administrators. And I imagine there are multiple reasons for that. I mean, one is that we have a very unique programming language that we need—that'd be PEARL. We use PEARL programming for our database. And our last position that we were hiring for we had probably two applicants from Minnesota and about 48 from the rest of the country. And it's just been hard to find somebody with the right skills, the right mindset, and the right drive to fill our programming needs. As a result, almost all of our IT staff is remote. And that's the wonders of technology. We can handle that through project management software and innovation. We would definitely love to have more local employees, but when you're located in Little Falls, Minnesota, it's pretty tough sometimes." | Central |
| "And the QA side of it, developers tend to be a little bit—I kind of compare them to artists because it's kind of an art form—and they do not like the QA side of the mix and testing their code or having anybody else come in and tell them to test their code. I think part of that comes along when you have someone that...well, testing is their thing. So, they're just going to be a lot better at it all the way through." | Central |
| "They've got to cross-train. It's no longer just writing code. We're really big in the unit testing, testing your code up front, and testing your software package up front. All of my clients are looking for even new grads out of college that have some sort of testing skill set." | Central |
| "And PEARL—we use that as testing. Just kind of giving the students additional background in fundamentals around the importance of testing and how that comes into play in the IT design and the project management space." | Central |
| "And database skills. I've interviewed computer science students who don't really understand what a database is. If they can get through a program and have weak skills like that, it's problematic. Data rules the world. Software isn't anything without data. And we see students come through that don't have that perspective." | Central |
| "And the folks that we're able to hire typically don't know how to run the testing equipment; they don't know how to use the equipment to test and figure out where the issue is at if there is an issue." | Central |
| "They've got to cross-train. It's no longer just writing code. We're really big in the unit testing, testing your code up front, and testing your software package up front. All of my clients are looking for even new grads out of college that have some sort of testing skill set. They also have to have database back ends, and they need to have programming languages. There is so much to learn. It's the combination of skills that is incredibly important. And they've got to want it. If they don't, it's just not going to be worth it to them in five years. They've got to have all those skills together and really want to actually learn those different skills and understand how they all fit together. Because that's how these businesses in our business are all built—on a combination of different technologies." | Central |
| "In addition to that, we have a very large quality assurance analysis team. We're finding that there are graduates who have computer science or computer engineering degrees that don't have specific experience with quality assurance testing analysis. There are some that are specifically interested in that area, but have not been exposed to it. So, that's something that I think we would love to see more of in the Twin Cities—especially in the educational institutions here." | Metro |
| "Employer: We're hiring people right now for data warehousing and analytics. Question: So, maybe we should add analytics to that list of virtualization and Cloud and...? Employer: Yeah, I would." |
Northeast |
| "Employer 1: I know our Information Management department is having a heck of time finding people to be able to do that exact work—to be able to support those data systems. So, I think there's certainly a gap we have a need for. Employer 2: We do get requests for analytics, not so much as straight programming, but the need is definitely there. Employer 1: And that's a significant part of our business, is analytics. I think it's going to grow. Employer 2: I think it's just going to continue to grow." |
Northeast |
| "Employer 1: I love the technology that we're focusing on—hardware and software—but what about the data? Databases, data analytics, business intelligence, and those types of skills? Those skills also help develop the critical thinking and problem-solving skills that you're looking for. Employer 2: We actually depend on our third-party vendors to support our databases. And then we do know SQL, of course. And we do all of our own reporting and stuff. But our third-party vendors pretty much build it and push it out to us, and then we grab the data for reporting. But I think it's important, absolutely." |
Northeast |
| "You have to have people that have the ability—from whatever systems and using whatever software—to take all that data, organize it, and make it usable and presentable to the accountant, to the line manager, to the engineer. And that's what's really hard to find. So, it's the analysis and presentation." | Northwest |