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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:
With rapid and ongoing changes in the field of technology, many employers are most interested in candidates that have broad technical knowledge. When candidates possess this knowledge, employers are able to provide on-the-job training in more specialized knowledge.
| "We are going to look for the well-rounded person. We want them to have the personal skills, the communication skills, the technical skills, etcetera. But we are going to look a little more for technical aptitude, which is one of the reasons why the MIS doesn't work as well for us—we don't see the technical aptitude. Generally, if they migrated in that direction, they are not as interested and haven't learned much on the technical side. We want to take people that we can move into some of these other areas." | Metro |
| "We want people who have the technical aptitude. We want people who are interested in knowing more about multiple things and who are willing to jump in and learn more, whether it's on the technical side or maybe migrate to the project management side and the analysis side. We see more students migrating away from technical aptitude." | Metro |
| "If you are looking for somebody to come in and do programming, if you are looking for a network person, great. Leave them there. Let them be good at their job. They don't have to be the communicator." | Metro |
| "We want technically-oriented two-year degrees. And, yes, they have to be able to present themselves well and communicate, or they won't work at a small company. That's for sure. But we certainly want a technical emphasis coming out of that two-year college." | Metro |
| "The way 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. So, the things that you need to understand are so much broader than what you do to understand them fast on the infrastructure side." | Metro |
| "All of the comments that I'm hearing lead me to believe that you have to be a specialist, but you have to have general knowledge across the spectrum. You still need a general knowledge across all those areas. If you don't have that, you're probably not fitting into today's technology world." | Metro |
| "We're a very small company. So, people have to do everything. They have to have skills across the board. One new hire that we brought in not too long ago, an engineer, was very strong in engineering. But the IT skills—the ability to help with the internal tasks such as simply setting up networks of computers and even implementing and running scientific software—were less than what we had expected. I'd ask for more cross-training in the engineering disciplines so people can do a bit of IT." | Metro |
| "We look for very highly-technical individuals, but we have competencies that we look for like strategic agility, intellectual horsepower, and leadership." | Metro |
| "The technical skills are certainly important." | Metro |
| "Technical skills are so important because we have to do the translation to the enabling technologies." | Metro |
| "Our entire business really requires technology skills these days in one form or another. The idea that IT is only in IT is really not true anymore. There are technologists everywhere within our company—they just have different levels of expertise." | Metro |
| "If you're only allowed a certain number of credits in your two-year certificate, you have to make choices. Give us the technology platform so that we can grow that employee internally." | Metro |