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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.
| "They need to have the basic stuff on how technology works and how networking works. And math and—obviously—engineering skills. But we can get them into our specialized niches if they come with a hard-work attitude." | Northwest |
| "Question: So, you need somebody with a broad range of abilities and experience with some manufacturing...? Employer: Yeah. Because they go out and tie it all together from a manufacturer's perspective, rather than from a non-manufacturer's perspective." |
Northwest |
| "If they come in and they know basic PC hardware skills—for instance, if we ask, 'Can you change out a card in a computer?'—it's not hard to do, but it scares some people. But they should be able to do that—change a power supply—not that they'd have to do that in their jobs. Most people don't. We have people that do that. But it's a skill that if you understand the reasoning—why things are there and how the components work together—it helps you dramatically when you're in a tech support position." | Northwest |
| "We can't get expertise in all the different things you need to know, and we couldn't even hire it out. I mean, they're just not there. Especially in our niche. Because how many people in any given community are going to have really specialized expertise? It doesn't make sense for you guys to train for another employer's platform versus our platform versus the next company's platform. There's just too much out there." | Northwest |
| "Technical skills are key. But we've had people—I think one in particular—who scored a total zero on our technical test. Total failure, but she did so well on the customer service side that we hired her anyway, and she's still an outstanding employee to this day. So, it depends on the circumstances, but technical skills are going to bring you the top. Again, technical schools should be helping students practice being able to answer questions on the fly in the interview." | Northwest |
| "My needs are small, but it's not going to be too much longer until we could have one full-time IT person rather than contracting. And what our concerns are is finding the person that's willing to work as a well-rounded IT person. They've got to be that person with a good attitude about supporting a PC problem. Because if a PC is down because of some silly thing that employee can't do, we're done. So, they've got to be willing and happy to do that. But, on the other side, we've got a web page that's crucial to our sales that needs to be maintained and managed. And, even bigger than that, is that all of our customers are going to their own separate EDI platforms that we need to get implemented and managed and maintained. And then there's the integration of our manufacturing software to ERPs, and then we've got the network itself. So, where do you get that person that's not only willing to do all those things, but who is also happy to be doing all of those things? Otherwise, I'm contracting the website to this person, the network to that person...and so it's a tough one." | Northwest |
| "Employer 1: Do we feel like we have over-specialized IT? We've kind of put everybody in these convenient little categories and we're losing that broad-based... Employer 2: You have to be a little bit of everything. You have to be... Employer 1: Because IT is a very broad field. I mean, we put it into four very broad categories and then under that there are multiple job types." |
Northwest |