Will & Mark, you bring this up as an education issue, but there has been a huge shift in the labor cycle that was done w/o much asking of the education cycle. Namely, sometime around the early to mid nineties we went from a career lifecycle where business took on a greater share of the burden of education than they do today. They want education to create fully-functioning mid-level folks, but calling mid-level folks entry level, but they did nothing to engage education to make that shift happen there.
1. there are less internships possibilities than ever. AND if we are going to be blunt about this, the UX community has been really half-assed about creating internships and maintaining them in their culture. This can't just be a the giant corps as they can't sustain this and they only give a small slice of the total experiences that we all need. 2. It used to be that "hiring straight out of college" was a managed process at especially larger corps. People out of college were mentored, nurtured and trained with high level programs guiding them through the real world. Today it is out of the oven of education and into the fire of industry and none-betwix-between. So Mark, you are pointing a finger at education w/o giving education the benefit of the doubt and looking at the longer historical picture. Institutions around the world are desperate for corporate contact, but even sponsored projects is not enough to give students what they need. There are real reasons to protect students from "reality" within the educational setting even at the senior and graduate level. Educational institutions don't only need to be forgiving of failure, but need to encourage it and only concept level projects (read as not entirely real) offer anything close to that type of leeway. The reality is that it is industry that has let down education and not the other way around. All of the internships and coops during undergraduate education aren't going to replace the experience of having a real job. To be more balanced, I think that the schools that have corp connections (sponsored projects, internships, coops, etc.) are doing all they can at this point. If even these students are not "cutting it" when they come to you then I think the other side of the campus needs to be looked at and evaluated and not 1 corp at a time, but as a practice. -- dave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=49535 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
