Andrew Nimick Point Concept twitter.com/andrewnim

Last Wednesday eve, I attended an event at the Tauranga Club put together by Waikato University, BOP Polytechnic and Priority One.

The aim was to bring students in their final years (or finished) in to contact with prospective employers in the IT industry; notably employers who are generally finding it hard to find suitable staff.

It is a sad but true fact that there is a skills shortage within the technology and IT sectors in the Bay. Well, actually nationwide.

Five Tauranga companies attended and made brief introductions on what they do and what they want. The companies were:

Origen Technology (who had to pull out due to the happy news of a newborn, congrats Tim)

Pingar
Personnel Resources
Cucumber
Radford Software
TechnologyWise

What all of the employers want is the right attitude and aptitude. With these, any gaps in the knowledge and experience of a student fresh from studies can easily be overcome.

Heck, the industry moves so fast that they need to be updating those on the first day.

But some things employers in the IT industry do need knowledge of:
Project methodologies,
Source control and versioning (for developers)
Requirements gathering,
Communication,

Gen W?

One of the things which came out in this event was that our institutions need to do more to help young students prepare to meet prospective employers. They need to understand how to get out there and find the right situation for them. It is not going to come looking.

Only one student had taken the time to look into the companies attending. Only one had a contact card. Three were on Linkedin and a few on Twitter.

Bear in mind that these young people are part of the ‘connected' generation who have grown up with mobile and the web.

Consider also that 30 per cent of US companies now have an online component to their candidate research. They are not only looking to find bad images of drunken exploits they are looking to see if candidates are engaged, if they have any passions and if they are part of the wider community in their field. For developers this means joining user groups and sites like stack overflow.

The Resume is dead, long live the Profile

The old CV/ Resume approach is dying. Replaced by sites like Linkedin and your own personal profile page which shows employers where you go and what you do.

It becomes a living changing resume, one which also becomes a little more honest and a little less tailor made.

So if you are a student and studying now; now is a good time to start telling future employers about you. About why they will want to employ you when you finish your studies.