What's new is old

Professor John Hosking is rightly being recognised for promoting work experience and internships for IT students.

What fascinates me is that this is regarded as a "novel approach".

One would have thought that any HR department worthy of the term would have had some sort of recruitment overlap with local tertiary institutions, but apparently this is uncommon.

My own 100% New Zealand-based IT career (and that of many of the people I worked with in IT) was characterised by the "learn on the job" training method. This was during the era when hordes were fleeing New Zealand and Sir Robert Muldoon was in his final term.

I started out as a mainframe operator in the early 1980s, doing shift work clearing printers and mounting tapes. I soon became a shift leader, then moved out to operations support. Not long after, I moved out to systems programming and then on into a technical sales support role at IBM and then on into an Asia-Pacific role with AT&T doing large-scale pre-sales custom project composition and assurance for bids to global customers. None of that went anywhere near a university. My own tertiary training had been in journalism in the late 70s and was completely unrelated. We were trained on old typewriters using 3-layer carbon copy sheets.

The point here is the normal way people have learned to do almost anything throughout human history has been "on the job".

That this should now be regarded as "novel" and recognised as valid and effective is just one more thing to giggle about when contemplating how easy it is for the blindingly obvious to be overlooked in an industry full of experts.

Hopefully there will be many more like Professor Hoskings who can re-establish training methods tried and true since we climbed out of the trees and stood up to see what was going on.