While I hate to see people being screwed out of their hard-earned money, I have mixed feelings about technical schools like these going out of business.
Although I had other responsibilities, I handled the IT functions for the small offices I worked in since 1987. When I finally left to pursue a full-time position in IT with a large company, I decided it would be in my best interest to become certified. Fortunately, the company I went to work for was willing to pick up the tab.
Back then, one thing I noticed in all the classes I took was that a good majority of the class were people looking to make a career change. They were not currently employed in the IT field, but were obviously woo'ed by the countless radio and television commercials promising endless opportunities to make big money in the growing field of IT.
Now, I'm not saying that someone who makes a living as a mechanic can't successfully change careers and become an IT person. BUT... many of the people enrolled in these classes clearly did not have the right mindset for this type of work. To make matters worse, the early Microsoft certification exams were far too easy. The result was an enormous population (at least here in the Phoenix-metro area) of wannabe IT people with a lot of training and no experience. Some of them were even certified but clearly not qualified to be in this line of work. Since many of the people doing the hiring were non-IT management who equated certification with knowledge, a lot of these folks even found jobs in IT. For a while.
Once it became clear that they didn't know what they were doing, they lost these jobs. Toss in the real IT people who lost their jobs because of the sagging economy and you have a huge glut of unemployed IT people competing for jobs. Ultimately, you have an employer's market and salaries are driven down.
Now that things are starting to turn around, a lot of the people who clearly weren't cut out for IT work have gone back to what it was they did before. Things are looking up for IT job seekers.
This explains the logic behind my mixed feelings about tech schools.
Now that some of the "fly-by-night" institutions are gone, perhaps there will be fewer people being made to believe that ANYONE can be in IT. Maybe some of the people who successfully hooked their Netgear router up to their cable modem and said, "Hey, I can do this" will realize there is a lot more to managing a large network than they thought.
I'm already seeing changes. In the program I'm enrolled in now (after all, you can never have enough certifications in the eyes of management), everyone is employed in the IT field in some fashion. There aren't any lawn maintenance engineers looking to make a career change.
It seems people are realizing not everyone is cut out to be a geek.
Posted by geekchik at February 23, 2004 09:51 AM