What happens if you don’t get a chance to develop necessary IT skills while studying? MOOCs can help. Some employers are receptive to hiring IT job candidates with MOOC education.
“We rate education relatively light here,” Morris said. To him, a traditional college education and online learning hold the same value and convey the same information: that a person has been exposed to code.
The software that people develop with that code demonstrates their technical competency, which along with cultural fit, are the two metrics Morris uses to measure potential hires.
To me, educating yourself using a MOOCs demonstrate two things:
- The initiative to self educate (finding a course and sticking with it till the end, shows that)
- The ability to sift through several options and pick one or two and stick with it.
Ultimately, I agree with this assessment:
“I’m going to have to see projects that you’ve actively worked on. I’m going to have to talk to you and get a sense of how much you’ve actually retained of that information. Any of the best programmers that I’ve hired didn’t go to school for computer science.”
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Wrote this specifically to answer the question of a student who did not have any experience but looking to find a job. We get the question a lot. How can students with no experience find jobs. I think they have several tools at their disposal. If they are lucky some entrepreneur or mentor would go and visit them and give some good advice. Or they would discover a few companies where they can intern and learn.
If you are a student without any job experience, the only thing that makes you stand out is the initiatives you take.
2 thoughts on “MOOCs – Ways to Develop Competencies”
There have been doubts about the impact of MOOCs. A recent report from Penn’s Graduate School of Education apparently found that only 4% of enrolees actually finish their courses. Even Sebastian Thrun conceded that 60% of all enrolees never even visit the website. I think one needs to find out why and get MOOC to fulfil its great potential.
Here is a report :
http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/12/11/are-moocs-really-a-failure/
I saw that report Raghu. I think a lot depends on why you take a course. I take several and I complete some and do not complete others. In most of them I don’t take the quizzes or try to get certified. I use MOOCs to broadly understand the subject in some cases and drill deep down into others.
In this example, we are talking about people who not only take the course but also follow up and use that knowledge to create something. It is possible to do that with some skill based courses.
MOOCs are being considered competition to colleges. I view them slightly differently. I think they can fill the gaps that many colleges courses leave. They also get you to listen to some of the greatest teachers and interact with peers around the world. Many MOOC courses are not even taught in colleges. For example, The lean startup course on Udacity (by Steve Blank) has no equivalent in many institutions (even MBA courses) in India.
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