Kirk McDonald tells the cold, hard truth about finding jobs after graduation.
In a letter to college graduates, Kirk McDonald, president of PubMatic, an ad tech company in Manhattan, gives the young adults a pep talk.
“The next month is going to be thrilling as you cross this major milestone in your education. But when it’s all over and you’re ready to go out into the world … I’m probably not going to hire you.”
McDonald doesn’t lash out at students, doesn’t even blame them: he has simply found that most college graduates do not have the skills that his or other companies need.
In part, it’s not your fault. If you grew up and went to school in the United States, you were educated in a system that has eight times as many high-school football teams as high schools that teach advanced placement computer-science classes. Things are hardly better in the universities. According to one recent report, in the next decade American colleges will mint 40,000 graduates with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, though the U.S. economy is slated to create 120,000 computing jobs that require such degrees. You don’t have to be a math major to do the math: That’s three times as many jobs as we have people qualified to fill them.
It’s time to start addressing this crisis. States should provide additional resources to train and employ teachers of science, technology, engineering and math, as well as increase access to the latest hardware and software for elementary and high-school students. Companies—particularly those like mine that depend heavily on information technology—need to join the effort by sponsoring programs that help schools better train graduates to work in a demanding industry. But there’s one more piece of the puzzle that’s missing, and it’s the one over which you have the most control: you.
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The criticism of U.S. schools is not there to serve as an excuse for students, though. He is not expecting graduates to be engineers and programmers, only to understand the basic concepts and what the engineers and programmers do so that they understand the big picture.
“Unless you understand the fundamentals of what engineers and programmers do, unless you’re familiar enough with the principles and machinations of coding to know how the back end of the business works, any answer you give is a guess and therefore probably wrong,” Mc Donald writes. “Even if your dream job is in marketing or sales or another department seemingly unrelated to programming, I’m not going to hire you unless you can at least understand the basic way my company works. And I’m not alone.”
Though it may seem harsh, this is sometimes exactly what college graduates need to hear to get motivated (I had a conversation to this tone with a programmer at a NeMLA conference—which was focused on literature, art, music, and theater—about how each person on a project needs to have at least a foundational knowledge of how the other team members work, especially the programmers—and it was one of the most eye-opening and relevant conversations about employment that I have ever had; even in a setting that had nothing to do with computers, it was a 100-percent relevant topic). Computers are the means by which everything is done, and so you become more valuable and employable when you have a working knowledge of basic programming or engineering.
If you want a job in media, technology or a related field, make learning basic computer language your goal this summer. There are plenty of services—some free and others affordable—that will set you on your way.
Teach yourself just enough of the grammar and the logic of computer languages to be able to see the big picture. Get acquainted with APIs. Dabble in a bit of Python. For most employers, that would be more than enough. Once you can claim familiarity with at least two programming languages, start sending out those resumes.
McDonald doesn’t expect students to be experts—he acknowledges that he certainly isn’t one. He does expect that the people he employs will either have had the training for the job while they were in college or, what he sees as the more likely case, will have been self-motivated and self-taught in the skills. It is not about the grades you got but the skills you learned.
“So congratulations again on your achievement,” McDonald tells students, “and good luck getting your real-world education.”
Photo: mer chau/Flickr
The biggest flaw in the push for “STEM” (all acronyms are stupid, but this one is awful) is that not everyone is capable of being successful in STEM. This guy makes it sound as simple as just changing your degree major from humanities to science. Well that would have been great to get my science degree for my high paying job if I had been any good at science. I hated math, barely passed the second semester of my “science for LA majors” class, and didnt even like all the numbers that got thrown at me in economics. The real… Read more »
While this is all true, it’s only partially true. Computer language? What about writing and reading? At the community college, I have recently begun teaching students who have already completed associates degrees in nursing and other fields; they come back to fill requirements they ignored when they believed they would not need or want to transfer to a 4-year academy. Their writing skills were abysmal, and they failed their reading assessments. They could not gather the purpose of a short book on media consumption. We’re facing a crisis on all levels, and it’s only going to get worse because no… Read more »
I teach at a community college as well. The single biggest complaint I hear from employers is not a lack of computer skill or engineering basics. The biggest complaint I hear is that they can’t find people who can write well. When you put off English Comp until your last semester because you don’t think it’s all that important, and then you squeek by with a C in it, then, yes, you are not doing yourself any favors.