Want a job in IT industry? Then u must be ....

Accrding to this news:

To get a job in IT industry, what is the talent that required??

Analytical skills

From candidates fresh out of college, we expect good analytical skills. For example, the question may be "If six typists can type 40 pages in two days, how long will it take for 5 typists to type 100 pages." We also expect good mathematics. For example, the candidate should be able to plot "y equals x square minus seven x plus 12," or the candidate should be able to explain the concept of a prime number. Our reasoning goes like this:

1. A candidate, who has learnt well whatever was taught in school and college, is trainable to do our job.

2. A candidate, who can logically analyse and deduce solutions from a given set of facts, can work on the technical problems that we face everyday.

If the candidate knows a programming language, he should be able to put any logic he has understood into a program in the programming language that he knows. For example, after knowing correctly what a prime number is, he should be able to write a program to test if a given number is a prime number or not. The exact programming language hardly matters. What we look for is the skill to express the logic as a program.

High school mathematics

Sadly, the candidates who come out of the colleges fare very badly in our tests. Usually our questions are limited to high school mathematics. No calculus. No complex analysis. Plain algebra and trigonometry is what we test candidates on. Many candidates feel that we should not expect them to remember what they learnt at school. We do not expect them to remember facts and definitions. We do not expect them to define a rational number. We only expect them to be able to use basic algebra and trigonometry to work out some simple problems.

I agree that education has a much larger scope than preparing for employment. But what industry expects is a basic minimum. Education gives the following skills:

1. Information — e.g. earth is a sphere.

2. Logical reasoning

3. Behavioural skills — e.g. how to interact with peers.

4. Values — e.g. one should be truthful.

It is taken for granted that the candidate has the basic set of information and values. Behavioural traits usually show up in the various rounds of face-to-face interviews conducted. The main stress during the entry test and interview is on reasoning.

Are we asking too much?