This article originally appeared on reed.co.uk’s news site
I was recently asked by Clare McDonald (@ClareEllenMcD), at Computer Weekly if I could help with some opinions and figures about recruiting for technology roles, especially in the light of the upcoming A Level results in the UK. As seems to always happen if I’m given the chance to start talking about something, about 2000 words appeared, and Clare’s questions sparked this post. I hope that this will be useful to anyone – especially students – contemplating a career in any of the amazing roles that fall under the heading of “IT and Technology”.
If you’re short on time and curious about the answer to the question posed in the title, the short answer is, “No. But it won’t hurt.”
Some background
I have been responsible for recruiting for technology and product development roles at reed.co.uk for 15 years, and we have a very strong preference for hiring and training junior staff. This probably reflects my own background (I’ve never had any formal IT education, and left university with a Psychology degree). Even so, our investment in developing junior staff has been crucial to our success at reed.co.uk, and is now part of our institutional DNA.
Our policy has always been to favour mindset – attitude and capacity to learn – over qualifications, or even work experience. Our primary goal at interview is to find the people who will love their job with us, have the aptitude to gain the appropriate skills and the motivation to develop their own careers. We also believe that it is a shared responsibility for both the employer and the employee to pursue opportunities to develop skills with appropriate training throughout the employee’s career – whether this be online training or a Master’s degree.
Should I go to university? Does the course matter?
The answer to this will vary significantly from employer to employer, and from job to job, but the general mood appears to be changing. At reed.co.uk, attainment of a degree is only part of a complex picture painted by a candidate at interview, and Google certainly seem to be moving to share this belief
“For years, candidates were screened according to SAT scores and college grade-point averages, metrics favored by its founders. But numbers and grades alone did not prove to spell success at Google and are no longer used as important hiring criteria”, says Prasad Setty
The importance of training can also vary significantly from discipline to discipline within technology teams – especially within my team which has a very strong product development focus. For instance, roles like User Experience Researcher or Business Analyst can benefit hugely from social science degrees like Psychology, Management and Economics, where statistics and the scientific method form a core part of the degree. Other degrees, like pure Science, Engineering and the Arts can all bring unique skills, experience and perspective.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, when recruiting for highly technical roles like Developers and DBAs we often see Computer Science degrees more as an indicator of intent and interest in the subject, rather than as a prerequisite for a job offer.
Even though personality is foremost, training and education is a great opportunity to advance your own skills and knowledge and will always have an impact on your interview because it gives you something to talk about. This is a great reason to make sure that you choose a degree subject that you think you’ll love, rather than one that you think will get you a job – your enjoyment and affinity for the course are what will be memorable to a good interviewer, not the course modules.
For those people working in IT without a formal technology education, the training provided by the employer will be key to future development – make sure to ask what training and development schemes are offered whilst you’re in any interview.
Are Computing & IT degrees important for technology roles?
Speaking for my own team, we are just as likely to hire a skilled Arts graduate as we are a Computer Science graduate – personality makes a far greater difference than their degree subject.
Having studied IT at degree level is nowhere near as important as being able to show that you’re passionate about what you want to do. If you really want a job as a developer, show me the Android app or Ruby on Rails website that you built in your own time.
Having said that, if the course sounds interesting to you, you will have a great opportunity to learn many things that you might not have a chance to learn whilst at work. It’s also vital to keep the flow of academics into research institutions to help build the next generation of technologies that we, in the corporate world, rely on.
Is IT a good career?
Of course it is! But as many people have misconceptions of what IT really means, consider that ‘the IT department’ barely exists any more. Professional developers and data scientists may work in Marketing departments. Finance teams often analyse the biggest data in the company. Scrum Masters, a role in agile teams, work more as coaches and trainers than the HR team.
The technology industry comprises some of the most creative, exciting, collaborative and challenging work of any industry – if you love solving problems creatively (developer), working with customers (UX and Product Owner), motivating teams (Scrum Master) or just taking things apart (engineer and administrator), there’s almost certainly a job in IT that you will enjoy.
One of the favourite disciplines in my team is that of UX, or ‘user experience’. Whilst it often finds a home in product development teams, UX has more in common with a social science, and is a fantastic career for sociologists and psychologists. Anna Walters leads the UX team at reed.co.uk and answered some questions for me about her role:What’s the best thing about working in UX
That’s really hard to answer, because one of the best things is the sheer variety of stuff you get to do. Perhaps that is the best thing? I guess it would be the blend of analytical thinking with creative thinking.
What different types of thing do you get to do?
Conduct and analyse research, design cool stuff, but not just webpages, how the whole thing should fit together, test stuff to see if it works.
What did you study at University?
Is this an interview? MSc Electronic Publishing at City University
What on earth is that?
It was designed to enable people to move into online disciplines from the offline world. It was run jointly by the journalism and informatics department. I did information architecture, interaction design, more traditional web design, writing and editing for the web, some other stuff I can’t remember and a 20,000 word dissertation on the usability of the Guardian’s live blogs.
How likely am I to get a job in IT?
Right now, employers in the UK are competing fiercely for young people looking for careers in technology. Even though applications to Computer Science degree courses are increasing again, IT and Technology is cited as only fifth most popular as a destination career by graduates using reed.co.uk.
This means that there are employers looking for talented staff, and a great opportunity for people to differentiate themselves with their passion for technology and perhaps less of a requirement for particular qualifications.
In addition, technology roles are only going to become more important to the UK economy as we stamp our mark on the global digital economy with the products being developed by technology stalwarts like Sage in the North East of the UK, and the growing startup community around London’s ‘silicon roundabout’. The number of IT & technology roles in the UK has increased by just under 20% in the last year according to reed.co.uk’s figures, and we expect this to keep growing.
If I don’t go to university, how can I keep developing my skills?
There are two great ways to keep improving your skills to help your career prospects – either through your own personal development, or looking for a suitable apprenticeship.
Personal Development
The internet could have been developed with online learning in mind. The number of exceptional online courses is staggering. For developers, Codecademy and Codeschool are great resources, as are Udacity, Udemy and Edx for a broader array of courses up to degree level. I’d also be remiss to not mention that reed.co.uk itself also has over 3000 technology and IT courses which have been designed specifically for people looking to improve their own skills and careers.
Apprenticeships
On the apprenticeship front, an increasing number of employers are realising the value in developing young talent, without the expectation of a degree level education. In my opinion, this is vital to the health of British industry and the wider economy. Apprenticeships for school leavers are very close to my heart, having grown up in the car industry where apprenticeships were the de facto route for progression into many roles.
At reed.co.uk we are developing our own Graduate/Intern/Apprentice (GIA) programme to offer these important opportunities to young people, with entry points at many levels of education. One of the first new roles we are creating is that of an Agile Apprentice, a role specifically being created to give people with no experience of technology in the workplace an understanding of what is great and unique about the most common disciplines in product development – from DBA to Scrum Master.
It’s also positive to note that this trend is apparently more common across the industry, with Avenade, Xerox and Computacenter extending their Graduate programme to school leavers, and Salesforce running an active apprenticeship scheme in the UK, which we’re very pleased to be taking part in.
Where will I work? What will I earn?
Pinching my figures from reed.co.uk’s data, we can see that the south east, and particularly London is the hotbed for technology roles. Whilst over a quarter of jobs are in London, Manchester and Birmingham are the second and third most popular cities for tech jobs respectively (with about 4% each).
Obviously there’s a marked difference between apprentice salaries and for those repaying a student loan. Research suggests that the average net pay for apprentices is £170 a week (quite a lot more than the national minimum wage of £2.68 per hour. In contrast, almost half of all graduates expect to earn between £15,000 and £20,000, while the average salary for a graduate job on reed.co.uk today is £30,421.
So, after all that, should I get a degree?
Yes, if it appeals to you! But don’t feel like it’s the only way into a good job.
Having a degree is no longer the requirement for getting a technology job that it has been in the past. Not having a degree is unlikely to reflect poorly on you, if you can show your drive and talent in other ways, for example with work experience through an apprenticeship or your own portfolio of work.
On the other hand, degree courses can teach interesting and important topics that you won’t get exposed to at work. If the courses sound interesting and you have the opportunity to attend a university, it certainly won’t hurt your chances of getting a job.
The most important advice that I can give you is to enjoy whatever you choose, as you’re more likely to succeed.
Want a job in Technology? Talk to us!
reed.co.uk is currently hiring for ourselves, with our technical team aiming to double in size this year. Current entry level roles with us include:
If none of these appeal, have a look at the tech jobs at reed.co.uk, all graduate roles currently being hired on the site or all entry level IT jobs from all of our employers.