[Sussex] IT qualifications advice

[Geoff Teale]

On Fri, 2003-11-28 at 22:53, Alan J Fitton wrote:
> Well, as an experienced bunch in the IT field, I was wondering if anyone
> could give me some good advice on the subject of what qualifications are
> actually useful for real life IT work.

OK, Alan I'll try to advice as best I can - this debate has come up from
time to time.  A lot of people have said that qualifications are not the
most important thing in an IT career - I think that very much depends on
what sort of IT career you are talking about and what you are like as a
person.  Someone like Nik can get by in life very well without doing a
degree because he is not only demonstrably intelligent, but can also
talk the hind legs of any donkey you care to mention (as you probably
found out on Thursday night).

In terms of the subjects you mention.  Basically if you already know a
fair bit about computing then anything that isn't teaching you the
fundamentals of programming, networking and database systems isn't worth
your time.  If you plan to go on and maybe do a degree in Computer
Science then a good A-level education in mathematics would serve you far
better than word processing and web page design. 

Moreover good grades in more fundamental subjects like Maths, the
sciences and English will give you a much wider choice of possible
degree courses than a specialist subject will.  These subjects will of
course be harder to get good grades in, but from what you've said I
imagine that being taught to use MS Word is going to be boring enough
for you to flunk it even though you can do it in your sleep.  I've been
there...

A couple of other things to remember:

0/
A levels are not the end of the world.  I don't have _any_ A levels, but
I do have a degree.  I got onto my Uni course by simply going along and
talking to IT lecturers about what I knew.

1/
The secret to learning is to want to learn and thirst for
understanding.  If you want to get good qualifications you need to seek
out subjects that _excite_ you.  If you can't think of any then you need
to start adjusting the way you think about learning.

> Btw, the 2.4.23 kernel went final today, in case others didn't notice.
> Seems to be working fine on my desktop. :)

:)

Surely we should all be running the 2.6 testing releases by now?


-- 
Geoff Teale <tealeg at member.fsf.org>
Free Software Foundation