Commodore 64 Rebooted

[Caledfwlch]

I have never had a very good experience training Students/Graduates in IT/Admin/Data Entry, who aren't CompSci - and I would be really, really worried if a CompSci Graduate couldnt do basic IT & Admin stuff on a PC

How does someone graduate from a Legal Degree in a modern institution like Leeds University in 2008 and not even know how to turn a PC on? (it wasn't quite as bad as asking why their foot pedal was on the desk, not the floor, but not far off either) I had 2 of them to train & supervise.
I came very close to emailing the Head of Law at Leeds Uni, and having a right go at him and his department, and the substandard quality of their graduates! I was supervising a data entry team for Leeds City Council, and these 2 law degree muppets get sent by a recruitment agency, who must have had a new member of staff in - were it the agency who got me started with LCC, they wouldn't even have signed these 2 guys onto the books, let alone offered them a temp contract - they weren't stupid!
I was concerned enough that on my request, my Manager asked HR to contact Leeds Uni to check whether these guys had A: Attended full term, B: Were who they said they were and C: actually did have a Law Degree of some sort. The fact they claimed to be legal graduates, yet their spelling was dreadful (mine can be awful, as is my punctuation due to Dyspraxia, but as I know that I tend to be extra vigilant with spell checker on work stuff) this was also a City Council - if they had reasons for it beyond laziness, and an allergy to spell checker, there was plenty of extra support. Also in my little fiefdom, that was the Data Entry Team for LCC's Building Services Dept, I oversaw a Russian Lass, who wasn't on the DET, she had a different responsibility, but was put under my supervision - Her English wasn't yet fluent, she was still struggling with colloquialisms esp Yorkshire ones (& the accent!) not to mention having to type in an entirely different alphabet to what she grew up with, yet her work was better spelled, produced etc than the 2 "graduates" (I never found out if they were genuine as left for Doncaster couple months later and the Uni had not yet fulfilled the request) but they also knew nowt about Law, I a mere random member of the public with a vague interest in certain legal issues knew more than them....

They actually turned to me in 2nd week, after I gave them back the last 3 days of work, full of mistakes, not just spelling, but missing out important data, though their 3 days of work was equivalent to 1 days work by Samuel, one of my guys. First they whined "what does it even matter its only some report" these were Asbestos surveys, and so were vital, since if a report was entered wrong, at some point, a Builder doing repairs, could start laying into a wall, or floor with a Sledgehammer, and fill the property and their own and co-workers lungs with lethal Asbestos dust!!
It was swiftly followed by "this job is beneath us, we have degrees"
I felt more shocked than anything for a moment, given their "quality" but then I saw Alina's (the Russian lass) face and she looked murderously angry, totally outraged at the very concept of a job being beneath anyone, if it pays the bills, plus like she said, the City was full of Russian and Polish girls, who would do the job much faster, more accurately, and with less complaint, these guys were insane, I did get worried that she actually might deck them, so with the Russian I had learned from her, whilst teaching her some English I said "come, Comrade Alina, coffee time!" and took her to staff room.
when we came back I said "Better than this job? if that is the case, how come you are even here? why have you not been taken on by a law firm to do your apprenticeship, or is it that your degrees are worthless, that you only just scraped in, so nobody will hire you?"
their reaction said it all

I have had it in other jobs, trying to train students/graduates.

 

[MemoryTale]

It's not really ticking my nostalgia boxes. No Dizzy games, no Space Trader, no text adventures I can see, nothing else I remember either apart from the two Cybernoid games.

Mind you, the Cybernoid games for me exemplified C64 gaming. You'd hone your reflexes, learn enemy patterns, get really good and the game would screw you over by not giving you enough treasure to get to the next stage and you couldn't grind because it was timed so you died anyway.

 

[Biskit]

I have had it in other jobs, trying to train students/graduates.

I think part of the problem is coming out with a degree, and thinking you know everything, and probably a limited skill-set in terms of everyday jobs, along with a total lack of experience in the reality that most jobs are filled with repetitive tasks, no matter how 'hi-tech' they are, and no matter how highly qualified you have to be to do them.

I went straight from BSc into postgraduate studies, so one of the first things I learned was that I knew just enough to understand how much I needed to learn. It also has to be said that I had a number of summer jobs doing what was essentially laboratory scut-work, valuable training for being a first year postgrad, which needs a negative scale to describe the glamour level. By the end of that first year I was skilled and experienced enough to spend entire days in a darkened room, running the same experiment, over and over, with minor variations.

After three years of postgrad, I went and got a real job, and the whole learning experience started again...

 

[Caledfwlch]

Yeah, I think it was a combination of arrogance born of (I did a law degree, how amazing am I) and thinking they did know everything, and getting a nasty shock, that in fact, they weren't even competent to do a basic data entry job unless they accepted it was something outwith their experience, and they needed to learn, to take advice from people actually doing the job.
Interestingly, the Student's I had trouble with tended to be from a law or English Lit/Politics type background - I have worked with students temping after graduation, or whilst studying from for example more science based disciplines, and they have been ok, and totally trainable.

So if my post gives the impression I think all graduates are untrainable wastes, that is not true, and I do apologise. It's just the people who's degree would suggest a familiarity with the sort of tasks a busy office, or data entry position requires have been disappointing.

Mind you, the 2 law graduates were well spoken, Home Counties types, RP accent etc, so it probably didnt help being told what to do by a guy with an accent that was a weird mix of a Welsh Accent they will have never heard, in the media and if I am brutally honest, thanks to my ex fiance, a sort of inner city Leeds working class "Chav" lol

 

[Biskit]

Interestingly, the Student's I had trouble with tended to be from a law or English Lit/Politics type background

I did have the dubious pleasure of occasional contact with a guy with some sort of materials science degree who was very firm that a PhD was not a real degree because it wasn't a taught course, so how could you possibly know you got it right? He really couldn't cope with the idea that someone, somewhere has to figure things out for the first time to be able to teach it as part of a course. We could never get through to him the idea that the whole point of a PhD, or research in general, was to find out something not previously known and provide adequate evidence that you did get it right. I suppose it would have confused him even further to try to explain that someone could subsequently come along and show you got it wrong... or at least not completely right.

It seemed a very peculiar thing for someone working in a research lab. I imagine he would have driven me nuts if he had actually worked for me.