| "employable computing skills " I think this is a very broad statement even though not trying to undermine your question. The problem however with this statement is that it varies. Some people have mentioned HTML/JS etc. which are surely good but not all tech. related jobs need that. Some things that I strongly feel should be part of every CS curriculum especially in the context of your question i.e. employability are following: - Understanding real world projects and the lifecycle. This should include practical experience delivering software and manging the entire phase. Some universities already have a "software engineering" class for this. - Related to #1, teach them the value of teamwork. No real world project can be done alone and the bigger the employer, more likely you will deal with cross matrixed teams (yea teach them what cross matrixed means :) - Teach them about distributed computing and how software is deployed/managed in a large scale environment. - Teach them that no one cares if you build cool stuff. People care about what problem it solves. It could mean anything from keeping your company/manager happy to solving real world client problems. - lastly, tell them that whatever you learn now, you will learn a heck of a lot more when you are actually out in the real world and that will make you realize that you did not know anything. This does not however mean that the learning is useless but it is just the tip of an iceberg. |
I know the "Give a man a fish" adage, but trying to teach my students to be Global Anglers hasn't worked well for a decade (given our students, numbers, faculty, and facilities). I'm not shooting for trade school either, just something that's very mindful of your iceberg analogy.
Tip: - Come, learn some skills, peek at the landscape.
Iceberg: - Go get a job(s), learn the rest of what you need to build the solutions that keep your company/manager happy.