New Term underway banging on about jobs and placements

A new term is under way at the Liverpool Business School, mostly induction this week. I have taken the chance while going to the cohort meetings with the 2nd and final year Businesss Information Systems students to go on about my key rants.

These are born partly out of the my experience recruiting over the summer. Namely the necessity of getting something that gives evidence of your greatness on your CV.

While reading new graduate CV's in the summer I was horrified to see people who began with a splurge of waffle about what a great team player, self starter they were, backed by no evidence. Then they list the modules and technologies they covered on their courses, which they and everyone else on their course has covered. And then they finish off telling me that they like to socialise with their friends, watch a movie, play computer games and possibly stay up to date with technology.

They must think this separates them from the crowd but it is rare to come across anyone who doesn't like spending time with their friends, or at least admits to it in a CV. And the other three things are basically sitting in front of a monitor of some type, watching movies, playing games and web surfing. Employers mine included are not going to expect this on its own to push the company forward in these tough times.

We all encourage the students to think about these things, but of course we are often frustrated that the students don't take this seriously until it is too late. As it stands the universities societies fair was just a hundred yards away so I desperately tried to push the students in that direction in the hope that their being treasurer of the university plate balancing team might put some evidence behind their inevitable claim to be a team player, by showing that a group of peers in the team were prepared to trust them with something.

Meanwhile Matthew Baxter-Reynolds writes in the Guardian noting how in the software industry recruitment companies were creating a largely inefficient barrier between the 'talent' and the companies. Roughly suggesting that more candidates should send their CV's direct to potential employers.

I had commented to my colleagues in my day job that we don't seem to get unsolicited CV's anymore, once upon a time we kept a file of them as they accumulated. But now they don't appear. This article seemed to confirm that this was not just my experience. Whereas I get dozens of unsolicited emails from recruitment agencies every week and probably about 150 phone calls a year from the same.

My conclusion is that my students should get out there sending out their CV's looking for jobs and placements depending on their position on the course. The other rants to my (Information Systems) students were that they should get a black belt in Microsoft Office particularly Excel but also Access, so that they can do things that others can't do once they get that job or placement.

When I complete these rants, I am always optimistic that the students will have heard the urgent message and set themselves on a path to a solid career, I choose to ignore the evidence of previous years. Still as Tesco say every little helps.

Sifting CV's out in industry

I’ve written a couple about recruitment campaigns we've had at villagesoftware.co.uk to get in graduate programmers and we are in the middle of another one. Again bringing people in at the bottom of Software development for £15,000. This superstar starting salary attracted 55 cv’s sign of the times. Last time we did this 2 years ago the split was

50% were expats looking for first UK job.
30% bog standard graduates with relevant degree.
10% were experienced but out of work local developers.
10% Random people with no relevant capability

This time we had many less expats applying, perhaps a weaker pound or perhaps the job centre had advertised thing less widely. Aside from this group , the proportions stayed much the same.

10% were expats looking for first UK job.
50% bog standard graduates with relevant degree.
20% were experienced but out of work local developers.
20% Random people with no relevant capability

My colleagues and I having been through the CV’s and covering letters some things are apparent.

Firstly the obvious things are true. A properly written CV and personable covering letter opens up well. We had one guy who didn’t even give a surname, several who didn’t give a real address.

Very narrow interests do not excite, programming (fair enough), computer game playing, keeping up on technology developments (web surfing), not a collection that point to a rounded candidate. An amazing number led with the fact that they liked socialising with their friends as their main interest, presumably to distinguish themselves from the candidates who ‘don’t like people’. Some watched movies!

Clearly those who had done relevant work experience or a sandwich year stood out from the crowd. My Business School colleague Alistair Beere commented if only we could convince the students of this.

There was some annoyance around the table here at the number of graduates of computer science related degrees who did not have relevant skills. The big surprise was that those who went to the ‘lesser’ Universities (in Liverpool the traditional league is Liverpool, John Moores, Hope, Edge Hill) seemed to have the better skills. Perhaps their lecturers are more in touch with the commercial world than those at the higher brow outfits. It must be frustrating for the student who has paid and studied and are not being rejected by us for a lack of relevant background. I felt frustrated that Universities are sending their graduates out poorly armed to enter their chosen profession. While degrees are not only about employability I am reminded that we must work hard to teach what the students need to know not what we happen to know.
The perception of grade inflation was apparent with most students with 2:2’s being kicked into touch, where degrees were an issue it was considered that if students couldn’t get in the 63% of students now given 2:1’s they were unlikely to be fliers, despite the many fine adjectives they deployed on their C.V’s, it shows that not getting a 2:1 is a problem in the job market.

Interviews later this week, fingers crossed we find the right person, having previously published on this blog how we do interviews interviewing-graduates.html we will have to make a few changes.

I will hopefully take some of the lessons learnt back into my interactions with the various modules I teach on.

Where are the WarGames students?

This morning I happened to enjoy "What's the point of ..." on BBC Radio 4. Motivated by an imminent spending review and inevitable cuts – as well as recent celebrations concerning the Battle of Britain – Quentin Letts put the RAF under some scrutiny. What's the point of the RAF in 2010? The issues and debates are well rehearsed, e.g. Are über futuristic fighter jets required for the conflicts the UK is likely to be engaged in? The outcome of the debate was inconclusive because few people can predict the types of conflicts that may emerge in the future.

One type of warfare which all commentators agreed was potentially imminent is cyber warfare. Not only is such warfare potentially imminent, but the UK (along with other NATO allies) is completely unprepared for a sophisticated or sustained attack. According to the programme only 24 people at the MoD are actively working on cyber security(!). Commentators agreed that funding had to be diverted from other armed services (i.e. RAF) to invest in cyber security. This means more advanced computing and information professionals to improve cyber security, but also to operate un-manned drones, manipulate intelligence data, and so forth. 'More Bill Gates-type recruits and fewer soldiers' was the message.

Although it wasn't given treatment in the programme, the conundrum for our cyber security – as well as our economy - is the declining numbers of students seeking to study computing science and information science at undergraduate/postgraduate level. This is a decline which is reflected more generally in the lack of school leaver interest in science and technology, something which – unless you have been living in a cave – the last Labour government and the current coalition are attempting to address. With the release of A-level results today and the massive demand for university places this year, some universities have been boosted by government grants designed to recruit extra students in science and technology. The coalition, in particular, sees it as a way of improving economic growth prospects; but it seems that the need to reverse this trend has become even more urgent given that we only have a small mini-bus full of 'cyber soldiers' – and, let's face it, five are probably on part-time contracts, two will be on maternity leave and one will be on long term sick leave.

It's a far cry from the 1980s Hollywood classic, 'WarGames' (1983). WarGames follows a young hacker (Matthew Broderick) who inadvertently accesses a US military supercomputer programmed to predict possible outcomes of nuclear war. Taking advantage of the unbelievably simple command language interface ("Can we play a global thermonuclear simulation game?" types Broderick) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) light years ahead 2010 state of the art, Broderick manages to initiate a nuclear war simulation believing it to be an innocent computer game. Of course, Broderick's shenanigans cause US military panic and almost cause World War III. I remember going to the petrol station with my father to rent WarGames on VHS as soon as it was available (yes – in the early 1980s petrol stations were often the place to go for video rentals! I suppose the video revolution was just kicking off...) and being thoroughly inspired by its depiction of computing and hacking. I wanted to be a hacker and was lucky enough to receive an Atari 800XL that Christmas, although programming soon gave way to gaming. Pac-Man anyone? Missile Command was pretty good too...

How much software is there in Liverpool and is it enough to keep me interested

I am worrying about 'S' which I'll define here as the quantity of commercial software source code under maintenance and 'delta S' how this figure is changing. And by implication what we should be doing to make 'S' and 'delta-S' bigger. I'd rather the government worried about this rather than subsidising super fast YouTube to cottage dwellers.

In particular I am thinking about my home market in Liverpool where I am hoping to continue to carve some kind of career in my day job. If there is not enough 'S' to keep me going for another 25 years I'm going to get bored, poor or a job at McDonalds.

'S' maintenance is only a relatively minor destination for our business information systems students (still the students with the highest exit salary in the business school I am told please send yourself and your children BIS Course), but it is important to me.

Back in the day job we are working on developing LabCom a business to business tracking system for chemical samples and their results. One of the things that appeals to my mind is the fact that it is building a machine that is making things happen. I like to see how many samples are processed on it a year. Sad I know. We are delivering various new modules that will hopefully allow it all to grow. However thus far the project is not really big enough to fund the level of technical development and architecture expertise we would like to deploy, not enough 'S' to on its own maintain and fund high level development capabilities. The alternative for software developers such as my team is to engage in shorter term development consultancy forays, but for these to be of sustained technical interest they have probably got to add up to 100K or more and alas we have not worked out how to regularly corner such jobs.

With few software companies in Liverpool I wonder how this translates into the bigger picture and whether we can measure it.

There is definitely some 'S' in Liverpool, I did some work a couple of years back looking at software architecture with my friends at New Mind who are a national leader in destination management services and have a big crunching bit of software behind it. Angel Solutions are another company with a national footprint, this time in the education sector, backed by source code controlled in Liverpool. I have come across only two or three others over the years although no doubt there are some hiding. For someone trying to make a career out of having the skills to understand and develop big software this lack of available candidates in Liverpool might be a bit of a problem. A bit like getting an advanced mountaineering certificate in Norfolk ( see news Buscuit).

With this in mind I wondered is there more or less 'S' under management in Liverpool than elsewhere. Is this really the Norfolk of mountaineering.

How can we know. There are some publicly available records, we could dig up finances of software companies and similar, although most of these companies (including my own) are principally guns for hire engaging in consultancy and development services.

Liverpool's Software/New Media industry has a number of great companies such as Liverpool Business School Graduate led Mando Group and Trinity Mirror owned Ripple Effect and the only big player Strategic System Solutions. However as I understand it these are service delivery and consultancy companies not software product development companies they make their money through expertese, they contain a relatively low proportion of 'S'. Probably the largest block of software under management will be in the IT departments no doubt they have a bit of 'S'.

So how could we weigh this here in Liverpool or elsewhere. How much software is there. Lots of small companies such as my own have part of their income from owned source code IP 'S'. There are the few larger ones. So we could try to get a list and determine what proportion of income is generated from these outfits based on public records and a little inside knowledge. We could perhaps measure the number of software developers deployed or the traditional measure of SLOC (Source Lines Of Code). I've in the past looked at variants on Mark II Function Point Analysis you can find out a little about this on the United Kingdom Software Metrics Association website . In my commercial world I’m interested in estimating cost hence toying with these methods while we ponder what we can get away with charging and is it more than the our estimated (guessed) cost. In this regional context I’m interested in whether we can measure how much value there is lurking to give a figure for 'S'.

Imagine we did measure that the quantity of commercial code under management in Liverpool was I’ll call it 'Liver-S', I then want to know how this compares to Manchester's 'Manc-S' (I suspect unfavourably) and perhaps more importantly from a career and commercial point of view how it compares to last year. Is 'Liver-S' getting bigger (what is 'delta Liver-S').
The importance of 'S' and 'delta S' is about whether we are maintaining enough work to maintain or indeed develop a capacity to ‘do big software’ in the local economy. Without which to be honest I’m going to get bored.

Any masters/mba students stuck for a bit of an assignment or even better funding bodies wanting to help me answer this question please drop me a line.

If there is not enough 'Liver-S' in the future at least I'll be able to sit at home with my super fast broadband.