“Future headline: UC grads face challenges entering workplace.”
I’m telling you this from experience. College degrees are almost useless now. If they want a quality engineer then that person must have a certificate from ASQC. ASQC tests and certifies that you know the material. Plus, to maintain the cert takes money and a course every year. The same is true for most of what used to be covered by just a college degree. If you ask why, they’ll tell you because the quality of the grads is sub par.
Why won't ASQC also conform to the equity directive and adjust accordingly? What makes them immune to DEI?
I've been a software engineer since 1980. The declining quality of graduates spurred an industry to test for competence and issue certificates. Having 40 years of experience in the field doesn't excuse me from having to spend time and money studying cert materials and sitting for expensive exams. The pressure to do that comes from the practice of requiring specific certs of employees assigned to work on a contract. The customer demands it in the contract. The employer demands it of employees who want to work on the contract.
Having the certs is demonstration that you can study materials and pass exams. It is no guarantee of ability to apply concepts to get real work done. Much of the exam material is very broad and only a small percentage maps to the work to be done. Still, it offers some small assurance to a hiring manager that the applicant isn't a total BS artist.
I have a friend in the UK who earned a PhD in linguistics. I sent her an e-mail a couple years ago to see how she was doing since graduation. She said it was necessary to pursue a new career in cyber security. She could not feed herself with employment related to her PhD. At the time, I was studying the CEH (Certified Ethical Hacker) materials. She said the better cert in the UK was "CREST". For the CREST cert, you must actually successfully breach a test target (practical exam) in addition to the written exam. She now works for a large bank in the UK.
On my "todo" this year is CySA+ (Cyber Security Analyst) and Pentest+ (Penetration Tester). This is in addition to wrapping my head around Docker/Kubernetes/Kafka/Spring Boot and upgrading 30 year old applications to operate inside those current frameworks.