This article is a response to , which proposes to choose courses based on the value of the conversion of students from enrolled to settled.
When choosing courses, you should be interested in 2 numbers - the proportion of people who reached the end of the course and the proportion of graduates who got jobs within 3 months after the end of the course.
For example, if 50% of those who started a course complete a course, and 3% of graduates get jobs within 20 months, then your chances of entering the profession with the help of these particular courses are 10%.
The attention of the future student is drawn to two metrics and this is where the "choice tips" end. At the same time, for some reason, the educational institution is blamed for the fact that one of the students did not complete the course.
Since the author did not specify what exactly he means by "IT profession", I interpret it as I please, namely "programming". I don’t know any blogging, IT management, SMM and SEO, so I will only answer in a familiar area.
In my opinion, the choice of courses based on two indicators is a fundamentally wrong approach, under the cut I will describe in more detail why. At first I wanted to leave a detailed comment, but the text turned out to be a lot. Therefore, I wrote the answer in a separate article.
Studying in courses for the purpose of employment is not a lottery
Education is not drawing a lucky ticket, but hard work on oneself. This work includes the student doing homework. At the same time, not all students can allocate time to complete their assignments. Quite often, students give up doing homework at the first difficulty. It happens that the wording of the task does not fit the context of the student, but at the same time the student does not ask a single clarifying question.
Mechanical recording of all the words of the teacher will also not help to master the course if the student does not engage in comprehension of his notes.
Even Bjarne Stroustrup in the instructor's guide to his C++ textbook ( ) wrote:
Of all the things that correlate with success in this course, “spending the time” is the most
important; not previous programming experience, previous grades, or brainpower (as far
as we can tell). The drills are there to get people a minimal acquaintance with reality, but
attending the lectures is essential, and doing some exercises really matter
To succeed in the course, the student first needs to “spend time” on assignments. This is more important than previous programming experience, school grades, or intellectual ability (as far as we can tell). For a minimum acquaintance with the material, it is enough to complete the tasks. However, to fully master the course, you must attend the lectures and complete the exercises at the end of the chapters.
Even if a student finds an institution with a conversion of 95%, but sits idly by, he will fall into the unsuccessful 5%. If the first attempt to master the course with a conversion of 50% was unsuccessful, then the second attempt will not increase the chances to 75%. Maybe the material is too complicated, maybe the feed is weak, maybe something else. In any case, the student needs to change something himself: the course, the teacher or the direction. Mastering a profession is not a computer game where two identical attempts can increase your chances. It's a tortuous path of trial and error.
The introduction of a metric leads to the fact that the activity is directed to its optimization, and not to the work itself
If your decision will depend on one metric, then you will be provided with a value that suits you. You still do not have reliable data to verify this indicator and how it is calculated.
One of the ways to increase the conversion of the course is to tighten the incoming selection according to the principle “only those who already know everything will get into the course.” There is no benefit to taking this course. It will rather be an internship for the student's money. Such courses collect money from people who are essentially ready for employment, but do not believe in themselves. In the "courses" they are given a brief review and an interview at an office with which they have connections.
If an educational institution optimizes the conversion of applicants to employed in this way, then many middle students will drop out at the stage of admission. In order not to spoil the statistics, it is easier for an educational institution not to miss a student than to teach him.
Another way to increase conversions is to consider those who are "lost" in the middle as "continuing learning". Watch your hands. Suppose 100 people entered a five-month course, at the end of each month 20 people are lost. In the last fifth month, 20 people remained. Of these, 19 got a job. In total, 80 people are considered “continuing education” and are excluded from the sample, and we consider the conversion as 19/20. Adding any counting conditions will not fix the situation. There is always a way to interpret the data and calculate the target "just right".
Conversion can be skewed by natural causes
Even if the conversion was calculated “honestly”, it can be distorted by such students who study the IT profession without the goal of changing their profession immediately after graduation.
For example, there may be reasons:
- For general development. Some people like to look around to be "in trend".
- Learn to cope with the routine of your current office job.
- Change jobs in the long term (more than 3 months).
- Assess your strengths in this area. For example, a person may take introductory courses in several programming languages to choose from. But at the same time do not finish any.
Some smart people may not be interested in IT, so they can easily leave in the middle of learning. Forcing them to complete the course may increase conversions, but there will be little real benefit to these people.
Some courses do not offer career change readiness despite job “guarantees”
For example, a person has successfully completed only a course on java with the spring framework. If he has not yet taken at least a basic course in git, html and sql, then he is not even ready for the position of a junior.
Although, in my opinion, for successful work, you also need to know operating systems, computer networks and business analysis one step deeper than a typical layman. The study of one single skill will allow you to solve only a narrow circle of boring and monotonous tasks.
On the area of responsibility of educational institutions
But an unfinished course is, first of all, the failure of the school / course, it is their task to attract the right students, weed out the wrong ones at the entrance, captivate the rest during the course, help them complete the course to the end, prepare for employment.
Shifting the responsibility for passing the course only to the educational institution is as irresponsible as relying on luck. I admit that in our world there is a lot of hype on this topic, which means that courses can easily fail. However, this does not negate the fact that the student also needs to work for their success.
Warranty is a marketing gimmick
I agree that the goal of an educational institution is to attract the *right* students. To do this, you need to find out your position, select the target audience and formulate it in your advertising materials. But students do not need to look for a “guarantee of employment” either. This term is an invention of marketers to attract potential target audience. You can get a job with a strategy:
- Take multiple individual courses without a guarantee
- Try several times to pass the interview
- Work on the bugs after each interview
About prescreening
The task of weeding out unsuitable students is simple only for the strict selection courses that I wrote about above. That's just their goal is not education, but the primary screening for students' money.
If the goal is to really teach a person, then screening becomes extremely non-trivial. It is difficult, very difficult to make such a test, which will allow in a short time and with sufficient accuracy to determine the terms of training for one particular person. A student can be smart and quick-witted, but at the same time it will be painfully long to type code, write write-only notes, be dumb on trivial file operations and have trouble finding typos in the text. The lion's share of his time and effort will be spent simply on the design of the launching program.
At the same time, a neat and attentive student who understands the English text will have a head start. Keywords for him will not be hieroglyphs, and he will find a forgotten semicolon in 30 seconds, and not in 10 minutes.
The term of study can be promised based on the weakest student, but in the end it can turn out to be 5 years like in universities.
Course fun
I generally agree that the course should be quite exciting. There are two extremes. On the one hand, the course is meager in content, which is served lively and cheerfully, but to no avail. On the other hand, it is a dry squeeze of valuable information that is simply not absorbed due to presentation. As elsewhere, the golden mean is important.
However, it may happen that the course will be exciting for some people and at the same time cause rejection in others only due to its form. For example, learning java in a game about the cubic world from Microsoft is unlikely to be approved by adult "serious" people. Even though the concepts will be learned the same. However, at school, this format of teaching programming will be successful.
Help for those who are lagging behind
For helping me get through the course, I'll quote Bjarne Stroustrup again ( ):
If you are teaching a large class, not everyone will pass/succeed. In that case you have a choice which in its crudest for is: slow down to help the weaker students or keep up the
pace and lose them. The urge and pressure is typically to slow down and help. By all
means help –and supply extra help through teaching assistants if you can – but don't slow
down. Doing so would not be fair to the smartest, best prepared, and hardest working
students – you'll lose them to boredom and lack of challenge. If you have to lose/fail
someone, let it be someone that will never become a good software developer or
computer scientist anyway; not your potential star students.
If you are teaching in a large group, not everyone will be able to cope. In this case, you need to make a tough decision: slow down to help weak students, or keep up the pace and lose them. Every fiber of your being would want to slow down and help. Help. By all available means. But never slow down. It won't be fair for smart, prepared, and hard-working students—the lack of challenges will make them bored, and you'll lose them. Since you will lose someone anyway, let it not be your future stars, but those who will never become a good developer or scientist.
In other words, the teacher will not be able to help absolutely everyone. Someone will still drop out and “ruin the conversion”.
What to do?
At the beginning of your journey, you don’t need to look at employment metrics at all. The path to IT can be a long one. Count on a year or two. One course "with a guarantee" is definitely not enough for you. In addition to taking courses, you also need to develop your own computer skills: the ability to type quickly, search for information on the Internet, analyze texts, and so on.
If you look at any course indicators at all, then first of all you need to look at the price and first try the free ones, then the cheap ones, and only then the expensive ones.
If you have the ability, then free courses will be enough. As a rule, they will need to read and listen a lot on their own. You will have a robot check the tasks. It would not be a pity to leave such a course in the middle and try another one on the same topic.
If there are no free courses on the topic haha, then look for comfortable ones for your wallet. Preferably with the possibility of partial payment to be able to drop it.
If there are inexplicable problems with development, then you need to seek help from a teacher or mentor. It will always cost money, so look for where you can be offered a consulting form of classes paid by the hour. At the same time, you don’t need to perceive the mentor as a live Google, which you can ask in terms of “I want to do this garbage like this.” His role is to guide you and help you find the right words. Much more could be written on this topic, but I won't go into it now.
Thank you for attention!
PS If you find any typos or errors in the text, please let me know. This can be done by selecting a piece of text and pressing "Ctrl / ⌘ + Enter" if you have Ctrl / ⌘, or via . If both options are not available, write about the errors in the comments. Thank you!
Source: habr.com