The Experience Factor
Where you went to school tends to be more of an issue for IT professionals who are just starting out. “When engineers first graduate, they don’t have any industry experience, so what companies are banking on are more the computer science fundamentals,” says Aaron Ho, technical recruiter at Riviera Partners, a San Francisco staffing agency focused on startups. “Top schools are very good at teaching that—practical problem-solving, algorithms, data structures. And new grads, that’s really all they have.” In a recently released profile of the engineers it places, Riviera Partners found the most common schools for undergraduate degrees were UC-Berkeley, UCLA and the University of Waterloo. For graduate degrees, they were UC-Berkeley, Stanford and Georgia Tech.Upload Your ResumeEmployers want candidates like you. Upload your resume. Show them you're awesome.
Getting Ahead
The advantage enjoyed by new graduates from better-known schools isn’t a blanket one, Ho notes. Alumni of other colleges can still effectively sell themselves to employers. “When you’re a young engineer, what’s really important is your drive and your ambition to learn,” he says. “Over time, if you’re constantly learning and constantly improving yourself, by five or 10 years out of college you’ll be a much stronger engineer overall.” His recommendation: Work on practical, real-world projects. “If you’ve been building things—maybe you have a website or portfolio of things you’ve been working on—that shows the kind of drive companies are looking for.”Related Articles
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