Randall Hansen is Right!

I really believe that career branding is important, especially in IT. There are so many students that graduate from college with degrees in computer science who have no idea about this. They are lost and struggling the way I have been for six years.

The academic people believe that the best way to teach computer science is in a general way - to introduce as many concepts to students as possible and teach them how to think. This is great and really important. However, if these students are not taught how to get specific jobs, they will not be in key places in the workforce to make this thinking work.

Instead, they will be competing with people who have gotten programming training in a specific technology. (In one of my graduate courses, I read articles labeling these people as "canned programmers.") Maybe these people were taught to memorize instead of how to think, but they key is that they know a technology well enough to talk intelligently about it and don't need (in theory) the ramp up time needed to pick up this skill and run with it that today's companies need.

I believe that the people who can think need to also get this training so that we can have the best of both worlds in today's workplace. People who can benefit a company now AND in the future. As I move onward in my career, I want to write about specific steps that I will take / have taken and what I am doing to brand myself in order to be successful in my field. I hope that others will read it who can learn from it.