Communications of the ACM
Employers Receptive to Hiring It Job Candidates With Mooc Educations
Credit: Johns Hopkins University
For IT professionals looking to advance their careers or other workers who want to make a career change to tech, taking a MOOC in a technical topic can help, according to employers. However, people need to complete projects that show hiring managers how they've used the tech skills they learned online. In other words, they have to show that a MOOC has helped them to learn practical IT skills necessary for a career move, preferably in a hot area like data science or Internet security. To a growing number of recruiters, a traditional college education and online learning hold the same value and convey the same information: that a person has been exposed to certain IT topics and possesses a certain baseline of skills.
For now, recruiters want to see evidence of MOOC projects that students have actively worked on during online courses. As they say, sometimes the best hires didn't go to school for computer science. That's especially true as students receive computer science backgrounds from a platform like edX, launched by Harvard and MIT in 2012. EdX offers the same courses that are taught to students enrolled in the participating schools. Unlike a regular university, edX offers the courses free to anyone with an Internet connection, and successfully finishing a course earns a student a certificate of completion instead of a diploma. Other popular MOOC platforms that offer a similar learning setup include Coursera, which was launched by two Stanford University computer science professors, and Udacity.
Given the strong demand and competition for tech workers with in-demand skills, employers shouldn't dismiss the education MOOCs offer. A company that doesn't entertain the thought of potentially hiring someone with an online education is limiting itself and its ability to accomplish the development projects that need to get done. The up-to-date material offered by MOOCs makes them ideal for learning IT topics that are relatively new, HR managers say. It's all part of a bigger trend as people moving away from the exclusive use of traditional brick-and-mortar education outlets and exercising other educational experiences. It means that your resume is your online presence — a list of projects rather than a list of courses you've taken. In short, HR departments have recently started emphasizing that they want people with experience through whatever means — whether it's online course work, internships, or traditional education.
From IDG News Service
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