Microsoft To Work With Community Colleges To Fill 250,000 Cyber Jobs (reuters.com) 38
Microsoft on Thursday said it plans to work with community colleges across the United States to fill 250,000 cybersecurity jobs over the next four years. From a report: Microsoft said it will provide scholarships or assistance to about 25,000 students and will provide training for new and existing teachers at 150 community colleges across the country. The company also said that it will provide curriculum materials for free to all community colleges, as well as four-year schools, in the country. "Over the next three years, we'll put many tens of millions of dollars behind this effort," Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a press briefing. "This is an opportunity for us to get started. This is not the ceiling on what we'll do."
Smart move for Microsoft (Score:3)
It's basically the Cisco approach - flood the colleges with gobs of your hardware (or in Microsoft's case, software), and when that crop of students graduates, your way of doing things is all they know.
And the colleges fall for it, hook, line, and sinker.
Re:Minecraft Consultant Solitaire Expert (Score:4, Informative)
You might think the colleges and universities don't care, but their accreditation agencies sure do. Every course taught in a college has an accreditation body that oversees the courses, along with an agency that oversees the college or university. Some examples of accreditation agencies are the New England Commission of Higher Education, Middle States Commission on Higher Education, Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, and the Western Association of Senior Colleges and University Commission.
Before a college can offer a class in something like underwater basket weaving, the course has to go through a pre-accreditation phase where they review the syllabus, testing requirements, the credit hours for the course, and other criteria. After the course is accredited, there is a better chance that the course will be accepted at other colleges for transferring credits, but it isn't always easy. A 4-credit math class accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools might only transfer 3 credit hours into a college accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. Some courses might not be recognized by the accepting accreditation agency and the credits will not transfer at all.
Military members run into this quite often as they are transferred to new duty stations and try to transfer credits into a new university, but accredited distance learning has made this easier.
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This is a significant misstatement of what accreditation bodies do. They approve entire colleges -- not individual courses.
When the accreditation review comes around, they get a giant binder of information on all of the school's programs, degrees, and courses. The judgement at the end is either a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to continued accreditation for the whole school.
A school is entirely within its own purview to offer an underwater basket weaving course. The accreditation body likely won't have any sign o
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... and I should add that the issue of transfer credits is likewise entirely in the hands of the receiving college.
Many institutions now try to hammer out articulation agreements [collegetransfer.net] with partner colleges so as to streamline that process and make it more predictable. But most such agreements are just between pairs of schools; unless in some places it's required by state law (say, between state-funded community colleges & the state university).
But again, an accreditation agency would never have anything to d
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Gud! Sumbudy neads to fix my spail chekker.
Embrace, extend, engulf. (Score:2)
"This is an opportunity for us to get started. This is not the ceiling on what we'll do."
Lotta of all things Microsoft involved.
Or... they could just dump their lousy software (Score:1)
Most of the cybersecurity issues are due to poorly designed and implemented Microsoft software. It has been relentlessly patched over the years but still is easily exploitable due to poor design and the need for backward compatibility. I think it's time for Microsoft to ditch this steaming pile and move to a more secure design.
Linux and MacOS don't seem to have nearly as many problems.
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Bad enough being educated by big brother... (Score:1)
> provide curriculum materials for free to all community colleges, as well as four-year schools
Sounds like Uncle Bill wants to control the young people's thoughts now also.
Giving them the benefit of the doubt here (Score:2)
But if Microsoft does domestic hiring and not just training it would indeed be a great thing and turn of the tide in technology. All the tech companies are putting money into supposed efforts to strengthen technology in the US but it always appears to just be lip service to lend credibility when they want to import another few hundred thousand foreign workers to dilute the labor pool.
Re: Giving them the benefit of the doubt here (Score:2)
Yeah, and targeting community colleges could do wonders in getting people from less privileged backgrounds into the industry. That's assuming this isn't a 'diversity' imitative, focussed more on race than economic status.
running scared (Score:2)
People don't grok community colleges (Score:5, Insightful)
I've taught math & CS at a community colleges for about 20 years -- one of the nationally top-rated ones, in fact.
People don't understand the state of the U.S. open-admissions community college system. The majority of incoming students can't read or write at an 8th-grade level. They can't do math either, often at even a 4th-grade level. I'm currently teaching a remedial algebra class in which absolutely no one can remember anything from day to day: not how to reliably multiply single-digit numbers, add or subtract negative numbers, solve -x = 8, etc., etc., no matter how many dozen times we go over it. I had a student yesterday say the very idea of taking a (8th-grade level) test without a calculator is humanly impossible.
Overall graduation rate nationally for community colleges is about 20%. For two-year degree programs in CS it's about 5%.
I've more or less given up hope trying to get anyone outside the system to grok the state of affairs; it's just too unbelievable.
So: Good luck MS.
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Preach on ....the barrier to entry is extremely low and then they wonder why the retention and completion rates are so low. I have no issue with the low barrier to entry but performance based funding really sets the schools up for looking like failures. CCs funding is a abysmal, they can't keep up with inflation, and don't have access to deep pocketed donors. It is like they are setup to fail ...or barely keep afloat.
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But if we lower the requirements to graduate, we can drive that graduation rate even higher.
I taught at a for profit community college. I know what you mean about a lack of skills. I had a situation today where I ran across someone who doesn't understand some aspects of network design and routing even though they have been working with network for well over a decade.
As I try to push more into CS, I also understand where some people are just not cut out for the industry. I don't know where to start, but I
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It's not particularly difficult to be in the field for decades and fail to grasp "some aspects of network design and routing". Plenty of other things that could be your day job instead and still be "in networking". Like the guy who was really quite experienced with WLAN, but then worried about a layer two wired/wlan/wired testing setup looping where there wasn't any loop, since one hop was routed, not bridged. (Nobody else on that forum caught that, they were all "use VLANs! use VLANs!" as if that magically
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I've been an adjunct at an LA cc for a few years and see the same thing. Another issue, even when I taught cc 40 yrs ago while in grad school, is high class withdrawal rate. Before the semester is half over I'm at 50% of the original enrollment, losing students who've never shown for class and/or who've made zero effort to learn the material or who find it too difficult even though the classes are geared towards non-stem majors fulfilling a general ed requirement.
Open admission isn't going away, but student
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Right. The solution to the low-enrollment issue where I am is that the withdrawal period has been extended the entire semester, to the very morning of the final exam. So students are encouraged by advisors to "keep at it" the whole way through no matter what the situation is. Early in my tenure, students had to get instructor confirmation they were passing in order to withdraw, but that went away. The policy now is that they literally don't have to do anything; stay in the whole semester, and if they skip t
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re: math (Score:2)
I can sympathize.
I was always great at reading, writing and spelling... along with any other subject I cared enough about to put in the effort. (Liked science, until chemistry got all math-heavy.) I was self-taught with computers from the early 8-bit home computer days and knew right then it's what I wanted to do for a living, one way or another. Math was always a struggle. (I actually got about a B or C average in geometry because it felt so different than all the other math; with the "proofs" that were
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The funny thing is that I regularly tell people that geometry is the most "real math" course that they take in high school.
You get the inverse problem in college with math majors. People who are good at following rules and computing numbers think they should be math majors. Then sophomore year it flips and everything is proofs forever from then on (mostly written in paragraph form), and it's like the Titanic hitting the iceberg and throwing them all in the freezing ocean.
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Math was my weakest subject, as reflected in things like my SATs. So I majored in math in college because I thought that was the best use of college. I don't regret it, even though I was a 'C' student and all the other math majors were 'A' students. At least I don't panic when somebody draws a graph on a blackboard (or whiteboard or whatever).
My fondest memory was that I had to give a presentation as a senior to math class made up mostly of juniors, a sort of senior thesis, and I chose to do it on Goedel
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Well I'm sure we've all heard stories about the problems inability to read and write cause in a persons life. Dyscalculia [childmind.org] is the same way with the lifelong problems that causes.
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So... On the same level as the average H1B worker, and they're working in IT everywhere these days. /Give me a head start before going after me...
Better title. (Score:2)
Microsoft To Work With Community Colleges To Suppress Wages
Come on, we both know there isn't a shortage of people, there just isn't a glut of people. This is all about keeping wages low.
Microsoft just wants to flood the market (Score:2)
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Odd (Score:3)
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Judging by how their current online training programs are structured, it's to increase the pool of workers trained to use Microsoft's proprietary tools. I looked through their Azure certification materials online, and you repeatedly see scenarios there along the lines of, "You know closing down your data center and moving everything to Microsoft Azure will save your company lots of money and increase uptime. This is how you sell it to your CFO." Also having a larger pool of workers who can use your systems
rate of pay (Score:2)
They only need/want new grads because they want to pay as little as possible. There are people that are available, Microsoft does not want to pay for qualified people. Surprised this isn't happening in some 3rd world country.
Is "Cybersecurity" even worth pursuing? (Score:2)
The whole time I've been in computers and I.T. -- the problem of securing systems and networks from hackers has been around. But a huge part of it is just plain old social engineering. There's not much technical to learn there, really. Just a basic understanding that a lot of people out there will lie and come up with clever excuses to get people to turn over their secure credentials to things.
When you look at some of the biggest, high-profile credit card leaks from companies? It's typically been an insid
So badly qualified and inexperienced people? (Score:2)
Yeah, that will go well. What about instead making the security of MS products suck less? Naaa, they cannot do that. No skills in that area.
Labor Shortage? Or crap pay/unrealistic demands? (Score:2)
We have all seen the ads where they asked for 10 years of experience on a software that has only existed for 5 years...and wanting a university degree for entry level jobs. It has gotten to the point where you practically have to lie on your resume to met there criteria, or not apply because lying offends your ethics.
What I think is that this initiative from Microsoft is really just an attempt to prime the pump to flood IT with "qualified" people and keep IT pay low.
Microsoft cybersecurity is a fcuking joke ? (Score:2)
Slashdot, you used to be a top tech site. But you've obviously reached 1,000 years in Internet years and need to be put down. It was nice knowing you.