Over the course of my more than 20-year professional career, I have encountered many different approaches. I myself am working on my third degree and often teach, but I find the whole subject of learning highly contradictory.
My children are already university students, but even now there is an unresolvable tension present: I expect good results, yet they know my opinion – which they also agree with – about the quality of the curriculum and the knowledge that can be acquired.
In my view, the situation is at least as bad as in the fairy tale about the king's new clothes. Everyone raves about how beautiful the garment is, while the king is actually naked.
The vast majority of people I have hired into my company were not experienced programmers, or were not even programmers at all. They had studied something completely different. Or if they had studied programming, it was at a level where nothing could really be done with it. Yet in some cases they paid millions for the training, or spent years wearing out a classroom seat, which in total also cost someone millions. The knowledge acquired, however, was not enough for anything.
In the corporate world it often happens that at the end of the year everyone is sent off to some course, because there is budget left over and next year we'll get less if it remains unspent. Colleagues are of course happy to go, because at least they don't have to work in the meantime. This is a kind of benefit, but by no means learning.
At conferences too it is a common phenomenon that a large part of the audience comes from sponsor companies because of sponsor tickets, and the primary goal is not the acquisition of usable knowledge. Of course, the organizers and speakers are also at fault here.
After so much struggling, so many exams and needlessly spent money, and days, weeks, years spent in frontal education, I am fairly certain of two things:
First, anyone who obtains a degree, however useless it may be, is far more capable of thinking in systems than someone who doesn't. Obtaining the grades is probably such a complex task that a person either manages to clear it, or doesn't.
Second, that theoretical training or a course is only useful if it is immediately followed by practice and assessment. It is a rather depressing sight when someone's office is full of certificates of the kind that merely prove they attended some training.
Perhaps my English teacher's timeless saying also belongs here: There are no miracles.
Still, learning is worth it! 🙂
