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Are Good Grades the Be All and End All?
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Blacksheep1979 wrote:Dedication yes, self belief maybe - but there is such a thing as being blinkered and just because a university is harder to get into/better thought of doesn't make it 'posh'. Whilst I agree the OU is a great university their methods of teaching level at a time and the fact that you pay for the course makes it a little different to a traditional university.
As to studentmusician yes a course can be more tailored towards a job but still quite a few employers will seek their prospective employees from fields that show the necessary learning abilities and not the necessarily those with the exact skills/training to do the job as once you have been taught something one way you tend to be stuck in a certain way of doing things which may not be the way they want. Examples of this are mathematicians, physicists and engineers going into computing roles where the majority of the work is programming.
There are very few vocational courses that have a job that other courses couldn't apply to, the few I can think of are medicine and law, depending on the area you are looking at I guess that electronic engineers would be able to apply
I think it depends on where you're intending to work. If you want to work in London on a mega-bucks salary, you stand a better chance of being considered if you went to a top 10 uni. But that isn't everyone's aim (tbh honest that would be my idea of hell!) For example, say an aircraft engineering company need graduate engineers - they can choose from a candidate from Bristol with a general BEng, or one from a lower rate uni or local college with a specific aircraft engineering degree. Why would they pick the one with the general degree - they'd surely need to be further trained in aircraft engineering, which takes time. Do you see what i'm saying? I think this is what the poster was saying. If all the degrees from all the bottom fifty unis were worthless, all students from these unis would be unemployed.0 -
You're right about some degrees offering specific skills and some universities gear their courses successfully towards the needs of industry. On the other hand, the poorer universities usually have far higher drop out rates and high rates of graduate unemployment; often higher than it first appears when you analyse the types of jobs they have gone into.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8403-1246754,00.html0 -
scorpio_princess wrote:Why would they pick the one with the general degree - they'd surely need to be further trained in aircraft engineering, which takes time.
Almost every firm will train its employees (especially in technical areas) as they want to be 100% assured that the employees do the work exactly as the company expects and in a given way and so it takes very little more to train a general degree than a specialist one thats why I've seen electronic engineers being accepted for computer programming jobs alongside computer scientists. A company would rather spend a small amount more time on a decent candidate who will fit in and have the right mentality than one who can do the job straight off.0
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