I recently had a coworker who was unable to understand how to use Google or other search engines. She may have been the stupidest person I’ve ever met and was the living embodiment of the fact that one can be highly educated yet still incredibly stupid.
It’s definitely a skill, but not one I would expect to see on a resumé. I do mention it in interviews, that I don’t know everything, but I can find out. Then they ask how, and I say that I know how to use search engines. But I akin it to “keyboarding”. It is a skill, but it’s something you’re expected to know by now and shouldn’t be added to a resumé.
That’s how we felt! Who could make it through multiple Masters degrees and advanced certifications without even basic computer skills? I’d say it’s a one in a million chance and we found them.
You can brute force most of higher education with memorization learning still. If you work twice as hard on your thesis for the six month or so you have to write it, you can make it seem like you understood most of it, even if you didn’t. If in doubt you can always try to make a literature research thesis and just write down what most authors talked about, even if you don’t understand what it is.
Yeah, it’s one of those core components that if someone actually lists it, first assumption is that they felt like they needed to pad their resume.
Though at the same time, it could be an attempt to say, “hey, I don’t know each of the specific languages you’ve listed, but because I know how to use a search engine, I can quickly learn any of them”.
Like I learned python because I needed it for assignments. It wasn’t a “oh, some classes might use python, I better learn it ahead of time”, it was a “I’ve just been given an assignment that must be written in Python. It’s due in two weeks, so next week I’ll sit down with a tutorial or two to learn the basics, then I’ll just have a couple of reference tabs going while I do the assignment itself”. And I’ve done that at work for both perl and ruby.
Out of all languages I’ve learned, the only new paradigms were things like objects, functional programming, or RTL programming with verilog. And really only that last one is a significant mindset shift. Objects are just a way to organize data and methods, functional programming is just using a new variable for each assignment, it’s all still running the same machine code on a CPU core. RTL is different because it’s designing circuitry that “runs itself”, but even that is one that I learned during one school term that I could have picked up on my own if pointed in the right direction.
The real benefits from my schooling and experience are all harder to put on a resume. I know how to learn. I might not know everything you’d like me to know to do this job right now, but I’m confident that I can learn them quickly and competently enough to be useful in this role. I naturally gravitate towards edge cases and rule exceptions, which I find helps mature my experience quicker because debugging is more matching current behavior with a limitation I was already aware of rather than needing to discover that limitation exists. But how do I put that on a resume, especially one that needs to get passed AI filters just looking for the most matches with words from the job posting? Or as a hiring manager, what do I even look for to try to get more of those people than rigid people who happen to have a match with the current skillset I’m looking for? A university level degree is the only thing I can think of so far.
I recently had a coworker who was unable to understand how to use Google or other search engines. She may have been the stupidest person I’ve ever met and was the living embodiment of the fact that one can be highly educated yet still incredibly stupid.
Haha! Oh, man!
It’s definitely a skill, but not one I would expect to see on a resumé. I do mention it in interviews, that I don’t know everything, but I can find out. Then they ask how, and I say that I know how to use search engines. But I akin it to “keyboarding”. It is a skill, but it’s something you’re expected to know by now and shouldn’t be added to a resumé.
You should say that you “surf the web” and attach the stereotypical picture of a 90s child literally surfing in the virtual space.
That is a pretty excellent image
That’s how we felt! Who could make it through multiple Masters degrees and advanced certifications without even basic computer skills? I’d say it’s a one in a million chance and we found them.
You can brute force most of higher education with memorization learning still. If you work twice as hard on your thesis for the six month or so you have to write it, you can make it seem like you understood most of it, even if you didn’t. If in doubt you can always try to make a literature research thesis and just write down what most authors talked about, even if you don’t understand what it is.
Yeah, it’s one of those core components that if someone actually lists it, first assumption is that they felt like they needed to pad their resume.
Though at the same time, it could be an attempt to say, “hey, I don’t know each of the specific languages you’ve listed, but because I know how to use a search engine, I can quickly learn any of them”.
Like I learned python because I needed it for assignments. It wasn’t a “oh, some classes might use python, I better learn it ahead of time”, it was a “I’ve just been given an assignment that must be written in Python. It’s due in two weeks, so next week I’ll sit down with a tutorial or two to learn the basics, then I’ll just have a couple of reference tabs going while I do the assignment itself”. And I’ve done that at work for both perl and ruby.
Out of all languages I’ve learned, the only new paradigms were things like objects, functional programming, or RTL programming with verilog. And really only that last one is a significant mindset shift. Objects are just a way to organize data and methods, functional programming is just using a new variable for each assignment, it’s all still running the same machine code on a CPU core. RTL is different because it’s designing circuitry that “runs itself”, but even that is one that I learned during one school term that I could have picked up on my own if pointed in the right direction.
The real benefits from my schooling and experience are all harder to put on a resume. I know how to learn. I might not know everything you’d like me to know to do this job right now, but I’m confident that I can learn them quickly and competently enough to be useful in this role. I naturally gravitate towards edge cases and rule exceptions, which I find helps mature my experience quicker because debugging is more matching current behavior with a limitation I was already aware of rather than needing to discover that limitation exists. But how do I put that on a resume, especially one that needs to get passed AI filters just looking for the most matches with words from the job posting? Or as a hiring manager, what do I even look for to try to get more of those people than rigid people who happen to have a match with the current skillset I’m looking for? A university level degree is the only thing I can think of so far.