Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Employers: Entry-Level Applications are Useless

Oh, come now! Once you get over the flaming wreckage, they're not so bad. Some of them are even cuddly.

But maybe I'm just an internal-locus-of-control sort of gal.

So, if I interpret this in another way...
It's good to have the "goods" on one's boss? He knows it and so do you, so a conversation can be had while the outside world looks on none the wiser?

I enjoyed 2008 very much.

Lots of fun, the crash was exciting, what with watching watching the web of lies and fraud unwind, and I made money.

And I got to be part of a real stock market crash.

Good times.

Yup! Choosing to be diplomatic and "lose" from a position of strength speaks volumes.

I get the warm fuzzies just reading that.

Debating the headlock is not really the point. It is the lack of strategic skills and that most young people have the political sense of a cow. They focus on their own path without any regard to the environment.

Problem defined, what are potential solutions? How would you help your child have better soft skills?

By actively coaching them in a metacognitive sense.

At least that is my theory. I'm conducting an experiment with an N of one, but so far things look excellent on that front.

My DD has always been pretty interested and tuned in to other people and what makes them tick, though... so I probably can take very little credit for her skills here.

I imagine that it involves a lot of the same kind of 'social stories' training that parents of children on the spectrum are quite familiar with, however. I just contrast how I see parents behave (even really good ones) now with how they spoke to children when I was one, though...

It's a really striking difference. Parents now generally avoid comparisons with other children. They seem to use me-centered language with kids, rather than more prosocial, outwardly directed language.

It's an entirely different way of looking at the world, basically. Does the world exist AROUND one? Or is a person just a small part OF that world? Basically, I like to think it boils down to convincing my child that not everything is about HER.

In her case, that was pretty essential since she had to learn that pretty early. Even family members who love her to pieces are totally capable of hurting or even killing her accidentally because of their ignorance. Some of them are quite difficult to educate on that point, even, which is far worse. That is a lot for anyone to process, but in order to maintain a healthy relationship, you have to be able to compartmentalize it properly and not take it personally.

Adolescents tend to naturally regress and think that everything IS about them. So I find myself issuing gentle reminders that her friends aren't 'ignoring' her because they hate her or because she did something awful... but probably because they have other things going on in their lives sometimes. I have to poke at her to get her to think of innocuous reasons why Joe/Jane hasn't been on Skype, or why Sam/Sandy has been grumpy lately.

I just have a feeling that this is a lot, lot harder with a kid that has been taught from toddlerhood that the world exists solely FOR him/her.

The problem we have in my industry (IT) is that they shipped nearly all the entry-level work overseas, so no one locally can even get INTO the field.. that means that every year that goes by, more and more of the older generation retire, and there are fewer and fewer of us who are actually proper senior engineers... there's no one coming in the door to replace at the moment. I suppose we'll have to keep granting H1B visas to bring over the Indians...

I think a bigger problem in IT is that the entry-level folks we do get here come from pointy-clicky experiences, which have so successfully abstracted the user experience from the internal programming that they have no idea how the processes they're performing actually work.

But also, see my previous post on the tool-specific requirements that employers are posting, which is worse for IT workers than just about anyone. In order for an IT worker to get their resume past the automated selection process, the resume has to be turned into a nearly illegible alphabet soup of acronyms and brand names.

Also, there's very little appreciation for how someone with relatively similar experience could make a quick transition. Red Hat is not fundamentally different from SuSE, relational databases are relational databases the world around, object oriented programming languages all share certain characteristics, etc.

As for H-1B workers... if you think our soft skills are bad...

The Indian soft skills... So much laughter here.

Pro-tip for everyone - when you call a tech support line, hit the option for Spanish, then when you get connected just play like you hit the wrong button.. They all speak English and are based in CA, NM or TX for the most part. :-)