BIT gives guest lectures for IT students at ROC A12

BIT gives guest lectures for IT students at ROC A12

13-04-2017 11:02:56
Like almost all other IT companies, BIT sometimes struggles to fill vacancies in the staff for certain positions. Luckily, we are currently operating on full strength, but our last vacancy for a Linux Manager, for example, had been open for almost a year. The number of IT vacancies greatly exceeds the number of candidates available. Our expectation is that this shortage of qualified staff will only increase in the years to come. One of the ways in which we attempt to compensate for that shortage, is by giving guest lectures for IT students at the local Intermediate Vocational Educational institution, the ROC A12. The number of dropouts at the IVE is quite high and we are hoping to change this for the better with our guest lectures.

 Iris Wildeman, student at the ROC A12 on our guest lectures: “You get to know more about other things; parts that do not come up during the usual lessons. The level of the guest lectures is quite high and that makes it more fun, more of a challenge for me. The guest lectures also give a better look at the future and what you do or do not like within your area of work.”
Iris Wildeman

The hosting industry feels the shortage of technical personnel the most. This particular industry requires knowledge that many educations only partially provide.

 One of the other students from the guest lectures, Harold Boersma, says: “During the guest lectures from Wido we learn to use Linux in many more ways. In my education I do work with this operating system, but only to a very small extent.”
Harold Boersma

We are giving four guest lectures of 3 hours each at the ROC A12. These lessons will be given to two groups of students that follow their lessons at two different locations. At the end of the series, the students will have installed a full open source mail server, including separate MTA, MDA and MUA, spam filtering, webmail functionality and security configurations on the Linus operating system. A small set up that you could find in a hosting company. And the students seem to like it.

 Alex van de Bruinhorst: “It is a good thing to get to know people from the corporate world at this stage. They have the knowledge on current subjects in the IT industry. I am not exactly sure what I want to be doing in the IT, but the guest lectures that teach me more about Linux did show me where my interest are and I certainly want to learn more about Linux.”
Alex van de Bruinhorst

In addition to the guest lectures at the ROC A12, we often give ‘masterclasses’ and tours in our datacenters for other Intermediate and Higher Vocational Educations. Such educational institutions have a high need for such possibilities. We advise other IT companies to go and meet up with schools in their neighbourhood. It is good for the industry and interesting to be able to do some ‘cherry picking’ when you offer internships and such. Also, the industry organisations ISPconnect and DHPA are shortly embarking on a cooperations with the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and a Cloud Engineer education that is offered in a dual fashion. The industry organisations provide candidates that will go to school part-time and also work for a hosting company. If this is interesting for your business, please do contact the industry organisations.

Guest lectures and tours for IVE, HVE and dual educations will not solve the shortage of IT professionals. BIT also works with (and strongly advocates) two other initiatives to increase the number of students at IT educations. That is the national programme “Pass IT On” and the pilot ‘Guest lectures, how it’s done’ that is only active in the regions of Amsterdam and Ede, but will become available in the whole of the Netherlands in due time.