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Tushar Subhra Dutta, writing at TechViral, explains the changes happening at America’s elite tech firms. The companies are changing their hiring focus away from only hiring college graduates with the highest grades to rewarding talent no matter how it was cultivated. Subhra Dutta reports (abridged):
We all know very well that all the major technology companies have highly skilled employees. Many of them graduate from the best teaching institutions in the world. But that does not mean that college education is mandatory: companies like the tech giant Apple, the tech giant Google, and the tech giant IBM no longer hesitate to prioritize specific experiences or skills in place of diplomas.
Tech giant Apple, for example, places a high value on the candidate’s experience, regardless of whether he got it in an academic setting or in other companies. Joanna Daly, IBM’s vice president of talent, told CNBC in an interview last year that the company takes into account skills built on boot camps, other jobs, or even on its own. About 15 percent of IBM employees in the United States do not have college degrees.
The case of the tech giant Google is quite interesting. Sergey Brin and Larry Page met at Stanford University when they were studying for a doctorate in computer science. They practically created the tech giant Google within the walls of the institution. In the early years, they tried to make the company remember a university, both in the inner culture and in the physical spaces.
This approach has helped Google attract young talents who envisioned the chance to make a career in a company with a nontraditional internal culture. But the level of demand was high: it is said that for a long time the tech giant Google made a point of only hiring employees who came from top universities and who, in addition, had high grades.
It’s not like this anymore. Academic education remains important to Google – indeed, to Alphabet as a whole – but is no longer a requirement for hiring.
Read more here.
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