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Television Education United Kingdom Technology

Young People Get Their Knowledge of Tech From TV, Not School (zdnet.com) 46

Posted by BeauHD from the survey-says dept.
According to a survey from Consultancy Accenture, young people born in the 90s are less likely to be getting their information about tech careers from school and teachers than social media, TV series and film. ZDNet reports: Social media ranks top for information sources about career aspirations (31%), beating out parents by a small margin (29%) and teachers by a larger margin (24%). Gen Z are more likely to learn about a future in the tech sector from TV and film (27%) than from school (19%). Accenture surveyed 1,000 UK-based 16-21-year-olds on their career aspirations and their long-term options. It found that 44% of young women said they had good digital skills, but only 40% of young men said they did. Despite this, less than a quarter of young people are confident in securing a technology job.

Shaheen Sayed, Accenture's technology lead in the UK & Ireland, said: "If the digital native generation is not turning to technology as a career option, then we have a huge pipeline problem for the technology profession. Young people know technology is completely redefining the world right now -- but their lack of confidence in securing a tech job indicates a worrying disconnect between young people, particularly girls, and a changing jobs market." Those interviewed who were interested in tech jobs said they would most likely choose jobs in AI, data analytics, and cybersecurity. Which makes sense to an extent, given that these are the top three subjects in online tech media at present.

"It's striking that young people are influenced more by digital channels than their connections at home and school when choosing their next steps," said Sayed. "Careers advice will need to meet young people where they are at and paint an engaging picture of the skills required for the economy today. Developing the next generation of tech talent requires more than having coding on the curriculum. Technology moves quickly and subjects must evolve to equip young people with the digital skills that will drive economic growth. Employers are looking for people to work with technologies, like AI, as they tackle global challenges like climate change and become more competitive."
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Young People Get Their Knowledge of Tech From TV, Not School More

Young People Get Their Knowledge of Tech From TV, Not School

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  • 0% of them actually had good tech skills.

  • All they need to know (Score:3)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Friday August 06, 2021 @08:59PM (#61665729)

    Can be found in one movie [imdb.com]. It's a little before their time, but it still holds up.

    • Can be found in one movie [imdb.com]. It's a little before their time, but it still holds up.

      I was hoping for Sneakers, or Swordfish.

    • Actually, when it was released it was a laughably bad Hollywoodification of the hacker subculture. Watching it was probably like how real doctors feel when watching medical dramas.

      ...decades passed and now a bunch of shit that shouldn’t be hooked up to the internet, is, and the movie now seems kind of prophetic. Dumb luck on the part of the writers, I’d guess.

      • Well as someone who met captain crunch like a really freaking long time ago; the part where they used a tape recorder to fool the payphones really worked in the 80s. The movie tried to take some 80s culture with bulletin boards, make a silent nod to William Gibson (necromancer), and bring it up to 1994 dial-up modem standards on the internet. Show of hands: how many of you still have the old underground magazine 2600? Or used a blackbox to keep line voltage at 48v so people could call you for free and the p

    • No, they should skip that and watch this instead. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0... [imdb.com]

  • This is no surprise (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TWX ( 665546 ) on Friday August 06, 2021 @08:59PM (#61665731)

    I learned what I learned in the nineties from BBSes and from friends. I may have drawn initial inspiration at school since I got my initial experiences with personal computers there, but what I actually learned wasn't really part of any curriculum.

    Likewise my friends were in similar circumstances, we all learned through troubleshooting, upgrading, and repairing our computers, and through playing with software including buggy beta-release commercial software and open source software in various states of maturity. You learn a lot when you have to try to make something work that wasn't even really working properly when you received it.

    Curriculum cannot teach you to be insightful that some weird edge-case is the cause of the problem. Curriculum might well give you some fundamentals but at some point you have to self-study or else all that you'll be able to do is spit-back that which was in the limited formal instruction. That formal instruction doesn't hurt, but it's nowhere close to the end-all of ability or knowledge.

    This is admittedly part why I'm not real keen on professional certifications, because I've seen MCPs and MCSEs and others with all the certs in the world but no real skill, and people with no certs at all capable of fixing just about anything.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Young people who have actual knowledge of tech, get the knowledge of tech from tech and most often in association with tech parents or close relatives. Young people who get their knowledge of tech from TV are the liberal arts schools version of young people with tech knowledge (oohh aahh, they know how to switch it off and switch it back on when it locks up), rather than the STEM version of young people with actual tech knowledge (who know how to program it to switch on and off). Heh, heh, so mean ;).

  • Setup for disappointment (Score:3)

    by WoodstockJeff ( 568111 ) on Friday August 06, 2021 @09:00PM (#61665733) Homepage

    Relying on TV, social media, and movies, where tech is depicted in ways that knowledgeable people cringe at?

    But, then again, it might inspire them to "do what cannot be done", because they didn't learn that it was impossible.

  • UK focused but relevant to EU and US (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jzanu ( 668651 ) on Friday August 06, 2021 @09:01PM (#61665735)
    These results show that the standard Western student has been deprived of knowledge about careers, whether they are technological or not. Particularly in IT though, this is not their fault. Saying "google it" doesn't mean anything when they do not know the words to search. More and more work occurs behind walls in secured rooms where the results are presented (sometimes) in flashy apps and more often not presented at all except through improved service efficiencies. How are kids to learn what the economy requires when it is not disclosed? TV and social media provide easy to digest and understand headlines for what technology does, whereas understanding what it can do is the realm of advanced education that is inaccessible at the early schooling level surveyed here. This suggests that colleges needs better outreach programs, and companies need to partner for actual educational fairs rather than vaguely defined career fairs aimed at older audiences. There is even a role for government funded expos on technology, particularly now that would be possible with massive media advertising for an online event designed for that purpose.

  • using not understanding (Score:4, Interesting)

    by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Friday August 06, 2021 @09:27PM (#61665779)

    A lot of kids use technology but very few try to understand it. To these kids 'having good digital skills' means on social media and has nothing to do with understanding how computing or programming works. How do you get a tech job with no tech skills?

    And it seems if you want a FAANG type job out of school you better have attended a top 10 CS program and done well.

    • A lot of kids use technology but very few try to understand it.

      The beauty of tech today is you can use it without having to understand it beyond the "surface level."

      Compare this to home computers in the 1970s. Unless you limited yourself to "plug in a cartridge and play the game" stuff, you pretty much had to know something about how things worked under the hood. Maybe you didn't have to know the BASIC computer language or understand what line numbers were for, but you had to know what command to type to load a program from disk or tape and run it.

      Even as a geek, I e

  • In 1980, we had books and just getting our hands dirty. Hands-on learning, jump right into it. If you were lucky you could find an old-timer to show you. All of a sudden, those HS science and physics classes were great!

  • For the longest time I have wondered where kids these days get their ideas from what security is about.

    Then I saw Mr. Robot and Watchdogs.

    Now at least I know where I have to start correcting their expectations.

  • Not one Computer skill teaches you the essential skill of typing really fast on a keyboard while an ally does the same! Not one.

    I had to learn that from TV.

    Now, it would be different if colleges taught essential techniques like double typing, creating GUI interfaces in order to send simple dos commands rather than doing the laborious process of typing them out, or the essential skill of sending a command to blow up your opponents computer no matter where it is in the world?

  • “Digital natives” looking for all the cool jobs in data analytics, cybersecurity, and AI. Im literally choking on the overflow of buzzwords.

    For ever job in AI, cybersecurity and AI there are more than 10 tech jobs in analog EE, digital EE, board design, chemical processing, mechanical design and optimization, hydraulic engineering, industrial controls, materials testing, concrete engineering, soil engineering, metallurgy, ceramics, polymer processing, plain old IT, non-AI programming, data

  • Using tech != being techie.

    They kind of coincided more in the 70s and 80s, when you almost had to be techie just to get anything to work. That's how the whole "dang those young folk sure get computers more, don't they Mabel?" trope got started.

    Not like that anymore. Yeah, kids may know how to navigate the UI of the latest app better, maybe. Doesn't make them techie.

  • Kids still watch TV? I didn't know that.
  • I find YouTube to have a video on almost anything technical and I even use it to, for example, learn how to play the intro to a song on guitar.
  • I got from a HOWTO manual. And occasionally a For Dummies book ;-)

  • Most humans don't belong in tech any more than they did in highly skilled trades. The sort who get their info from "influencers" are like their pre-internet predecessors who believed what they read in the newspaper or saw on TV while the future techies were interested in technology from childhood curiosity about objects around them. That's a profound difference.

    One may take training, but the aptitude and enthusiasm are mostly innate. Accenture's clients desire for serfs means they want to flood the job mark

  • School is not a place for smart people
  • So I guess they believe you can see data that isn't there.
  • When I see these attempts at social engineering I have a difficult choice. I can undertake the utterly thankless task of pointing out what's wrong with the post, the invalid premises, and the bias that created it, or I can ignore it and move on. If I do the former I'm usually just giving a springboard to the social engineers to spread their bigotry a little more. If I do the latter I have no say, am allowing the Overton window pushers that much more leeway, and am that much closer to abandoning the forum en
  • young people born in the 90s are less likely to be getting their information about tech careers from school and teachers than social media, TV series and film.

    ...less likely than what? When have schools ever informed students as to tech jobs? They haven't and that's okay. Very little of school is or should be about guiding kids into particular career choices. Teach them what they need to know and let them make up their minds what they're interested in doing....It found that 44% of young women said they ha
  • No one watches TV anymore, except old timers. See: Any statistics about time spend front of TV.
  • The youngest someone born in the 90s could be is still old enough to buy alcohol. The oldest of them are in their 30s.

  • That one word of advice, from the movie The Graduate, was meant to launch the young man into a future filled with change and opportunity. Many in the audience took it as a joke. The reality is that my 1954 car had nothing that we would recognize as plastic, and my current 2009 car, loaded with plastic, has few places to hang a magnet. Plastics did undergo a revolution. But like all revolutions, it has come to an end.

    And so did the 'tech' world- digital electronics and software. The revolution is over now af

  • They might get lots of dubious information from TV-Series and movies, but they are not watching them on a TV.

  • I think it's will be different each families, if parents influence them in different ways how to use TV, smart devices...

  • Both my children reported being forced to review the Department of Labor occupational outlook handbook, pick a "career", research it, and write about it. Neither found it particularly valuable.

    High School public education in the US is an unfunny joke. It's ineffective expensive incarceration, and for far too many kids it's torturous. If you've got kids in it, save them. Homeschool isn't that hard, and they can take the North Dakota GED at 16. I have zero regrets for pulling my daughter from her school,

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