Feel free to elaborate? Did you employ in the aviation industry? Do you know what is entailed in the aviation management degree?
No, and no. I only worked full-time in aviation for a short time in the early 1980's before getting laid off.
My experience as an employer began in 2000 when I established a computer repair / tech support / consulting business. Most of my employees were part-timers. I eventually did have a few full-timers who lived in or closer to some of the more distant regions we serviced. I sold the business in 2011, keeping for myself only the Web development part (which had started as a hobby but eventually became an offshoot), and semi-retired to the boondocks.
My experience with college students or graduates with I.T. majors was less-than-wonderful. Most of them either were utterly incompetent at the more practical, hands-on sorts of tasks that were the basis for most new client contacts; or else they were unwilling to do that work, considering it beneath their lofty training. I'm talking about things like replacing a NIC, running Ethernet cable to a new workstation location, upgrading a hard drive, upgrading an OS... those sorts of jobs. They weren't exciting, but they were how we got most of our new clients.
It didn't take me long to gravitate toward college students who had a hobby interest in computers, but who weren't I.T. majors, as my part-timers. They were just better at the job. The I.T. majors had more theoretical knowledge, but little or no practical competency in a production environment. They also whined a lot about having to do work that they thought beneath their lofty educations.
Students with majors in almost anything else, but a hobby or peripheral interest in computers, were much better all around. Engineering students as a group were the best, but my very best part-timer was actually a nursing major with a strong hobby interest in computers (especially Linux, which she'd been using as her preferred OS since she'd been in high school).
By the time I sold the business, my reasons for choosing college students as part-timers had become pragmatic: They tended not to be morons, they needed flexible schedules, and they were very loyal. The loyalty was a product of the pay they were getting. The lowest-paid kids were helpers who pulled cables and the like. They got $15.00 / hour. The more skilled kids got as much as $25.00 / hour.
That was pretty astronomical pay by college student standards. But I was billing them high enough to justify it, and they were very loyal and reliable. I also paid for their meals either in person or by giving them petty cash up-front if I wasn't going on the job. I knew that even well-paid college kids sometimes ran short on coin, and I wanted to make sure they ate. That was just a general decency thing. I wanted to be a good boss.
My full-timers were people of a wide age range, some with degrees and some without, most of whom were already doing some sort of onsite tech support or consulting work as a sideline and had sent me resumes seeking full-time jobs. The ones I hired eventually operated pretty much independently. They serviced the more distant parts of our service area with little supervision. They were legally my employees, but they operated more like affiliates.
I really didn't care very much whether they had degrees. By then, I'd already come to view degrees as little more than expensive nail-hole covers. Rather, I made my final decisions based upon the candidates' attitudes and competency during a trial period during which they rode with me and/or with a trusted part-timer. I also sent them on solo calls to clients with whom I had especially friendly relationships, and asked the clients to confidentially evaluate them. On average, maybe a quarter to a third of those who started trial periods made the final cut.
That's my experience in a nutshell. It's also a small part of why I have such a low opinion of American undergraduate education. I believe that almost all majors should be more like engineering or nursing, with the students spending nearly all their time studying their majors and closely-associated disciplines, and little time studying anything else.
That will never happen, however. The only reason it's the case with engineering and nursing is because their respective accrediting agencies force it to be that way. The last thing the education industry as a whole wants is for the average Bachelor's degree recipient to be able to actually make a living in his or her chosen profession because they've learned everything they need to know for entry-level employment. It's much more profitable to teach the same courses at the grad school level for two or three times the coin.
Rich
