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Information Technology courses that impacted your career

by Mike Sarokin

Schools have a difficult challenge preparing students for the wide variety of jobs in Information Technology (IT). Examples of the varied jobs include consulting, systems management, application development, network engineering, and security.

As I reflect back, there were a number of courses that I considered being very valuable in my career. My 30 year career has mostly been in the enterprise architecture and applications area.

Here are some of the courses I found most beneficial:

IBM 360 Assembler: While I never programmed professionally in Assembler this course provided me the necessary foundation for my programming career. Understanding the instruction set and use of registers was fundamental to how I developed and debugged COBOL programs.
COBOL: This course was necessary to get my first job. I programmed in COBOL for many years and the fundamentals I learned in school jump started my career.
Typing: Actually, I took this class in junior high. Being proficient in typing has rewarded me with greater productivity than my peers who type with one finger. I wonder if they teach classes on how to type with your thumbs so that I can be as productive with my PDA phone?
Writing skills: I didn't anticipate that this course would have been so valuable. Effective written communication both formal and informal has been very important in my career.

I would assume that IT professionals that entered the field in recent years have some different courses on their list.

What courses had the most influence on your IT career?

Published Friday, March 14, 2008 2:31 PM

Filed under: Education

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Comments

Posted by Murali Narayanan Friday, March 21, 2008 11:37 AM

No matter how intensive the courses were or how lengthy the courses... it sure adds value to the life and comfort in career.

- Basic Language: I took this course in high school, when computers were toddlers. Provided simple approach to programming concepts.

- Assembler: Understand the guts of the computer.

- COBOL: Made me think the application of computer to business purposes. While Basic and Assembler are good for show off, COBOL boils down to application that really adds value to an organization.

- C/C++/Java: Most of my career I spent on C, C++ and Java. Provided me with an infrastructure on thinking.

- Project Management: I took this course out of curiosity. This provided me the vision to see the organization from a totally different perspective.

Posted by DiegoLopez Monday, March 24, 2008 8:03 PM

I'd have to say the following courses have been the most beneficial to me as a software developer:

-Co-op: By far the most important part of my college education was being in the co-op program at my school. I got to experience life at two different companies over 5 full semesters working full time, in environments where I was exposed to completely new lines of business and technology that I had never even heard of previously. The biggest thing most newly-graduated IT pros lack is real-world experience, so I'm forever glad that I took advantage of the co-op experience offered to me.

-AP Computer Science: this class (taken during my senior year of high school) formed the building block for everything that I do today. I use the OO-concepts that I learned in that class every day. The languages and IDE's I've dealt with since then have changed from C++ using a very basic DOS-Borland compiler to .NET and VS2008, but the basic building clocks remain the same. Learning the concepts (and most importantly, why they are important in practice) has proven invaluable. As I continue to mature and move more towards systems architecture, OO is still the centerpiece.

-Data Structures: I was lucky enough to have the head of the CS department at my school as my professor in this class. This class taught me to think abstract concepts and apply them in meaningful ways to acheive programs with higher performance and scalability.

Senior Design Projects: At my school we had two semesters worth of senior design, with each semester *usually* being a completely different project with completely different teammates. Aside from my co-op positions, this was the closest I ever got to a 'real world' experience during my college days. I got to taste the difference between being a project manager and a technical lead and near the end of the second project we got the opportunity to present our work to the engineering school's executive board. :)