Chan's Personal Blog

I came across this amusing article in Time Magazine entitled, "Competence: Is Your Boss Faking It?"


Lately I've been finding myself with a front-row seat to amateur hour performances, and I cringe when people offer up random bad answers that make no sense. Seems like the more answers you give, the more competent you appear. Kind of funny though. Imagine appearing on Jeopardy and always buzzing in right away, and quickly making up an answer. You'd have a huge negative balance, but people would rate you highly competent right?

When I went home for Christmas, I went back to my university to visit professors, friends, and old co-workers. I spent a good amount of time chatting with folks from the Department of Co-operative Education, where I worked for almost five years. As I talked to people, there seemed to be a little bit of doom and gloom in the air. I dug a little deeper, and it seemed like enrollment in co-operative education was drastically down compared to its glory days.

For those who are unfamiliar with co-operative education, it's basically a program where you spend a couple semesters working in the real world for school credit. It offers an excellent way to apply some of theory you've learned in academia, and it gives you a chance to make connections with people in industry. A computer science student (back in my day) typically spent five semesters working at a co-op job. In my experience, it was a pretty good deal because you managed to add 20 months of work experience to your resume, and you got a chance to make some money too. A study also revealed that 90% of co-op students found a job after university within 6 months of graduation. I am one of those fortunate people that falls into this category.

In the old days, the Department of Computer Science at UVIC used to have around 400 students enrolled in co-op. Competition was always extremely fierce, and demand for jobs outstripped supply. It was always nerve wracking when you were trying to find a co-op job because you didn't know if you were going to be working or going to school in the next semester. Also, if all your friends went out on a co-op work term, and you didn't, your academic schedule would become unsynchronized with theirs, and that was not fun.

Fast forward to today, and apparently enrollment is about half of what it was. Only around 200 computer science students are enrolled in the co-op program. The supply of jobs far outstrips demand. Employers are constantly complaining that students are not applying to their jobs, and this is even the case for big name employers. Students these days also seem to be very picky about what kind of work they do, whereas in my day, we were glad to get any kind of work.