Why do I teach niche skills rather than mainstream?
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2010-02-13 06:33:25 - Graham EllisBeing able to drive a car is a far more useful skill for me (personally) than being able to service that same car would be. And having the life skills to live in a house is far more of a mainstream thing than being able to actually build that house. But that doesn't mean that there's no call for people with the skills of servicing cars, that all house builders have unemployable skills - it means that they are more niche roles and we don't need to train too many people for those jobs. The same thing applies in the IT world.
A question from my mailbox: "Why do we teach computer graphic theory in university instead of graphic software such as Photoshop?"
My answer: "Because we need a pool of people who are skilled at writing and maintaining firmware and software for the graphics boards that we all have in our PCs". And I can add that it's a far more skilled role to be able to design, write, implement and maintain such drivers than it is to be able to pull up a picture in Photoshop and lighten / darken / sharpen it. So it's only natural for the use of computer software to be taught at a younger age when more people are still in education, and to be taught in vocational colleges, but then for the niche topics such as the practical application of Bresenham's algorithm to be taught on specialised further educational courses.
"As an extra, I will add that for a really heavy user of a technology, it can be useful having some background / insite into the next layer. I happen to do / have done a lot of work with Computer Graphics, and my knowledge of polygon fill techniques, clipping, perspective display, etc is a help when working with user packages, just like my knowledge of how compilers work is so helpful when I'm training on any one of what is a substantial range of languages that we cover. On that same basis, it's good for a professional driver to have some idea of how the car he's in is serviced, and for all of us to have an idea of how our home was constructed and is maintained.
At Well House Consultants, we specialise in computing niches like the examples I've given above. Many people use computer software, but only a very few need to learn ruby to use testing and validation tools to check it out. Most of us order online, but only a small proportion need to learn to program in PHP to actually write the software for such an ordering system. It's because we're so specialised - so niche - that we have our own hotel for course delegates and in many other ways a very different model indeed to a company who trains in the use of Photoshop, Excel, Sage ...