What Are the Best Majors?

Engineering, computer science are transferable

Human resources executives advise college freshmen to study engineering, computer science, or healthcare rather than marketing or law to avoid being unemployed when they finished their studies. The advice came in a survey of 150 HR executives by global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

“This recession may have many freshmen second-guessing career plans. Certainly those who were contemplating a future in financial services or home building may be looking for new options,” said CEO John Challenger. “It is impossible to predict what the job market will look like in four years. Young people entering college this fall could graduate into a job market that is still recovering from recession.”

Skills that are flexible and transferable between industries will go far in helping graduates avoid unemployment, he advised. In the survey, computer science/information technology edged out engineering as the most-recommended field of study. It was selected by 16 percent of survey respondents, who were instructed to select just one field from the 11 provided. Engineering was favored among 15 percent of human resource executives, while medicine/healthcare was recommended by 14.3 percent.

Developer, Engineer, or Architect?

Defining the differences between disciplines

By Andrew Anguelo

Back in the day, those who wrote software applications in the business space were called programmers. It was simple to understand what the work was at a particular level. For instance, a Programmer III was more experienced than a Programmer I. But over time, the title evolved to Programmer Analysts I, II, or III. Today we have software developers, engineers, and fairly recently, the new title of architect. A frustrating phenomena occurring around these titles is that developer and engineer are being used interchangeably, although they are distinct disciplines. In my opinion, the role of software architect has evolved as a result of interchanging developer and engineer titles to segregate specific skills a software engineer typically performs during the systems engineering process.

Polishing Your Presentation Skills

Technical speakers can take tips from comedians

By Bob Colwell

You're sitting in yet another interminable conference session. Man, this chair gets more uncomfortable by the millisecond. Who's that over there? He looks like Mike Meyers from this angle. Or maybe Mini Me. What's that interminable droning sound? Oops, that's the speaker going on and on about ... Whatever his topic is. You can't remember—your mind has been wandering for the past 10 minutes.You slide back into your reverie and idly wonder if it's true that your memory gets worse as you age and whether there's anything to the folk wisdom that says you're okay as long as you can remember what you ate for dinner in the past week. I think I had grilled salmon a week ago. Or was it that you had to remember for 10 days? Uh oh, I can't quite recall. That can't be good. But suddenly your attention is drawn back to the speaker, even though you can't quite put your finger on why. Something about his cadence, or pitch, or the way he paused and leaned away from the podium. You can just sense that he has momentarily diverged from his planned course and is about to extemporize. If there's going to be anything memorable from this talk, it will be now, when the speaker is making remarks off the cuff. The earlier part of the talk could have been a prerecorded audio track, but this part is real, immediate, full-bandwidth. The speaker is operating at his peak communications capacity, and the audience senses that and reacts accordingly.