Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!van-bc!rsoft!mindlink!a684
From: a684@mindlink.UUCP (Nick Janow)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: Education
Message-ID: <848@mindlink.UUCP>
Date: 26 Dec 89 17:11:44 GMT
Organization: MIND LINK! - British Columbia, Canada
Lines: 26


Bill Wolfe writes:

> The reality is that employers want *specialists* -- they will even ask for
> ten years' experience in an area which has only existed for five!!

and
> 
> Retraining is essential; no program, regardless of how general, is going to
> enable one to be competitive in all possible professions at once.  If I
> decide I'm tired of being a computer professional and would like to become a
> genetic engineer, retraining is completely appropriate and absolutely
> necessary.  Its cost and duration can be minimized by not taking irrelevant,
> non-productive topics.

How do you retrain someone who has learned one specialty to the exclusion of
all other knowledge?  If you have learned only the science necessary to be a
COBOL programmer, how difficult will it be to learn biology?  You personally
can consider switching because of your relatively general education.

Consider further that fields of specialization are changing rapidly. Some
electronics engineers _are_ required to design bio-interfaces; how do they do
that if they've never learned basic biology?


  Generalists evolve; specialists become extinct!