From Classroom to Career: Mock Interviews at a Local High School
Recently, I had the opportunity to represent Version 1, along with some colleagues, at a mock interview event at a high school in London. As well as being a great way to prepare students for the job interviews they’ll be doing in a few years, it also offered some interesting insights, which I hope to outline below.
The Appetite for Tech Jobs
In a world increasingly driven by technology, it was unsurprising to see just how much appetite for jobs in tech there was among the students. While there were obviously a range of areas of interest among the students as a whole, software development, engineering and similar fields comprised a sizeable amount of the chosen career paths on the day.
There is often a preconception that Gen Z are, by default, more tech savvy than the generations before them. While it’s true that many of them have grown up with access to things like the internet, smartphones, and tablets (sometimes practically from birth!), some of Gen Z lack digital fluency¹, defined as “having the skillset and understanding of digital technology to not only use it for basic tasks but also to adapt different digital tools for different situations to achieve a desired outcome such as creating new information and content”.
I’m not sure whether there is any overlap between those Gen Z-ers who are less tech savvy and those who pursue a career in software development or if the two are, by definition, mutually exclusive. It would be interesting to see what effect (if any) it has on A level or university results compared to previous years, and also if it highlights areas of primary or secondary education that need to be changed to better equip students to work well in the tech industry.
The Value of Real-World Experience
One of the most useful aspects of a practice interview is the opportunity for feedback. Real-world interviews rarely provide detailed feedback to candidates, leaving them to guess what went well or poorly. In contrast, mock interviews offer the chance for detailed critique and guidance, allowing students to understand their strengths and areas for improvement.
We had been asked by the staff at the school to “really grill them”, something I struggled with, remembering what it’s like on the other side of the table. The idea was to give them a sense of how brutal it can be out there. I tried to make sure they knew that they could take some time to think of a response if they needed to, and that they should ask any questions that came up as we went, rather than waiting until the end. There were of course some students that, through unpreparedness or nerves, struggled to answer questions. However, the awkward silences and monosyllabic answers were made better by the knowledge that we would be able to explore what to do to improve in future. It is important to note that doing poorly in a practice interview is not necessarily a negative. In this context, a challenging interview can be more beneficial as it allows for more comprehensive feedback and provides a valuable learning opportunity for the student.
Participating in the event as an interviewer was a great experience. Being relatively early on in my career means that I have only ever been an interviewee, so it was interesting to see the kind of things you can learn about a person based on their responses. As I alluded to above, the candidates did not have much work experience to speak of, but I found myself genuinely impressed by the personal projects some of them talked about, as well as their ability to come up with detailed, relevant responses with examples that tied back to the subject of the question. Job interviews are a part of working life that often don’t feature in traditional classroom education, so contributing to the event felt like we were able to provide a genuine help to both the students and school.
DevOps: Unknown Territory
One thing that I was surprised to learn, but makes sense on reflection, was that DevOps was a largely unknown field to the students. Fields like software development and cybersecurity are of course well known due to their ubiquity and presence in the news and popular culture, but despite its crucial role in modern tech environments, DevOps seems to have flown under the radar somewhat. This got me thinking about whether or not DevOps is a career that individuals might ‘fall into’ or pivot to upon discovering it once they’ve started in the world of work. This is true in my own experience, having started in desktop support, moving to application support and then taking an interest in DevOps once I started to get a sense of what it was all about. It would be interesting to see some data about how DevOps professionals have gotten into the field and the path they took.
Another realisation was that the skills needed for DevOps, and a lot of other tech jobs, such as scripting (as opposed to programming) and source control technology like git are not usually taught in school or even at university. Now that coding languages like Python are being taught in schools, it only makes sense that these auxiliary technologies are covered as well.
Conclusion
I highly recommend that anyone who hasn’t already done so find out about any similar events coming up and go along. It’s a great way to give back and help support the next generation.
The event at the high school was a highly enriching experience, highlighting the growing interest in tech jobs among students, the value of real-world experience, and the need for increased awareness about important tech roles like DevOps. It underscores the importance of initiatives that bridge the gap between education and industry, preparing students for their future careers in the ever-evolving tech world.
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About the Author:
Lucas Jones is an Azure DevOps Engineer at Version 1.
