> It’s not vocational training, it’s the equivalent to the lab portions of physical science classes. We don’t call pipetting vocational training for biologists or titration vocational for chemists, even though both will be doing a lot of that in professional and research careers.
You're on the right path: learning how to use a specific tool produced by a specific $Corp is not vocational training, it's end-user training.
Learning pipetting and titration is very different from learning $MegaCorps software tool that will be replaced with something else in a few years.
Source: Me! I did undergrad in multiple different subjects, including chemistry, physics and biology.
Like I said, if you are looking for end-users, you don't have to search very hard. Universities should not be focused on training more end-users. It's fine if there's a half-credit or no-credit course somewhere on "How to use $PRODUCT".
A better option would be, like I said, industrial practice after graduation, before getting a license to practice, but that's way too professional for a field that seriously and unironically came up with SpaghettiCodeAsAFramework.
I’m not talking about SAP or Oracle databases or Matlab, but tools that are as fundamental to the application of computer science in industry as titration is to professional chemists.
There aren’t even that many of them: git, terminals and bash scripting, IDEs, and maybe a database. Vocational training would be stuff like managing VMs/cloud infrastructure, devops, testing, and so on that would be taught as dedicated classes.
The important thing is that these aren’t skills with a dedicated class but skills a student should pick up and masters across half a dozen classes with CS departments that coordinate their choice of tooling.
SSH and even just managing your dev env in a sane manner are skills that I have to literally hand hold people through on a regular basis and would fully expect people to have coming out of a 4 year degree.
SSH is absolutely not a core CS skill. I use it daily, and I think students should pick it up somewhere along the line. But it still is a mere tool, not a concept that should be taught in mandatory classes. Same goes for latex and git and C.
All of that is, or should be, vocational, because anyone can learn it given some time. Universities are about the hard stuff that is difficult to get right at even a mediocre level.
If your company requires it, include it in your regular training program. Don't dilute the material because you don't want to be bothered. If you think people spend too much time on hard stuff, hire BSc instead of MSc.
When learning how to git bisect, you're learning two things:
1. the specifics of how to use git (*) to carry out a task
2. the conceptual underpinnings of the task, which would exist whether you use git or perforce or bitwarden or any future RCS.
Being overly focused on either #1 or #2 is a mistake. It's not good understanding the task if you don't know how to use the tools you have right now to carry it out (or what available tools are appropriate). It's not good knowing how to run the tools if you don't understand what you're actually doing. The two go hand-in-hand.
You're on the right path: learning how to use a specific tool produced by a specific $Corp is not vocational training, it's end-user training.
Learning pipetting and titration is very different from learning $MegaCorps software tool that will be replaced with something else in a few years.
Source: Me! I did undergrad in multiple different subjects, including chemistry, physics and biology.
Like I said, if you are looking for end-users, you don't have to search very hard. Universities should not be focused on training more end-users. It's fine if there's a half-credit or no-credit course somewhere on "How to use $PRODUCT".
A better option would be, like I said, industrial practice after graduation, before getting a license to practice, but that's way too professional for a field that seriously and unironically came up with SpaghettiCodeAsAFramework.