I have been reading the correspondence about graduates, recruitment and training with an increasing sense of deja vu (Letters blog, letters.computing.co.uk/skills).

I remember the BCS and the NCC both pushing the professional training message in the early 1970s with a similar level of success.

More to the point, I have been recruiting and managing IT people for 30 years, and have come to the conclusion that the "professionalisation" of the industry is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the work.

IT is primarily a craft skill that depends on aptitude and experience.

The aptitude includes not just the ability to think in the correct way, but a willingness to engage imaginatively with problems and to absorb and apply knowledge appropriately. The experience is needed to test and hone the aptitude.

This is why I have found recruitment, of graduates in particular, a chancey business. Institutes of learning need to impart a body of knowledge that is defined so that it can be tested. Unfortunately, IT systems are undefined in the round, depending on circumstance of need and history in each case.

So a graduate may be successful at university by virtue of an ability to learn and perform some well-defined tasks, yet may be ineffective in the world of IT because they lack a required aptitude, such as the ability to recognise common patterns.

Jim Blair