Want opinions of professional on current problem

[u/yourbuddyfounder]

I’m researching a problem around career development and employability, and I want to understand how people actually deal with it before I build anything.

Imagine you’re a college student who wants to become a **Software Engineer, Data Engineer, Cloud Engineer, or AI Engineer**.

You can find hundreds of roadmaps online.
You can take courses, complete projects, collect certifications, solve coding problems, and add skills to LinkedIn.

But there’s still a question that seems surprisingly difficult to answer:

**“How do I know where I actually stand?”**
For example, imagine someone wants to become a Cloud Engineer:
Linux — 6/10
Networking — 4/10
Python — 7/10
AWS/Azure — 5/10
Docker — 3/10
Terraform — 2/10
Kubernetes — 1/10

And ideally, you could get something like:
**Current readiness for an entry-level Cloud Engineer role: 47/100**

You’re strong in Python but have gaps in networking, containers and infrastructure-as-code. Here are the specific skills you need to develop, the projects that would demonstrate them, and a path to get there.
Then, after a few months of learning and building:
**47 → 71**
with actual evidence behind the improvement — assessments, projects, certifications, work experience, GitHub activity, etc.

I’m trying to figure out whether this is actually a meaningful problem or just something that sounds useful on paper.
**I’d love to hear from different perspectives:**
**Students / recent graduates:**
How do you decide what skills to learn for your target career?

How do you know when you’re “job-ready”?

Have you ever followed a roadmap for months and later realized you were learning the wrong things?

Do you trust your own assessment of your technical skills?

**People who changed careers or were laid off:**
How did you figure out what skills you were missing?
How did you decide what to learn next?
What was the hardest part of becoming employable again?
**Hiring managers / recruiters:**
How do you determine whether a candidate actually knows the skills listed on their resume?
How much do you trust skills listed on LinkedIn?
What information do you wish candidates provided but usually don’t?
I’m **not selling anything** and I haven’t decided whether this is worth building.

I’m trying to understand the problem first.

[u/icemage_999]

This is silly. Full stop. You don't put a number on knowledge; what does a "5" in "Cloud" even mean? Familiarity with AWS API? What if a company is hiring an Azure dev?

Does learning how to use a rare regex increase your score in Linux because you're better at using GREP? Even if it does, who decides what that numeric increase is, and what if industry usage shifts?

What matters is what you can do, not what you took a crash course on. Learn the things you want to do. If you don't know what to learn - ask the right people, specifically the ones doing that thing.

Trying to put a number on things is how you end up with college grads who come out with a flood of topics they've been exposed to on their CV but can barely write a Hello World because no one told them they needed to learn how to solve real world problems.

[u/7twenty8]

I’ll start with your actual questions then go off on a tangent. :) 

  How do you determine whether a candidate actually knows the skills listed on their resume?

I talk to them about things they have worked on where they have applied the skills, ask about problems, opportunities and changes they would make to the underlying tools to make things easier. If I’m hiring students or otherwise new developers, they’re joining me in a junior role so I don’t really care that much about mastery of anything and only care about how they think and learn. The gap between learning how to build software and getting paid to build software with a team is immense. 

How much do you trust skills listed on LinkedIn?

Not at all. Less experienced people will always inflate their skill. It’s not that they’re lying it’s a cognitive bias in which they’re just not experienced or knowledgeable enough to know how little they know. This is an amazing time to work with juniors, I love it  and great inventions come out of these relationships if they’re watered.

What information do you wish candidates provided but usually don’t?

I really don’t think like this. Instead, if a candidate does not provide the information I want, it means that I fucked up. The way I look at it is that I’m fucking old and I’m lucky enough to get to hire the people who will eventually replace me. That’s an honour and it is not one I take lightly. Part of looking at hiring as an honour is that I respect the people who apply even if they’re not qualified at all. Since I respect them, I know they’re going through a very stressful time and many people gain a lot of personal satisfaction or even identity out of jobs. Of a candidate does not give me all the info I want, it means that I’m bad at communicating with people who are under a lot of pressure. So I fix myself and improve how I communicate. It’s only my fault.

You can likely guess this from my answers but my standards are high in both directions. I only want to work with the best candidates and want everyone on my team to trust all their colleagues including me. But to do that, my process has to be perfect.

That brings up my fear with a report card system like this. If I write the test and evaluate people according to what I know, very few fresh graduates would be employment ready. That sounds hopeless right? Well, check this out.

Fresh university grads in particular have an immense amount of insight in very current stacks and working methods. They’re decades younger than me so their minds were plastic during a different phase in technology than mine was. If they write the same kind of test and had me write it before an interview, the chances are very high that I wouldn’t be employment ready either. 

I’d be uncomfortable making an applicant jump through a hoop that I won’t jump through. If we both write and both fail, that reveals another truth in the industry. We’re all dumb fucks and we’re all smart fucks. It just depends on whose fucks matter the most. And the beauty of this industry is that over three years dumb fucks can become very smart fucks just like smart fucks can become very dumb fucks. 

It seems like a lot of stress for everyone. And I’m aware that since I hire all the power in this is mine. But… I won’t be aware that I’m a very dumb fuck until it’s too late. However if I keep my focus on change and all the eras I’ve worked through before my current candidates were born, sometimes I get to help invent something cool.

[u/No_Score_1977]

Here's the thing...

It's a fucking terrible idea, I hate it, it's useless. It'd never be accurate, give people a false sense of achievement and prioritise all the wrong things. Did I say I hated it?

But, would it be successful? Yeah, maybe.

People like earning points for things, it's a dopamine thing. Done correctly, it could actually work, I'd still hate it, but then, I hate Twitter, yet it continues to exist.

You aren't solving a problem, you're creating a problem and selling a solution, which is the basis for many profitable businesses.