graduate admissions - Usefulness of prior industry experience before entering grad school?

I'm wondering what impact does prior industry experience (by which I mean 2+ years in a non-trivial functional role in any established organization) lend to the profile of someone who is entering grad school for a Ph.D. (in my case, its Computer Science, but I expect the question to be applicable to other areas as well) ?

• Do admission committees look upon it as a bonus point, seeing that the applicant has managed real-world responsibilities successfully in the past, thereby improving the chances of acquiring funding (in terms of TA/RA) ?


• More importantly, does it help the candidate during (and post Ph.D), when he is looking for research internships/post-docs ?

In both cases, assuming the position the applicant held is in a completely different area from his/her research, what other factors become important in the both the above cases? Is it the difficulty of projects the candidate undertook (which, frankly, very few people outside the organization are equipped to judge), or the level of success (promotions, accolades acquired during the stint in industry) that matter, or are there other parameters as well ?

Also, in case it is deemed that such a profile offer limited/no advantage to the grad student, it would be nice to know why that may be the case - after all, most (if not all!) organizations are run for profit, and they would tend to have very little use for someone who is not productive or capable of learning.

Answer

As someone who sits on an admissions committee, this isn't idle speculation, but it is a personal perspective. I agree with the other responders that industrial experience probably isn't of much interest to an admissions committee, unless you get a strong letter of recommendation from a supervisor who can make a convincing case for admission to the graduate program.

The issue is that while you are in industry, unless you're in a position where your actively doing things related to your graduate school education, your knowledge of the "basics" is atrophying, so it will actually be somewhat more difficult to get back up to speed for the coursework typically required for a PhD program. The longer you're in industry, the harder it typically is to play catchup.

That said, industrial experience may be of interest to an individual professor within a department, and would certainly help with employment following the PhD program.