Agreeing with @PurpleTitan. We don’t look from practical skills* when we hire junior-level staff (my teams hire test , software, and program management staff exclusively). We’re looking for people well-grounded in the foundational knowledge in the profession as well as the ability to have a collaborative** discussion. Put another way, if I have a candidate with “practical web experience” in PHP or someone who wrote, say, a theorem prover in Haskell, SML or Scheme, I’m far more interested in the latter.
Writing this, it occurs to me that there might be a split here between people who hire for product development (best), hiring for staff in the, often outsourced, IT department (not great), and hiring for the outsourcing vendor (least common denominator body shop).
*not that they can’t be a small differentiator for equal candidates. However, better quantitative or verbal aptitude will easily overshadow those. Using a trivial example, I’d rather hire someone who could tell me the fundamental data structure and algorithm underlying Make than someone who knows how to write a Makefile.
**looking at some of my strongest employees, two of them were music majors before switching/adding a technical degree and another was a theater major who went to a Top5 CS program for a funded PhD and left with his Masters.