Abstract
This paper investigates the integration of leadership training into IT curricula to develop current and future skills needed by the IT job market. The technical and non-technical skills required for IT professionals are presented and a conceptual model for including leadership training in technical courses is outlined. To implement this model, we adopted the Problem-Based Learning approach to teach an IT course. Qualitative and quantitative data were gathered, through a survey, from 52 undergraduate students in the College of Information Technology at Zayed University. Our results show that our adopted approach was successful in teaching IT skills as well as developing leadership skills. Given these findings, we highlight the importance and feasibility of integrating leadership development on a daily basis within technical courses to develop both the technical and non technical skills required by the job market.
Highlights
In today’s business environment, Information Technology (IT) graduates entering the workforce are expected to have strong technical as well as strong leadership skills (Morneau and Talley, 2007)
In terms of assessment of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) courses, new techniques have been developed that are consistent with the PBL philosophy, in practice, faculty using PBL partially use some of the traditional testing methods (Boud and Feletti, 1997; Waters and McCracken, 1997; Ellis et al, 1998; Segers et al, 1999; McCracken and Waters, 1999; Yip and Ghafarian, 2000; Duch et al, 2001; Segers and Dochy, 2001; Hämäläinen, 2004; Uden and Beaumont, 2006)
We suggest adopting a long term approach where leadership training is introduced in technical courses and not as one single course devoted to leadership
Summary
In today’s business environment, IT graduates entering the workforce are expected to have strong technical as well as strong leadership skills (Morneau and Talley, 2007) The latter were traditionally learned on the job, but they are requested at the entry level. Benamati and Mahaney (2007) argue that “In the past strong technical skills could carry them [IT professionals] until they develop the domain and leadership knowledge. This will be less true over time, as more and more technical work is outsourced”. For the purposes of this paper, we discuss the implementation in only one course, but the approach could be generalized to other IT courses
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