Information Technology Graduates Research Articles

Information Technology Graduate Employability Enhancement Model: Case Study in the Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia

Malaysia Higher Education Institutes (HEI) have continuously designed strategies to ensure the employability of the Malaysian universities graduates, particularly in the field of Information Technology (IT). For example, Faculty of Information Science and Technology (FTSM) Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) has established the Industry and Professional Development Unit (IPDU) under the FTSM Industry and Community Partnerships (HEJIM) as an initiative to improve the employability and quality of its graduates. To realise the strategy, a study through Action Research approach has been carried out to develop a Graduate Employability enhanceMent (GEM) Model. The model forms a plan to produce knowledgeable, competent and industry-ready FTSM graduates. GEM Model includes GEM programme track to improve the undergraduate study system based on the motto “GEM programme nurtures nations great IT Professionals”. GEM programme provides a platform for industry and services to channel their latest technology and best professional practices. GEM Model is validated through the implementation FTSM Summer School in collaboration with International Business Machine (IBM). The analysis findings showed that majority of the participants have successfully secured IT professional jobs within two months of completing the programme. The implementation of GEM program has also added value to two FTSM undergraduate courses through the latest technologies module content, hence validates that GEM Model enhances the employability of IT graduates, particularly in FTSM .

Investigating the Determinants of Starting Salary of IT Graduates

The starting salary of a fresh graduate is considered a potential indicator of career advancement. Yet few studies have examined the determinants of starting salaries of information technology (IT) graduates. Further, existing studies have focused on how demographics affect either the salary or the kind of job the graduate enters into, but rarely both. In this paper, we explore both and examine if entry into an IT job mediates the effects of demographics on the starting salaries of fresh IT graduates. Our model is tested using data from annual surveys of undergraduate students majoring in IT at a large public university in Singapore over a 5-year period. We find that gender and foreigner status influence both starting salary and fresh graduates' entry into an IT vs. non IT job. Further, the effect of gender on the starting salaries of IT graduates is partially mediated by their entry into an IT job. In other words, part of the reason for a gender difference in starting salary could be attributed to female IT majors being less likely to enter IT jobs upon graduation than their male counterparts. On the other hand, foreign IT graduates are more likely to enter IT jobs, yet their starting salaries are found to be lower than local graduates. The implications of the results for research and practice are discussed.

"Implicit search feature based approach to assist users in exploratory search tasks" by Chathra Hendahewa, with Prateek Jainas as coordinator

Chathra Hendahewa is a Ph.D. candidate in Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University in New Jersey, currently finishing up her dissertation (Expected Graduation Date: Jan 2016) under the guidance of Prof. Chirag Shah. Her major research interests lie in user search behavior analysis, data mining/machine learning for user interaction analysis and time series analysis. She has published and presented her research work at reputable conferences such as SIGIR, WSDM and ICMLA and also co-authored multiple journal papers published in ACM TOIS, IP&M and JASIST. She holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from Rutgers University, USA (Jan 2013). Before joining Rutgers, she received her Bachelors in Information Technology from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka (Jan 2007), where she was awarded the best information technology graduate award. Chathra was a recipient of the International Fulbright Science and Technology Award (2008-2011) to pursue her doctoral studies. For more information see: http://paul.rutgers.edu/~chathrah/

Employment Status and Academic Competencies among the Information Technology Graduates: A Tracer Study

Information technology graduates of colleges and universities have increased rapidly while continuously facing stiff employment competition. The study traced the employability of the Bachelor of Science in Information Technology (BSIT) graduates of a university. It also described the profile of the BSIT graduates; assessed graduates' employment conditions; and determined the academic competencies utilized by the BSIT graduates in their current jobs. Using descriptive research design, the study employed standardized tool from Commission on Higher Education (CHED), and a sample of 87 BSIT graduates as respondents. The findings revealed that majority of the respondents were dominantly male, single, and from the Visayas region. Majority of them were regular or permanent in their current job and were locally employed and worked as an IT professionals in their present occupation. The graduates found their first job through advertisement. They utilized advanced information technology competencies in their jobs. Hence, their work matched to their tertiary degrees. The study provided information that the BSIT graduates of the University of Cebu - Banilad Campus are highly employable. After months of linkages for possible employers and career mapping of graduates, the school will be able to increase graduates assistance on job placements. After two hours of seminar on career mapping, the college will be able to assess the skills of the graduates to suggest possible areas of work to engage.

Is the graduate attributes approach sufficient to develop work ready graduates?

Many universities have graduate attributes often referred to as generic skills, soft skills or work ready skills. Our study of the professional work experiences of recent Australian Information Technology (IT) graduates found that communication, time management, teamwork, working with people, working across cultures, project management and business skills are some of the major categories of professional skills IT graduates believe are required for their work. This paper describes the study details and findings which raise questions about the adequacy of the graduate attributes approach in the development of professional skills such as the ability of graduates to work across cultures and on multiple projects which are major requirements in many IT (and other) workplaces. IT graduates’ gave views on the challenges they face at work, the typical professional skills requirements of their practice and how they acquired or developed them, the elements of their university study that are relevant to their work professional skills requirements and how well their studies prepared them to meet the professional needs of their practice.

Benchmarking of Undergraduate Computing Curricula in Kenya

This study investigated the quality of undergraduate computing curricula at Kenyan universities, how they compare locally and regionally with equivalent programs and how closely they meet the ICT sector needs. It was guided by four objectives i.e. to undertake an ontological mapping of computing curricula, to identify appropriate benchmarking criteria, to develop and test a benchmarking tool, and to investigate the alignment of these curricula to computing skills requirement. The study was deemed important by the plethora of academic computing programs of varying degrees of utility and credibility, which are a product of the escalating demand for computing education in Kenya given the development of Vision 2030 and the rapid growth of the ICT industry. To achieve its objectives, the study adopted a quantitative and qualitative cross-sectional descriptive survey of computing curricula offered locally (in Kenya) and regionally (from best practicing countries, USA and India). A sample of 70.3% was drawn from the target population for ontological mapping. Two research instruments, i.e. a questionnaire and a document analysis framework that were administered to a cross-section of 11 public/private universities. The study established that there are 24 undergraduate computing programs under 6 titles, viz. BSc., BCom., BTech., BB., BEd. and BEng. The two most populous programs are BSc. Computer Science (CS) and BSc. Information Technology (IT), which were selected to help identify two benchmarking criteria: Percent weight allocation of core hours within ACM knowledge areas and Relative performance capabilities of computing graduates. Using these criteria a benchmarking tool was developed and tested, which depicted disparities among the respondents in the percent weight allocation of core hours in CS programs. Similarly, it portrayed overlaps in the relative performance capabilities of CS and IT graduates, an outcome that queried the uniqueness of these programs. As such, its results indicate that the quality of the two computing programs is relatively insufficient. However, it further establishes that the computing curricula are aligned to meet the top 3 highly demanded computing skills i.e. Networking, Software development and Internet skills albeit insufficient percent weight allocation of core hours in Software development. It therefore recommends further testing and refining of the established benchmarking tool, the need to re-focus the computing programs and supports the call to institute a regulatory body and qualifications framework for computing education and skills.Â

Towards an online bachelor of information science degree programme in a Nigerian University: Part 1 – Lessons from the literature and existing curricula

Training programmes forthe information professions worldwide have been shifting and diversifying the scope of their claimed domains and curricula in order to empower their graduates with diverse knowledge and versatile technical skills required to compete successfully in the highly competitive job markets in the information industries. In line with this trend, and after running its flagship Master of Information Science (MInfSc) programme for more than 20 years, the Africa Regional Centre for Information Science, Nigeria, undertook a comprehensive study in order to gain new understanding of trends in curriculum design for information science and technology education. The first part of the study reviewed existing literature and curricula worldwide concerning education for information science and its related fields. The second part surveyed potential employers of information science and technology graduates in the Nigerian public and private sectors, and of graduates and current students of the MInfSc programme. This Part One of this paper reports on findings from the first part, while Part Two reports the findings from the second part.

Employment issues among Malaysian information and communication technology (ICT) graduates: A case study

In the 21 st century, there has been a growing concern about the role of higher education institution and how well they are satisfying the employers’ needs. Malaysian Prime Minister mentioned that only 23% of the workforce was highly skilled in year 2010. This percentage is much lower, compared with other developed countries. It was stressed that, there is a need to improve the composition of highly skilled workers to at least 37% by 2015, to become a developed nation. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the causes of unemployment among Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) graduates in Malaysia and the need for changes in the curriculum. Data were collected based on quantitative and qualitative study. Questionnaires were used to gather information from 296 current undergraduate students and 248 graduate students. These students are from public University in Malaysia. Besides distributing questionnaires, short interviews were also carried out. This paper concludes that the higher education institutions need to reengineer their curriculum in order to keep them updated in-line with employers need in the job market.

Towards a gender inclusive information and communications technology curriculum: a perspective from graduates in the workforce

An online survey was conducted of recent information and communications technology (ICT) graduates from 21 Australian universities. A range of abilities including personal/interpersonal, cognitive, business and technical were examined in relation to importance in the workplace and university preparation of those abilities. In addition, a set of six open-ended text-response questions concerned with the curriculum and other workplace preparation were asked. Quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed a range of responses that were significantly different according to gender. Amongst the significant findings are that females are more concerned than males with interpersonal communication, the development of people-skills and the people side of ICT. Implications for the ICT curriculum are that it should have more than a narrow male-centred technological focus and include the involvement of people and the effects of ICT on society in general. This broad inclusive pedagogical approach would satisfy the needs expressed by all respondents and contribute to increasing the enrolments of both female and male students in ICT.

Link Analysis in Employment Data Set to Improve Learning Outcomes for IT Programmes

This paper presents an approach for analyzing data of the Information Technology graduate according to the employability knowledge areas in order to predict feedback recommendations toimprove the IT programmes teaching and learning resources and processes towards,the improvement of the programme learning outcomes. The approach is based on features (knowledge areas) extractedfrom logged data for employment and university graduates. Link analysis is an efficient approach to study the correlation and relationships between different attributes that highly affect jobs in ITmarket, including different skills areas in both the market and the programme curriculum, and it gives good weighted evaluation for these knowledge areas. The link analysis shows great relationship andassociations between these attributes (Student Performance in Bachelor degree, analytical and development skills, Programming skills (Java, C++, C#, etc), practical skills communication skills, andtraining and certificates) and the market demands. Data set from IT market and university records is used to create and test the model. WEKA was used as a software for mining tasks.

Improving Soft Skills of University Students through Software Development Team Projects

The success of a software project depends on many factors. It requires project team members to be well-equipped with technical knowledge and good soft skills. Among the many soft skills, the two basic soft skills that all project team members should possess are communication and negotiation skills. Today, communication skills are found to be lacking among the university graduates. This situation has resulted in the unemployment of 3 942 information technology graduates in 2006. A study was initiated to incorporate the teaching of communication and negotiation skills in the Project Management (PM) course through team projects undertaken by members of multi-racial composition. This paper presents feedback from 67 students on the teaching of communication and negotiation skills, and project management concepts through team projects.

The Supply-side Context of Graduates’ Employability: A Case Study of Malaysian Information and Communication Technology Graduates

The Supply-side Context of Graduates’ Employability: A Case Study of Malaysian Information and Communication Technology Graduates

Effects of Professional Experience and Group Interaction on Information Requested in Analyzing IT Cases

The authors investigated the effects of professional experience and group interaction on the information that information technology professionals and graduate accounting information system (AIS) students request when analyzing business cases related to information systems design and implementation. Understanding these effects can contribute to the success of the college classroom and corporate training learning environments. The results suggest that as the amount of professional experience increases, the number of information requests that match the information requests determined by a master panel (matched answers) also increase. In addition, higher numbers of matched answers by novices were associated with being in established groups prior to completing the experimental case individually.

Information systems and technology education: from the university to the workplace

Since its beginnings, the growth and development of the information systems and technology industry has been limited and shaped by the availability of sufficient numbers of skilled technical and professional workers. Information Systems and Technology Education: From the University to the Workplace presents a multifaceted, global view of the human dynamics of education, supply, demand, and career development in the information systems and technology industry. Information Systems and Technology Education: From the University to the Workplace exhibits a range of cultural and stakeholder perspectives, focusing on the profession, the professionals, the perspectives of students and new graduates, and common issues and challenges ahead. Information Systems and Technology Education: From the University to the Workplace provides an improved synopsis to understand and meet the challenges of providing improved integration between the stakeholders in planning, and improving their contribution to educating and employing an optimal supply of information systems and technology graduates in the decades to come.

Integrating the needs of industry and critical cross-field outcomes at a technikon: an example from information technology

Cross-curriculum outcomes need to be integrated into all programmes in Higher Education. If one looks at the skills defined as cross-curriculum outcomes, there is no doubt that these would be useful to graduates in life as well as in their future careers. There also can be little doubt that Information Technology Developers need to have good communication skills and good interpersonal skills. These skills have been highlighted in Curriculum '97 and the Informatics Curriculum Framework 2000 as being important for Information Technology graduates. The problem is how tertiary institutions can be expected to develop these skills in their learners. This article describes how one can use the needs of industry as a starting point for incorporating critical cross-curriculum skills into a Technikon Information Technology course. (South African Journal of Higher Education: 2003 17 (1): 175-184)

Innovators Dilemma And An Association For Accounting Information Systems Educators

Recently, there have been debates on whether it will be services to the accounting information systems (AIS) educators and the society if AIS educators form a new organization independent of American Accounting Association. As like any new discipline, AIS emerged from many existing disciplines, including accounting, computer science and information systems. Yet, different from their counterpart in industry, the leadership in accounting academics across the nation has been slow in embracing the new reality based on information technology and has the difficult time to make a smooth transition to restructure their old curriculum to the fast changing market places. Yet, the strong market demands for information technology graduates and declining enrollments in the traditional accounting programs across the nation provide an incentive for accounting educators in many institutions to rethink their long term strategy in surviving this tumultuous time and preparing for the challenging future ahead (Albrecht and Sack, 2000). Against this backdrop of radical changes, the new conferences for AIS educators held consecutively for two years (AIS Educator Conference, 1999, 2000) were devoted to the professional growth of AIS educators. And the conferences drew serious attention from AIS faculty, particularly, those who are interested in teaching practical and hands-on application-driven information technology (IT) to their students. In this paper, I examine various issues related to this idea of creating a new organization for AIS educators independent from AAA. First, I highlight the paradigm shift in accounting industry for the last three decades from the traditional accounting services to accounting and information systems (AIS) services. Then, I delve into exploring who AIS educators are. Once the AIS educators model is established, I examine the missions and purposes of two independent organizations: one is the existing AAA, and the other is one yet to be formed, a new organization for AIS educators. Once the differences and similarities between organizations missions and purposes are established, I examine the implications of creating the new AIS educators organization, using the findings from Christensens study (1997), and similar studies on the impact of innovative technology on organizational changes.