Same Old, Same Old

Shayne Flint, a lecturer at the Department of Computer Science at The Australian National University (ANU), spent 17 years in the industry before joining academia a few years ago, and maintains tight links with the industry through consulting work and projects.

He says demand from industry for IT graduates with strong business skills is not new - he was making the same call himself throughout most of his IT career. But he does think the calls from CIOs are becoming louder as pressure on their positions grows. The ANU response has been an innovative and possibly unique program that sees third-year and fourth-year students assigned to teams that involve them working closely with industry on industry-sponsored projects. Each student goes through the same process twice: once in third year as a team member and then once again as a team leader. The faculty believes the approach gives students a strong grounding in industrially relevant behaviours, skills and approaches.

"We use a lot of visiting academics, visiting lecturers from industry - all our tutors after the project courses are industry-based people; these are all people who've been out in industry for a while. So these teams are working on real projects with real industry players, and links are formed. In fact a lot of our students are recruited through that process," Flint says.

Professor Tom Gedeon at ANU's Department of Computer Science says the aim of the highly innovative program is to cultivate students with strong business skills but also very strong software engineering skills. "But on thinking through how I would explain that to somebody else not in the industry, I think it does come to the same thing, because the kind of thing we're thinking of is more management of the process of constructing software - teamwork, skills and that kind of thing.

"We assess students on a range of things, and among them, one of the things they have to do as part of their project is to work out what their client actually wants. They follow a process very similar to and in some ways maybe more detailed than what you would sometimes do in industry."