Filling the Void

Despite such efforts, Mike Rebbechi, executive director of IT at Charles Sturt University, says the most obvious area of weakness in the new graduates he takes on himself, whether graduates of his own institution or elsewhere, is in the business analysis area. Rebbechi says graduates seem to understand systems analysis from a pure IT perspective, but it inevitably proves much harder to recruit business analysts fresh from university - particularly people using appropriate methodologies and standard methodologies. "We really struggle to find those people," he says.

To help fill the gap, Rebbechi has commissioned a company to provide mentoring services for staff, both in project management and in business analysis. The IT department at Charles Sturt University might have 10 or 12 people across both the project management and business analysis areas in a mentoring program at any one time. The mentoring company has also developed a range of toolkits for the organization.

Other IT shops run similar programs. For instance Jon O'Brien, IS manager for Tricare, recently took on a graduate in a graduate software development role who had worked in a voluntary capacity at Mincom for four months during the course of his degree in order to gain industry exposure. O'Brien says he was impressed overall with the quality of the applicants available in Brisbane and is finding his newest recruit shows strong ability and a high degree of motivation.

"We're glad we hired him because he has really fitted in well, and I think the knowledge he's picked up at uni and in doing a lot of work experience whilst at uni has helped him quite a bit to be able to fit into the role we require."

Overall, though, O'Brien says over the past three to five years the IT graduates he has seen have shown good theoretical knowledge but have proved badly lacking in practical experience. "We've even found that some of the theory they've been taught just isn't relevant to our day-to-day business, which is a concern to us."

To help plug the gaps in new recruits' knowledge, O'Brien says he calls in specialist IT trainers in response to specific business needs. "For example where we're doing a fairly large infrastructure upgrade using new Microsoft products, we would do that [use trainers] and we have in the past. The skills that come back from that are very good, but there is a cost involved."

At Southern Cross University IT director Maria Gillam, who currently has five Southern Cross graduates working for her, has found the best way to strengthen the business experience of IT students is to put them to work on the university's help desk. As students they already know the difficulties other students are likely to experience with remote access, and are certain to have some idea of how things at the university work.

"What we find is that we add value to their degree because we give them some practical skills in client service," Gillam says. "The problem with the younger graduates is if they haven't had any practical experience in the workplace. Quite often it is in those areas of people skills or just understanding how an organization works - the things it is very hard to learn unless you are in the workplace. We tend to just let them learn on the job, and because they've already been through the help desk, we find that has already started to introduce them into that area."

Eye of the Beholder

However, to some extent at least, it seems the usefulness of graduates fresh out of their institution tends to lie in the eye of the beholder. The Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) runs an annual graduate recruitment program, recruiting across several different disciplines, and CIO Tony Kwan says he is generally very happy with the quality of the graduates that come on board each year, saying there are rarely any performance issues. That may be in part because the department runs a solid training program for new graduates, which includes specific and targeted training to get them up to speed in the DEST environment.

Another reason for Kwan's overall satisfaction may be the department's recent shift in focus of recruitment. These days, instead of trying to recruit people with a good understanding of the department's environment, DEST puts greater weight on the inherent quality of the candidates: considering whether they are academically sound and can work in a team environment, and taking in the quality of their presentation and strategic skills, as determined by the department's own assessment centre for graduates.

"So in that sense, [our satisfaction] might also be a reflection of the process we've put them through to make sure we get the candidates that are a good match to our working environment. And that seems to work out very well," Kwan says.

Richard Boyer, group executive IT with Perpetual Trustees Australia, thinks it is unrealistic to expect graduates to leave university equipped with strong business and IT skills. "The ideal thing that the universities can provide is the analytical skills for both business and the technologies," Boyer says. "The business skills and the more mature IT skills actually come from experience, so they're less easy for the universities to deliver."

Boyer says to help fill the gaps in students' education Perpetual Trustees gives them training in personal development, and tries to give them a chance to learn how to handle both "the business context of project opportunities and the technical context".

So it appears that, for a while at least, CIOs will have available some candidates who are generally receiving better training and education, but fewer overall than in the recent past. Where have all the students gone? The choice for Monash to cut their IT staff may not be so clear cut after all.