Desirable ICT Graduate Attributes: Theory vs. Practice

1. INTRODUCTION ICT graduates seeking employment are faced with the challenge of addressing the selection criteria of prospective employers, typically through responding to advertisements placed on the internet. Although this is only the first phase in what can be a lengthy recruitment process, graduates must clearly be successful at this stage if they are to have any chance of securing employment within the industry. Their success requires them to demonstrate satisfaction of selection criteria, which to date have only been examined in a very limited fashion, such as technical skill occurrence frequencies (Liu et al., 2003). Graduate attributes are influenced by five key stakeholder groups: academics, professional bodies, employers, clients and technology providers. Academics are likely to have the greatest influence, since they develop and teach degree curricula, followed by the professional bodies, whose influence includes accrediting degree programs and sponsoring educational conferences. The contribution of employers is likely to be relatively minor, particularly organizations that are too small to participate in activities such as student sponsorship and collaborative curriculum development. The requirements of ICT clients are likely to affect professional bodies and employers, and thus provide a secondary influence. Finally technology providers such as Microsoft and Sun have considerable impact, since employability is often dependent upon possession of skills with their technologies such as . NET and Java. The effect of this range of influences is reflected in the significant differences in the skills possessed by ICT graduates compared to those required by employers (Scott et al., 2002). Specifically, business (Milton, 2000) and project management (Kim, Hsu and Stern, 2006) skills appear to be particularly important to employers and of lesser importance to academics. Employers also require skills in the latest technologies, which are hard to incorporate into standard curricula that are strongly biased towards fundamental principles (Lightfoot, 1999). Research to date has been based upon a number of different approaches (Gallivan, Truex III and Kvasny, 2004): surveys (Crews, 2000; Fang et al., 2004; Gallivan, Truex III and Kvasny, 2004; Kim, Hsu and Stern, 2006; Scott et al., 2002; Wilkins and Noll, 2000), combined focus group, interview and surveys (Gallivan, Truex III and Kvasny, 2004) and job advertisement analysis (Gallivan, Truex III and Kvasny, 2004). The analysis of job advertisements has however been limited to simple analyses of skill occurrence frequencies, or augmentations of this approach (Gallivan, Truex III and Kvasny, 2004; Koong, Liu and Liu, 2002; Petrova and Claxton, 2005). This study therefore aims to address this gap by analyzing large samples of ICT job advertisements to determine the required applicant attributes and then compare these with curricula produced by academia, professional bodies and industry. These sources are obtained from the United States and Australia to allow international comparisons to be performed. The results give insight into the key attributes sought by employers, together with common skill groupings, and thus may be used by educators to ensure offerings meet business demand. Further, modifications to curricula to reflect these requirements may mitigate the current shortage of ICT student enrolments (Granger et al., 2007). The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows. A brief background to the study is presented, followed by the web content mining approach used. The method is then discussed, followed by the results and discussion, before final conclusions are drawn. 2. BACKGROUND ICT education draws upon a number of standard curricula produced by academia, industry representatives and professional bodies, such as the Australian Computer Society (ACS) Core Body of Knowledge (Underwood, 1996), ISCC '99 (Lidtke et al. …