Professionals Objective 2: Employer / Education linkage
Employers need new recruits who are highly employable in IT careers, with appropriate business, personal and technical skills 9 . Individuals are increasingly anxious to ensure their education and training prepares them for employment. Employers have differing tolerances of skills gaps, but almost all believe that, for significant improvement in matching skills to their requirements, major changes are needed. Employers need to specify their requirements at an industry-wide level, and work in partnership with both education and training organisations. They need to offer work experience that is integrated with educational programmes. They need to work with educators to improve the linkage between education and employability, and increase the relevance of training. Individuals need access to the qualifications and skills that employers want, ranging from those developed on non-IT degree courses through to vocational college courses. There are existing excellent examples of collaboration between employers and education, but they tend to lack the scale, coherence and publicity at a national level that would enable others to learn from them.
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Stronger linkages between educators and employers of IT professionals |
Programmes:
2.1. Work-related Higher Education: Develop a portfolio of leading-edge programmes for work-related Higher Education, including Foundation Degrees, conversion courses, short courses and Graduate Apprenticeships. 2.2. Educational curricula: Engage with educators to refresh curricula in preparation for IT-related careers, including increasingly sophisticated business and personal skills development alongside relevant technical foundations. 2.3. Centres of Excellence for IT: Deliver programmes to provide current technology, training materials and staff training for post-16 learning programmes. 2.4. Strategic forum: Establish a UK-wide ongoing dialogue between Higher Education and industry, supported by a web portal for the co-ordination and communication of employer / education collaborations concerning e-skills. |
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Students highly employable in IT careers |
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"We fully support initiatives to get employers involved with our IT curricula. The recent e-skills NTO programme with Compaq was an excellent example, with our staff and our courses gaining tremendously from this contact with the company. I would strongly recommend widening access to initiatives of this type."
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