How universities will produce the next generation of ICT stars

Ulrika Hedquist surveys top academic institutions

The dotcom bust of the early 2000s had a devastating effect on the number of students enrolling in ICT degrees. It has taken almost a decade to recover, and the gender imbalance remains, but universities now report that student numbers are steadily increasing.

Here is a sample of what type of courses are available to today’s school leavers.


Auckland University of Technology (AUT)
Ask Tony Clear, associate head of design and creative technologies at AUT, what the most popular ICT related courses are and he presents you with a list.

Java programming; web development; .NET; logical and physical database and networking.

Not surprisingly, it is the streams that focus on providing graduates with a clear career path such as software engineering, IT infrastructure support, and business analysis, which are the mostly heavily subscribed.

Clear says part of AUT’s degree programme is a final-year research and development project experience, which may or may not include an internship, says Clear. “Typically it is a project, sometimes in team mode, for an external client. It helps make the shift from raw student to budding professional.”

The students learn about fronting up to a client, understanding expectations, communicating and delivering against those and taking responsibility, he says.

AUT is looking expand into courses around security and has recently recruited extra staff in order to offer new courses. One is in the area of IT surveillance, in addition to the existing Master’s degree in forensic IT.

It is also proposing a Masters in service-oriented computing that will be running at its Manukau campus. “That is looking at the shift from computing as a product to computing as a service. You are seeing evidence of that with SaaS, cloud and grid computing and SOA. That’s a new area for us and we think it will meet a need,” Clear says.

AUT also has a growing number of PhD positions and research centres, for example the radio astronomy institute that is involved in the local component of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project.

“The SKA project could change the face of computing in New Zealand,” says Clear.

Job titles of recent graduates include information engineer; support analyst; technical consultant; software developer; business analyst; test lead; R&D team leader; application designer; and network engineer – “so quite a mix”, Clear says.


University of Waikato
The University of Waikato offers 10 specialisations within the computer science degree.

“All of our programmes involve a significant software programming component,” says Sally Jo Cunningham, associate professor and chairperson of computer science in the Faculty of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the university.

The software development stream focuses on development methodologies, different programming languages and all the skills required to work in a team to develop large pieces of software, she says.

“We also have a games and multimedia specialisation that is very popular,” says Cunningham.

There is also applied computing, intended for people who want to mainly do business support in small to medium-sized businesses, and an internet applications programme.

All programmes aim to provide students with a clear career path, says Cunningham. All of the specialisations have specific jobs that students will be “kitted out for”.

“We also ensure that all our programmes provide the broad skills that you need in IT over the long term. There is no one programming language, one development programme, one paradigm, one programming environment that is going to last forever. So in all of our specialisations the students have to learn all the underlying skills in software development and systems-thinking, which are going allow them to continue professional development throughout their careers,” she says.

The University of Waikato offers a Bachelor of Science (Technology) degree where students spend their summers doing work placements. In addition, there is a popular third-year course where students work in groups to try to solve the IT needs of a small local business, says Cunningham.

Among the new offerings is the games and multimedia programme mentioned earlier, as well as an interaction design programme.

Many Waikato students go overseas after graduating, but the university advises them to work for a couple of years in New Zealand first, says Cunningham.

“The great thing about a New Zealand-based IT job is that because so many of the employers are relatively small, on an international scale, the person who gets hired quite quickly gets a really broad range of responsibilities at a reasonably high level. So a couple of years here, then they have quite a nice portfolio to take overseas.”

There is a growing demand programmes in networking and telecommunications and the university is looking to increase its offering in that space, she says.