The English degree and graduate careers

This report provides English departments with information about the employment patterns and prospects of their graduates and suggests ways in which these might be enhanced. The report uses data gathered on English graduates three to four years after graduating. It shows that English graduates do take about four years to ‘find their feet’ on the career ladder, and that they do well in finding a job relevant to their qualification level compared to graduates in English-related fields or History. The report also examines how the skills of the English graduate are profiled by departments, by the English Benchmarking Statement, and by graduates themselves. These are compared to other disciplines to give some indication of the ‘strengths’ and ‘weaknesses’ of the English graduate

Users' trust in information resources in the Web environment: a status report

This study has three aims; to provide an overview of the ways in which trust is either assessed or asserted in relation to the use and provision of resources in the Web environment for research and learning; to assess what solutions might be worth further investigation and whether establishing ways to assert trust in academic information resources could assist the development of information literacy; to help increase understanding of how perceptions of trust influence the behaviour of information users

Focusing on IS Skills for the Middle and Senior Level Manager: A New Approach to the MBA Core IS Course

The core information systems (IS) course in an MBA program (the foundations IS course required for all students) is typically one of the hardest to teach. The wide range of student skills and the differing opinions on the content make this course a perennial problem. Who is the target audience? What should be the focus of the course? What is the appropriate course content? What is the proper balance between technical and managerial topics? To help answer these questions this paper investigates the problematic issues surrounding the core IS course and the current pedagogical approaches. An examination of past studies on IS skills seems to suggest academia should consider redesigning the MBA level core IS course. The paper proposes a new IS managerial approach to the course that may better fit the needs of middle and senior managers. This approach differs from previous approaches by making the central focus of the course the skills/knowledge needed by management, particularly general management, for exploiting information technology. A detailed description of a course example following this proposed new approach is provided along with a discussion of the flexibility that this approach offers MBA level IS instructors in achieving various pedagogical objectives. The paper concludes with some limitations associated with the approach and how these limitations can be overcome

Educating the effective digital forensics practitioner: academic, professional, graduate and student perspectives

Over the years, digital forensics has become an important and sought-after profession where the gateway of training and education has developed vastly over the past decade. Many UK higher education (HE) institutions now deliver courses that prepare students for careers in digital forensics and, in most recent advances, cyber security. Skills shortages and external influences attributed within the field of cyber security, and its relationship as a discipline with digital forensics, has shifted the dynamic of UK higher education provisions. The implications of this now sees the route to becoming a digital forensic practitioner, be it in law enforcement or business, transform from on-the-job training to university educated, trained analysts. This thesis examined courses within HE and discovered that the delivery of these courses often overlooked areas such as mobile forensics, live data forensics, Linux and Mac knowledge. This research also considered current standards available across HE to understand whether educational programmes are delivering what is documented as relevant curriculum. Cyber security was found to be the central focus of these standards within inclusion of digital forensics, adding further to the debate and lack of distinctive nature of digital forensics as its own discipline. Few standards demonstrated how the topics, knowledge, skills and competences drawn were identified as relevant and effective for producing digital forensic practitioners. Additionally, this thesis analyses and discusses results from 201 participants across five stakeholder groups: graduates, professionals, academics, students and the public. These areas were selected due to being underdeveloped in existing literature and the crucial role they play in the cycle of producing effective practitioners. Analysis on stakeholder views, experiences and thoughts surrounding education and training offer unique insight, theoretical underpinnings and original contributions not seen in existing literature. For example, challenges, costs and initial issues with introducing graduates to employment for the employers and/or supervising practitioners, the lack of awareness and contextualisation on behalf of students and graduates towards what knowledge and skills they have learned and acquired on a course and its practical application on-the-job which often lead to suggestions of a lack of fundamental knowledge and skills. This is evidenced throughout the thesis, but examples include graduates: for their reflections on education based on their new on-the-job experiences and practices; professionals: for their job experiences and requirements, academics: for their educational practices and challenges; students: their initial expectations and views; and, the public: for their general understanding. This research uniquely captures these perspectives, bolstering the development of digital forensics as an academic discipline, along with the importance these diverse views play in the overall approach to delivering skilled practitioners. While the main contribution to knowledge within this thesis is its narrative focusing on the education of effective digital forensic practitioners and its major stakeholders, this thesis also makes additional contributions both academically and professionally; including the discussion, analysis and reflection of: - improvements for education and digital forensics topics for research and curriculum development; - where course offerings can be improved for institutions offering digital forensic degree programmes; - the need for further collaboration between industry and academia to provide students and graduates with greater understanding of the real-life role of a digital forensic practitioner and the expectations in employment; - continuous and unique challenges within both academia and the industry which digital forensics possess and the need for improved facilities and tool development to curate and share problem and scenario-based learning studies

Latin American perspectives to internationalize undergraduate information technology education

The computing education community expects modern curricular guidelines for information technology (IT) undergraduate degree programs by 2017. The authors of this work focus on eliciting and analyzing Latin American academic and industry perspectives on IT undergraduate education. The objective is to ensure that the IT curricular framework in the IT2017 report articulates the relationship between academic preparation and the work environment of IT graduates in light of current technological and educational trends in Latin America and elsewhere. Activities focus on soliciting and analyzing survey data collected from institutions and consortia in IT education and IT professional and educational societies in Latin America; these activities also include garnering the expertise of the authors. Findings show that IT degree programs are making progress in bridging the academic-industry gap, but more work remains

Analytics in the Business School: Insights from the Literature

The demand for business and data analysts is growing. The business school is well positioned to offer programs to meet these needs. This paper presents both the findings from a review of the existing literature on data analytics job roles, skills required for those roles and also feedback from industry experts on findings. Three different types of articles are included in the design: faculty writing about their personal experiences and observations (faculty voice), data gathered from expert practitioners and other academics (nonresident expertise), and empirical data from online job service platforms (content analysis). The narrative review method is used to integrate these disparate sources of information and deliver cohesive observations. This knowledge can be used to build better analytics programs in business schools

Every student counts: promoting numeracy and enhancing employability

This three-year project investigated factors that influence the development of undergraduates’ numeracy skills, with a view to identifying ways to improve them and thereby enhance student employability. Its aims and objectives were to ascertain: the generic numeracy skills in which employers expect their graduate recruits to be competent and the extent to which employers are using numeracy tests as part of graduate recruitment processes; the numeracy skills developed within a diversity of academic disciplines; the prevalence of factors that influence undergraduates’ development of their numeracy skills; how the development of numeracy skills might be better supported within undergraduate curricula; and the extra-curricular support necessary to enhance undergraduates’ numeracy skills

The FinTech Skills Gap: Identifying Skills Desired by Bank Employers and Skills Taught in Undergraduate Business/Accounting Programs in Ontario

This study examined the FinTech skills gap in Ontario with the goal of identifying opportunities for developing FinTech talent in undergraduate business/accounting programs offered at Ontario universities. A literature review revealed a global phenomenon of technology-related skills shortages in the finance industry from the perspective of employers. Although educators do incorporate technology and data analysis tools in the classroom, students are not perceived as being fully proficient in them (Boulianne, 2016; Pan & Seow, 2016; Rackliffe and Ragland, 2016; Sledgianowski, Hirsch, & Gomaa, 2016; Wymbs, 2016). The methodology used in this research involved using text analytics to look at FinTech job postings data from Indeed.com compared against undergraduate program data from the official academic calendars posted on the websites of 19 universities in Ontario. Results reveal with statistical significance that business/accounting educators have a weak level of agreement with bank employers on the hard skills that are most relevant in the industry

Management Information Systems Education: A Systematic Review

Management information systems (MIS) programs were developed to prepare graduates to create innovative solutions to problems where business and technology intersect. As such, the curricula must change rapidly to stay current with industry standards, an accelerating moving target. This research presents the findings of a systematic literature review to identify and present trends in the scholarly literature on MIS education. The purpose of this approach was to understand how academia ensures students are prepared for industry and keeps pace with changing industry needs. Key findings from the literature are presented, as well as a compilation of areas for future research. Overwhelmingly, a lack of international perspective was identified as the vast majority of articles collected data in the US. Further, the direction of future research and exploration revolved around five themes of innovative pedagogical approaches, industry partnerships, subtopics of MIS education, new methods and metrics for measuring success in MIS education, and cross-disciplinary opportunities in fields such as mathematics, traditional business disciplines, and the hard sciences

ALIGNING IS CURRICULUM WITH INDUSTRY SKILL EXPECTATIONS: A TEXT MINING APPROACH

Digitalization offers both great opportunities as well as new challenges and uncertainties. In particular, students in their role as future employees will have to cope with the new digital environments, which makes lifelong learning and up-to-date skills even more important than they already are. Key players in this long-term development are the universities as providers of the necessary skills and knowledge. By now, it is clear that digitalization will have a broad impact on the future conditions of universities. But are they already prepared for it? Against this backdrop, we present an approach to combine universities’ offerings with the required industry job skills to identify potential curricular gaps at course level that arise through ongoing digitalization and, as a consequence, changing skill requests for employees. We identify an appropriate set of methods for our project including text min-ing methods, an expert survey and an interview phase for evaluation. We illustrate our approach using a large data set of German IS curricular module descriptions and offers for IS job starters