The IT Crowd: Are we stereotypes?

The power of technology and its impact on the average IT employee's working life has led to new job titles and responsibilities. IT workers' increased visibility also correlates to a new social image reflected in the media. The authors completed an empirical study to examine how IT workers are portrayed, particularly on television, and the resulting perception of the profession, which future IT professionals will likely reflect

It's not only about technology, it's about people: interpersonal skills as a part of the IT education.

Proceedings of: Second World Summit on the Knowledge Society (WSKS 2009), Chania, Crete, Greece, September 16-18, 2009.The importance of what have been termed the "soft skills" for the professional development of IT professionals is beyond any doubt. Taking account of this circumstance, the objective of the current research may be phrased as two separate questions. In the first place, determining the importance which IT related degree students place on these types of competencies for their professional future. In the second place, the importance which the development of the mentioned competencies has been given during their studies. The realization of an empirical study has fulfilled the two objectives described. The results demonstrate, on the one side, the moderate relevance which students assign to interpersonal competencies, especially emotional competencies, in contrast to the international curricular recommendations and studies concerning labor markets. On the other hand, the results indicate the scarce emphasis which lecturers have placed on the development of such competencies.Publicad

Indicative markers of leadership provided by ICT professional bodies in the promotion and support of ethical conduct

Most countries with a mature Information and Communications Technology (ICT industry have at least one professional body (PB) that claims to represent its members working with such technology. Other ICT PBs operate in the international arena. These PBs may differ in membership criteria, jurisdiction and even objectives but all profess to promote high ethical and professional standards. This study seeks to determine the common indicative markers that demonstrate that an ICT PB is offering leadership in identifying, promoting and supporting ethical conduct amongst a variety of constituencies including its own members and beyond. An extensive literature review identified over 200 prospective markers covering a broad range of potential activities of an ICT PB. These were grouped into nine major areas: ethical professional practice; continuous professional development; research and publication; education of future professionals; members&rsquo; career development; social obligations; professional engagement; preserving professional dignity/ reputation and regulation of the profession. These markers were arranged hierarchically in a word processing document referred to as a &ldquo;marker template&rdquo;. An analysis of selected ICT PBs websites was undertaken to confirm and refine the template. It will be used in the future for a comparative study of how professional bodies offer leadership to their various constituencies in the area of ethical conduct.<br /

IT professionals' competences: high school students' views

During last few years, the competential paradigm has become a standard for modern Human Resources Management. The importance and the impact of this concept have led higher education institutions to adopt this concept in the definition of educational resources. In this scenario, knowing which competencies and characteristics define professionals in any position is fundamental, not only for organizations and academic institutions, but also for the professionals of the future. In today’s environment, with its shortages of professionals in the IT sector, attracting students in order to shape tomorrow’s labor force has become a major issue of concern in educational institutions. Within the set of elements employed by such institutions to attract future students, one significant issue is how to convey the professional reality that is faced by prospective students. IT professionals are often subject to negative social stigmas. And this negative view creates negative stereotypes, which are on one hand, generally adopted, and on the other, they don’t accurately portray the employees’ the working life. This research presents a study that investigates the perception of the characteristics of IT professionals from the perspective of future professionals: students in their final year of high school. The results indicate that the students generally hold a stereotyped vision regarding the characteristics that are typical of professionals in industry. With the objective of improving the specific knowledge of the professional reality of IT workers, the current paper proposes a number of measures in order to attract students to the profession and inform them of the true professional characteristics of IT professionals. One suggestion is to encourage collaboration between organizations and academic institutions in attracting new people to IT roles and for professional associations to assume a much more active role in communicating IT working styles appropriately.Publicad

La relación entre el Curriculum DL y las Ciencias de la Computación: una revisión bibliográfica

The Curriculum Digital Library (Curriculum DL) is a curriculum with a structured scheme whose purpose is to delineate content, issues and problems through pedagogical processes appropriate to the careers of the Library and Information Sciences (LIS) domain. The Curriculum DL is directed, mainly, to postgraduate courses and closely related to Computer Science. This review has been proposed to answer how the literature addresses the relationship between the Curriculum DL and Computer Science. The methodology applied was based on identifying, evaluating and interpreting the relevant research in accordance with the guidelines of Kitchenham (2004). The result obtained was the selection of 20 articles from a corpus of 139 obtained (14.39%) categorized into three axes: Curriculum, Syllabus and crossed search. The review of the literature shows that there is evidence of the relationship between the DL Curriculum and Computer Sciences, with articles published constantly from 2001 to the present and with the presence of all the main topics of the "Computer Science Curricula 2013" (CS2013) of the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE-Computer Society

La relación entre el Curriculum DL y las Ciencias de la Computación: una revisión bibliográfica

The Curriculum Digital Library (Curriculum DL) is a curriculum with a structured scheme whose purpose is to delineate content, issues and problems through pedagogical processes appropriate to the careers of the Library and Information Sciences (LIS) domain. The Curriculum DL is directed, mainly, to postgraduate courses and closely related to Computer Science. This review has been proposed to answer how the literature addresses the relationship between the Curriculum DL and Computer Science. The methodology applied was based on identifying, evaluating and interpreting the relevant research in accordance with the guidelines of Kitchenham (2004). The result obtained was the selection of 20 articles from a corpus of 139 obtained (14.39%) categorized into three axes: Curriculum, Syllabus and crossed search. The review of the literature shows that there is evidence of the relationship between the DL Curriculum and Computer Sciences, with articles published constantly from 2001 to the present and with the presence of all the main topics of the "Computer Science Curricula 2013" (CS2013) of the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE-Computer Society

Professionalising the IT industry: towards the creation of a professional association.

The main aim of the project is to develop a set of guidelines that will enable the current IT profession to evolve into one that can take its place along side the established professions in society today. At this stage of the research we will use a working definition of a profession as ‘a vocation in which a professed knowledge of some department of learning or science is used in its application to the affairs of others or in the practice of an art founded upon it’ (Oxford English Dictionary). This definition is endorsed by Carr-Saunders & Wilson (1964) who go on to further explain that ‘special competence acquired as a result of prolonged and specialised training, is the chief distinguishing characteristic of the professions’ and that ‘a profession can only be said to exist when there are bonds between practitioners, and these bonds can take but one shape – that of formal association’. By understanding the core elements of what constitutes a profession and learning from the workings of other professions, I will identify the differences and unique elements of the IT profession and what lessons can be learnt to help enhance the professional status of IT. The impact of the IT industry and the relationship with other professions will be taken into account in defining the professional model for IT. The main beneficiaries of the research will be those organisation and institutions interested in growing and cultivating the IT profession. The beneficiaries of the research will be: • Computer Societies There are many IT organisations working to represent the interest of IT professionals in each country. This research will help identify the differences between them and the elements of a professional body. It may well be that these organisations are the vehicle through which improvements can be made towards creating an IT profession. • IT Industry Companies (e.g. IBM) which have a vested interest in attracting, recruiting, motivating and retaining IT staff. It is also of key interest to them that their staff are well qualified, professional and works in an ethical manner. The increased attractiveness of IT as a career will benefit them while the improved standing of the profession within the society will help grow their business • Academic Institutions Academic Institutions play a key role in the development of the next generation of IT professionals and hence will benefit from any recommendations from this project that will improve the level of professionalism. These recommendations may be applicable to the designers of future IT educational material, structure and content. • The State and Regulatory Bodies All professionals operate within the boundaries conferred on them by the state and regulatory bodies. Throughout this research recommendations may be identified that suggest changes to the relationship between the State and IT Professional organisations. • IT Professionals Many of the changes required to improve the IT Profession come from the IT Professionals themselves. Its members must want to make the changes and be willing to take action to make the changes happen. How individual professionals act will have a big impact on the image of the profession as a whole. While developing the research proposal, I have had informal conversations with a number of stakeholders: • Colleagues and members of the IT profession. The general consensus was that the IT profession had grown very fast over the last 20 years and is probably now entering a maturing phase. There was a feeling that the timing is right now in defining the future shape of the profession. • IT recruitment. The sharp decline in the number of IT students selecting IT as university courses is a concern for most societies. The apparent contradiction of skills shortages and lack of interest in IT needs to be addressed. It was felt that the unstructured nature of the profession coupled with poor image problems contributes to the decline of interest in IT. A strong professional body for IT would help address this. • IBM Management Like the rest of the IT industry, IBM is facing the same challenges of recruiting, retaining and motivating IT staff. This project is in support of IBM’s interest and other initiatives in this area. • Council of European Professional Informatics Societies (CEPIS) CEPIS is an umbrella organisation representing Computer Societies in the majority of European counties. Following discussions with senior officers of this organisation they confirmed that they had identified the area of professionalism within the IT industry as one of their top focus areas. They were excited about my area of research and offered their endorsement when contacting the various Computer Societies. In general, there was consensus regarding the aims of the project and its timing from the main interested stakeholders of this research

Student perceptions of ethics and professionalism in computer science: Does age, gender, or experience matter?

This work explores several factors that impact ethics education in undergraduate computer science, including: the overall understanding of ethics material, any differences between male and female subjects, any differences between traditional age and non-traditional age subjects, and any differences in experience level. Instruments (attitudinal surveys and reflective scenarios) were distributed to four institutions in the Midwest; 74 out of 170 were returned. Female subjects demonstrated a markedly better ability to distinguish between ethical and unethical behavior in the scenarios (especially in areas where the distinctions were less obvious) and produced higher quality written justifications. There were only 4 attitudinal survey items where differences were found between the genders, each attributable to the different sizes of the groups (though the split, 63% male and 37% female, is fairly consistent with current computer science enrollment data). Based on attitudinal survey responses, nontraditional students demonstrated a clearer understanding of the relationship between academic honesty and ethics than did traditional age students. Other differences existed, but were primarily due to the vastly different group sizes (84% traditional age, 16% nontraditional age). In the qualitative data, the two groups responded similarly to all but one scenario; the writing of the nontraditional students tended to be of more consistent quality. Among the experience levels, differences were found on several survey items and in the response patterns on all of the scenario data. The same general trend evidenced itself in both cases; freshmen (those who have taken/completed less than 3 courses) displayed a greater ability to correctly distinguish ethical and unethical acts, and responded to the acts more clearly and concisely than their more experienced counterparts. The pattern declines steadily through the juniors (7 to 9 courses) and rebounds slightly for seniors (10 or more courses)