Towards Narrowing a Conceptual Gap between IT Industry and University

The situation when the number of the students and the popularity of the engineering education in general and IT education in particular is not increasing dramatically due to the fact that there exists an opinion that engineering education is complex and time-consuming from one side and that the graduates are not sufficiently prepared for the industry from another, requires the University to perform a series of actions that can improve the current situation. One of the areas for improvement is the quality of the study programs in the sense of their suitability to ‘customers’, namely Students and Industry. Previous research shows that the knowledge requirements monitoring system and the processes behind it can improve the quality of the study programs, e.g. the results of the Value Network Analysis demonstrate that the Monitoring System can give additional value to both the University and the Industry. Developing a monitoring system prototype requires narrowing the gap between industry and university and introduces new ways of industry-university cooperation

Using a system dynamic approach to understanding the socialisation process of IT graduates

Magister Commercii - MComThis study analyses the process that an IT refurbishing organisation used to socialise 15 IT graduates to the norms of the working world. In addition, 5 IT industry and 2 governmental agency interviews were used, and 60 online job advertisements were analysed to develop a system dynamic model. The main motivation for this study was to develop a system dynamics model of the graduate socialisation process, in an attempt to understand the cause and effect of practical exposure, to bridge the IT skill-expectations gap. The main source of data for the model was from a-priori coding and content analysis of job adverts, online blogs and reports created by the students, supported by a review of the existing literatur

Topic map for representing network security competencies

Competencies represent the knowledge, skills and attitudes required for job roles. Organisations need to understand and grow competencies within their workforce in order to be more competitive and to maximise new market opportunities. Competency Management is the process of introducing, managing and enforcing competencies in organisations. Through this process, occupational competencies can be assessed to see if candidates match the required job role expectations. The assessment of competencies can be conceptualised from two perspectives. The rst is `competency frameworks', which describe competencies from a high-level overview. As such, they are regarded as theWhat" element of competency. The second perspective is `competencybased learning', which focuses on addressing competencies from a more detailed, task-oriented perspective. Competency-based learning is regarded as the How" element of competency. Currently, there is no available tool that can map the What" with the How" element of competency. Such a mapping would provide a more holistic approach to representing competencies. This dissertation adopts the topic map standard in order to demonstrate a holistic approach to mapping competencies, specially in network security. This is accomplished through the design and evaluation of a Design Science artefact. In this research process a topic map data model was constructed from mapping the `What' and `How' elements together. To demonstrate the applicability of the model, it was implemented in a Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) recruitment scenario. The aim of this demonstration was to prove that the topic map could be implemented in an organisational context