Work experience the key

By ADAM GIFFORD

In today's tight labour market, the most important qualification for a job in information technology is experience.

That catch-22 has long affected the industry, and it is getting worse.

David Palmer, managing partner of Alliance IT Recruitment, which caters for the senior end of the market, says the post-Y2K downturn raised the bar for entry-level positions.

"It is no longer an industry where you can do a course, get a qualification and step into the market," Palmer says.

"Now employers are looking not just for the qualification but for the passion for the industry. You have to go the extra mile."

The same applies for people who want to change jobs. Keeping up with the new technologies and finding ways to apply them will put people in a better position to shift jobs when the market opens up.

"A lot of IT now is about leveraging business advantage," says Palmer.

"IT people have to show how the firm can get business benefit from what they do."

Unitec associate dean of business Dave Hodges surveyed 1300 Auckland businesses on what they were looking for in graduates, and found work experience was rated 5.5 on a scale of 7.

"They are now demanding graduates not only be technically competent but have work experience," Hodges says. "That has huge implications for the way we integrate work-based learning into the curriculum.

"The days of teaching theory without developing strong practice skills are dwindling."

He says Unitec and other polytechnics and universities are starting to offer co-operative education in many courses, where students are placed on work sites for anything from three months to a year to apply what they have learned, before returning to the classroom.

"One of the fundamentals of learning, right from childhood, is we learn best from applying what we learn to real situations."

Hodges says the shift to co-operative education will require new partnerships between employers, education institutions and students, and Government must also do its bit.

"It is expensive, because it is important there is a supervisory relationship with students, and that kind of one-on-one interaction is costly for a tertiary institution," he says.

Auckland University's School of Management Science and Information systems has used a co-operative education model for more than a decade. Project 340 is a third-year paper which allows small teams of students to bid to do projects put up by participating companies.

"It gives students 'been there, done that' experience," says IT consultant Ian Howard, one of the course supervisors.

The teams work on site one day a week for the year, and 50 per cent of their marks are based on client satisfaction.

"They go through the full software-development lifecycle," Howard says. "They specify the solution, develop it, code it, develop the documentation and training and then implement.

"It is like walking through fire, so they can put on their CV that they have done a real live project for real live people, so they become very employable."

But even then, students find the job market tight.

"Whereas three years ago most class participants would have been employed by the half-year mark, this year 25 per cent are still not employed by the end of the course," he says.

James Bergin did the 340 paper three years ago, working on a project to create an online planning and reporting system for the Warehouse's intranet.

After he graduated the Warehouse hired him as a developer and he is now a systems architect.

He says the paper was the culmination of his degree and the most important paper he took.

"For the first two years at university we were introduced to the general concepts or principles behind accounting and commerce and information systems.

"This was the real-world application of those concepts," Bergin says.

"A lot of it was project lifecycle, business analysis and design - it was only in the last couple of months we did the programming."

Andre Rameil-Green did the paper this year, developing an extranet for Provenco Payments which allows its eftpos terminal resellers to check stock availability, support information and the state of their accounts.

"It was of tremendous worth because, while the theory you learn at university is a great foundation, a real project has a life of its own," Rameil-Green says.

"Not only that, a university course can't really teach you to interact with bosses and other workers."