Programmers with Business Smarts
Was just surfing through the weblogs.asp.net feed earlier today, still unhappy that it is no longer a full text RSS Feed.
But eh, i’ll live.
Anyway, I noticed this post by Jeff which reminded me of Dan Appleman’s post about advice for future Computer Science Majors that I blogged about. Or more in particular, reminded his point that “Being technologically savvy isn’t enough.”.
Here’s the news.com article that Jeff refers to.
This is perhaps more interesting food for thought for all of us, whether we are just beginning our IT careers, about to come into it or have been in it for an amount of time.
I recall while I was applying for graduate jobs that there was one particular graduate position that required someone who did a double degree in business/IT… I suppose it could mean that our IT courses may have the requirement that students undertake a subject which requires them to:
1) Do presentations to groups of individuals (helps with communications skills)… Perhaps offer “workshops” that help them with their communication skills if they would like to improve upon it.
2) Rather than be given assignment specifications, they are required to sit down with their tutor and have the requirements discussed and the student is forced to analyse the requirements and try to clarify any points they misunderstood in the original requirements discussion session with the tutor.
In regards to point number 2, what can perhaps be done is the subject lecturer (or a senior tutor) writes up a generalised assignment specification to be handed out to tutors only.
The students will then go and arrange a meeting time with their tutor to discuss the assignment requirements and from that they must write out their own requirements and part of their submission is how well they understood and implemented the requirements.
Perhaps further expansion upon what I’ve just mentioned can be undertaken, but that is perhaps a possibility.
I know that some IT courses have things such as final year projects where they have to interact with an external client. That is definately one of the best ways to get students to communicate with the clients, the only factor is that it is a group scenario and not every student would be willing to speak up.
When I did my final year project (also known as the Industrial Experience project) we worked with a client to develop an application for their company to utilise. Looking back I feel that is one of the most important areas that has helped me in my current job where I am required to actively communicate with the client and do analysis work based upon that. Though, yes that is just one of the contributing factors.
Ok, I better post this soon, since i’ve just been rambling on and on and i’m fairly sure i’ll start to make less and less sense. (This blog entry was started earlier today, and it’s still unpublished after lunch… so apologies if it doesn’t flow.)