Article C3:

IT Internships Seminar: An Industry – Tertiary Partnership

05:01
June 2007

Judith Speight, ITT WRKZ Ltd, New Zealand
jspeight@ittwrkz.co.nz
Panel Convener

Speight J. (2007, Jun), IT Internships Seminar: An Industry – Tertiary Partnership. Bulletin of Applied Computing and Information Technology Vol. 5, Issue 1. ISSN 1176-4120. Retrieved from

1. INTRODUCTION

The ability to align and match new graduates with the needs of industry is an enduring challenge. The Accelerating Auckland Taskforce has initiated a project to identify and pilot best practice internships to enhance the capability of industry to respond to its own needs by engaging with potential employees during their education phase.

The vision is that a successful pilot will lead to a self sustaining internship programme within the Auckland region and, possibly, nationally.

The panel session was designed to enable educationalists and industry employers to discuss their requirements, opportunities and challenges with contributing to an integrated internship programme. The opportunity was used to solicit feedback from the wide range of educationalists in the audience.

2. DISCUSSION

Judy Speight introduced the session, identifying the growing demand for ICT skills in the Auckland region and the current misalignment between skills and demand. She summarised the background of the project and introduced the speakers.

Iani Nemani – Department of Labour

The Department of Labour has goals to address ICT skill shortages and to support transformation of the economy. A number of projects are actively addressing these areas. Iani discussed economic and statistical observations showing the ongoing increase in demand for skills in the Auckland region.

Peter Marks – Oracle

Peter discussed the key attributes that major employers seek from graduates. He emphasized;

The need for competent soft skills – e.g. client facing skills
That corporates invest heavily in training graduates to be productive within the commercial sector

Tony Clear – School of Computer and Information Sciences, AUT

Tony discussed the profiles and skills of students graduating from AUT into the ICT industry.

He summarised existing and potential industry/tertiary partnerships and reflected on the benefits and challenges of these initiatives.

Rohan Cuff – EDS

Rohan described EDS’ role in New Zealand and internationally. He discussed the existing EDS Internship Programme, how it is structured and what it offers to both interns and to EDS.

Graham Duncan – Computer Press

The need for defined professional standards and the associated challenges of certification of ICT professionals was the theme of Graham’s presentation.

Debbie Noon – IBM NZ

Debbie described the benefits that IBM sees for both the company and for interns with an internship programme. She summarised the structure and approach of the IBM Australia Internship Programme and gave an insight into the programme being developed for New Zealand.

Giles Warburton – Agility Group

Giles presented the employment broker’s view (the glue between employees and businesses). He shared insights into issues that enhance and limit matching employers with employees and provided hints to the audience of areas to coach individuals on.

A number of questions were raised from the floor and several members of the audience voiced their encouragement and support for the project.

In conclusion:

There was a strong support for the project to proceed
There was a strong indication that support would be readily available for similar initiatives outside of the Auckland region.

3. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Judy Speight thanked the panel members, the organisers of the NACCQ Conference and the audience for their participation.

Copyright © 2007 Judy Speight
The author(s) assign to NACCQ and educational non-profit institutions a non-exclusive licence to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The author(s) also grant a non-exclusive licence to NACCQ to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web (prime sites and mirrors) and in printed form within the Bulletin of Applied Computing and Information Technology. Authors retain their individual intellectual property rights.

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