Computer Science Courses

If you have read my blog before you will probably know that I am very keen to improve the level and standard of architectural expertise through courses, training, examination and certification. Whilst there are a number of pretty good architectural courses becoming available from companies such as developmentor (see https://www.develop.com/training/course.aspx?id=211 ) there is still a need for architectural courses from the academic community. To this end I agreed to sit on the Industry Advisory group of my old Alma Mata and I went to my first meeting today.

There was an interesting mix of attendees, obviously heads of departments and senior lecturers from the University Computer science department but also senior people from another major computer company (!), a multinational bank, a multinational engineering company and a representative of small business. It was an interesting selection of people with very different backgrounds and interests.

There were 3 main topics on the agenda;

The addition of professional vendor qualifications to degree courses. This was felt to be a good thing so that graduates could be productive from day 1 however it was important that it was an addition to a base course and did not include the exam. There was some discussion around the whole area of distance learning and I went over our experience in this space with the MS academy which I must blog about sometime. Ah, so much to blog and so little time.

The concept of Foundation Degrees; a 2 year industry sponsored vocational degree. This was felt to be a bad idea as it was hard for industry to sponsor this sort of course and in addition the skills being generated were very offshoreable. This led into the whole area of offshoring and I talked (probably for too long) about my experiences in India; well the computing rather than the elephant ones. Again something I must blog about in more detail.

Finally the area of non technical professional development was covered which was felt to be a good idea but difficult to sell to the students. I think this is very much a presentation issue and story or scenario based was the right way to go. This opinion was backed up by one of the lecturers who said that he ran a History of Computing course which was focused on what has gone wrong in IT systems and was very popular.

At the end I made a plea for architectural training and this was very strongly backed by the other industry attendees. Indeed the need for engineering or architectural training came up all through the meeting and was a very consistent requirement

Probably the most interesting thing for me as a take away from the meeting was that even though all the industry attendees were from very different organisations with different backgrounds and job titles we all had a very similar view of IT. In fact the level of agreement about what was happening in computing was amazingly consistent and the requirement for Architectural training very clear.