Browsing by Author "Ibarra, Ana Francesca"

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    Assessment of inofrmation technology (IT) education in Metro Manila
    (2007-04) Duka, Marnie Anne; Ibarra, Ana Francesca; Tan, Edita
    The software industry is a fast growing and highly dynamic industry, which produces high value service for its customers. Although dominated by firms based in major industrialized countries, it continues to offer huge possibilities for economic growth and industrial development in developing countries. However the need for highly skilled manpower, such as programmers and systems analysts, remains to be a major problem in the advancement of the industry. Software companies also have difficulty in hiring and maintaining competent senior staff such as business analysts, technology specialists and project managers. Software engineers capable of research and development on software products are also scarce. According to Dr. Festin, Chairperson of the Computer Science Department of UP Diliman, there are 1 ,200 schools in the country providing IT-related courses and about 44,000 IT graduates a year. Even with these figures, the number of IT graduates in the country still cannot meet the number of skilled programmers demanded by the software companies for immediate hiring. This study hopes to address one of the major problems of the software industry, the lack of highly skilled labor, by analyzing the current Computer Science curriculum of different schools. Determining the gap or mismatch between the industry and the academe could make way for further improvement of the country's educational system to better align it with the needs of the industry. Topics from the curricula of 4 different schools were singled out and were grouped as follows: COE Schools which consists of UP Diliman and Ateneo de Manila University and Network Schools which composes of Informatics College and STI College. The topics are then compared to the skills required by the industry of their prospective employees as determined by a survey among local software companies. Considering the curricula, there is actually no gap between the needs of the industry and what the academe is teaching. All the topics required by the companies are addressed one way or another by topics from the curricula of both groups of schools. But the quality of the academe can probably better measured by the quality of teaching (professors), the teaching materials and equipments used (e.g. books, computers), the learning ability of the students and the implementation of the curricula. The industry, on the other hand, requires technical know-how in their prospective employees, as well as the propensity to learn. Other abilities that the industry wishes to develop in the fresh graduates are their soft skills and communication skills.