Ict curricula Guidelines (2nd draft)

New Behavioural Skills Required
As well as working on different things, people in the ICT industry now work in different ways. The complexity of systems continues to multiply, and the introduction rate or time to market of new products continues to get faster and shorter. Also, many different technologies may be combined to produce an overall system solution.
This means that many people must work together on the same project, not in sequence but all at the same time and in parallel. So this approach is different from a traditional model, where it was important for an engineer or computer scientist to work alone on a project of lesser complexity and produce a solution over a longer time frame.
Specialists now work as part of multi-disciplinary development teams, which are often international and located on different sites. There is an increasing trend for products to be designed for a global market, with national boundaries becoming less relevant. Marketing staff and customers tend to be involved in the development of a product right from the start.
An ICT graduate needs to be able to work with others from different cultures and backgrounds and arrive at a mutual understanding, in order to meet deadlines while working in this parallel way. Consequently, these behavioural aspects need to be taught in University curricula. What is needed is situational and contextual learning both embedded in technical and scientific courses and more explicitly taught. Students should be made aware of the value and importance of this type of the learning to the ICT industry.
Since technologies improve and change rapidly, some things which have been learnt may become less relevant over time, and other new aspects need to be studied further for a fuller understanding.
It is therefore necessary for the teaching environment to encourage and develop competency in continuous learning as a natural process of the student’s own development, which certainly should not stop after leaving university.