Meeting The Challenges Of Today's IT Labor Demands By Building A Better Prepared Student Thru Targeting Curricula Enhancements

Abstract

The landscape of the United States information technology (IT) workforce is evolving due to a variety of factors including global outsourcing; commercial-of-the-shelf software (COTS), and the bursting of the dot.com bubble.  In addition the world of software development and systems integration continues to evolve into an object-oriented (OO) based environment.  The advent of new development platforms such as Microsoft’s .Net and Sun’s J2EE has accelerated the adoption rate of OO based tools and the object-oriented development paradigm.  Tomorrow’s workers need to be equipped to describe a world made up of objects – whether the objects are self created or inherited from an existing object framework.  IN addition to offering OO software development classes, educational institutions must also begin educating systems analysts to create informative models based on OO principles.  The Unified Modeling Language (UML) has emerged as the standard for defining modeling principles and techniques.  This paper describes how we have tailored our curriculum to meet the demands of our graduates’ future employers by offering a four course sequence in systems integration and project management at the undergraduate level.  This series of classes that teach students how to elicit requirements and turn them into analysis and design level artifacts based on the UML standard.  The classes also teach and use a development methodology which is less methodical and more contingency (agile) based.  We also introduce the students to using analysis and design patterns.  Course models and examples of learning assessments are included.  The paper also maps the learning outcomes from our classes to those purposed in the ACM/SIGITE Information Technology model curriculum.