Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Comparison between IT/IS Professionals and
IT/IS Employers
Table 7 shows the mean and standard deviations of ratings by IS/IT professionals and
IS/IT employees for “hard” skills and business subjects.
Of the 14 subjects and skills that achieved a mean rating of 5.0 or more, the highest rating
by practitioners and employers was achieved by Communications and Report Writing, a soft
skill. Eleven technical subjects and two “other business subjects” management and business
ethics, achieved mean ratings of 5.0 or more. The value placed on these two subjects is
consistent with earlier findings by the authors shown in Table 1.
A remaining pool of traditional business subjects, including marketing, business
finance, operations research, mathematical modeling, international business, business
statistics, accounting, and business or commercial law, failed to achieve a mean rating
exceeding 4.35. Three other subjects, psychology, economics, and foreign languages, ranked
quite low, none achieving even a neutral rating of 4.0 by either group. The low ratings achieved
by these subjects by practitioner and employer groups suggest that the IS curriculum would
be improved by their replacement by other, more relevant subjects that help students develop
their “business skills.”
The data regarding non-IS business subjects were subjected to the Kurskall-Wallis
procedure. Only three subjects, accounting, management, and international business,
achieved significance. Accounting and management emerged as two of three most highly
ranked nontechnical subjects in the earlier study by the authors (Turner & Lowry, 1999b),
international business was not included in the 1999 study and was added as a result of insights
gained from that work. While business ethics was identified in the 1999 study as one of three
most highly ranked nontechnical business subjects, it was ranked a bit lower in the later study.
Table 9 shows the mean and standard deviations of ratings by IS/IT Professionals and
IS/IT employees for “soft” business skills.
Table 9 shows a marked similarity between practitioners and employers in their ratings
of the importance of “soft” business skills. Once again, consistent with Table 6, only the
ability to prepare multimedia presentations failed to achieve a mean rating of 5.0. All other
soft business skills were highly rated by IS practitioners and employers.
These included time management, oral presentation skills, good sense of humor,
willingness to undergo professional development, ability to prepare multimedia presenta-
tions, ability to quickly acquire new skills, ability to meet deadlines, the ability to work under
pressure, and well-developed written communication skills. It is interesting to note the
position of the ability to prepare multimedia presentations in Table 10, as it was the only soft
skill to fail to receive a rating of 5.0 or more from IS practitioners and employers.
DISCUSSION
Information technology is central to the work of computer scientists and information
systems professionals. Computer scientists are more oriented toward the technology, while
information systems professionals are more oriented toward the users of technology. The
model curricula of relevant professional bodies such as the Association for Computing
Machinery (2001), the Association of Information Technology Professionals (Davis, 1997),
and the Australian Computer Society (Underwood, 1997) have noted and acknowledged the
different roles performed by information professionals.
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