Just what that action must entail has yet to be seen though. Certainly, some argue, money to fund ICT awareness programs is key. Looming large in the limelight, host state Queensland committed $490,000 for two programs aimed at improving the stature of an industry from which first-year university students seem to have shifted away from altogether.
But is it IT as a whole that they have shifted from? Or, rather, IT&T? It may sound like a question of semantics, but Mark Lloyd, chairman of the Australian Computer Society’s Queensland branch, believes such a simple question highlights the fact that a lack of funding is the least of the industry’s problems.
“In our industry we don’t have a noun that describes us, and that’s a very poor image,” Lloyd explains. “Parents can talk about the variety of types of doctors, but how could any career counsellor or parent give advice to kids about ICT careers when the industry isn’t very well understood at all? Most think about a computer on the desk . . . but in fact our industry has a huge variety [of roles involved]: kids can do computer games, graphic arts, marketing to the world and a plethora of other activities.”
The problem: game design, graphic design, and marketing are all valid disciplines with or without ICT, which makes the study of ICT tangential to the core issues at hand. Unless students are being shown the relevance of traditional ICT fields to those pursuits, the study of computing and communications technologies will simply be taken for granted.
Maybe, just maybe, ICT as a field is simply a lame duck that’s no longer relevant. After all, years of progress mean ICT is all around us, taken for granted by students who are more interested in knowing what it can do for them. Asking them to focus on technology alone would be like asking a novelist to proofread punctuation for a living, or asking a doctor to spend his or her days refilling cotton wool containers instead of seeing patients.
Perhaps rather than focusing on growing the number of traditional IT graduates, policy should focus on integrating ICT skills into other educational streams so graduates can appreciate the cause and effect of ICT. Teaching a graduate how a network is built is one thing, but what about teaching that person how the technology of collaboration and information management underlies the business decisions that keep the world turning?
Both approaches are equally valid, but the latter approach is one where ICT is engaged with the world; in the former, ICT is disengaged. Perhaps ICT’s best approach is to stop trying to turn itself into a noun and become more of an adverb—a facilitator for how the rest of the world functions. Perhaps this approach, rather than more cheerleading, could help ICT grow out of its image as geek’s folly (an image noted as insidious and still damaging by the recently released report of the ICT Skills Foresighting Working Group)
ICT, it seems, is disappearing as a discipline faster than government and industry bodies can legislate it. Still, government announcements and the involvement of many key industry bodies prove the industry has not yet settled into complacency. Even the most aggressive action isn’t likely to produce results for five years, argues Lloyd, noting that the number of students graduating from ICT-related courses is far higher than the number entering them. And even money, he argues, is irrelevant to solving the problem without a coherent industry plan.
“We send mixed messages into the federal system and then wonder why we don’t make any progress or get any money to advance the industry proper,” he says. “Having not collectively agreed on a plan of action it’s not the time to start throwing large amounts of money at it. Once we’ve got something of substance, I think the government will provide relevant support.”
—David Braue
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