Australian IT students look to harder courses

Students considering tertiary courses in IT are moving towards harder edge degrees in what is a likely reaction to the international downturn in the dotcom industry, according to the Dean of Australia's largest IT faculty at Monash University.

Professor John Rosenberg, Dean of Information Technology, says his school is experiencing significant interest in 'heavier' IT degree courses. Professor Rosenberg said that in the current round of applications for 2002 courses there had been strong demand in more technical IT courses as opposed to the 'softer edge' generalist IT courses.,/p>

He said it was likely the cut-off scores for the Bachelor of Software Engineering, Bachelor of Computer Science and the Bachelor of Digital Systems would rise for the 2002 intake of students. "When times are tough students want a qualification that will give them the edge," Professor Rosenberg said.

"The demand in software engineering at Monash is up by nearly 30%, the demand in business systems is up by 25% and demand in computer science is up by 6%, so really that is significant growth in demand at the harder edge of IT," Professor Rosenberg said.

He said a recent Australian Information Industry Association IT skills survey showed that almost half the jobs in IT demanded a university qualification in IT with those figures almost certainly having increased.

"A lot of the jobs that were cut following the dotcom disaster were those which were viewed as non-essential, those that required less qualifications," he said. "Companies still need IT, they all need computers, they all need a web presence and in the end they are going to need to go back to buying computers and people to support those."

But Professor Rosenberg said he believed the softer IT generalist courses would eventually see a resurgence of interest. "Over the next couple of years we will see an increase in those taking up courses such as multimedia as the industry restructures itself following the dotcom crash," he said.