Grooming IT Students for Industry Through Industrial Training and Graduation Project Work

Abstract

It has been observed that, Information Technology (IT) Professionals educated with the conventional approach do not fully satisfy expectations of the industry since they lack the ability to develop solutions to real-life problems immediately after graduation. This is because most of the conventional education techniques view learning as remembering facts, terms and definitions in order to answer questions rather than concentrating on problem solving, system design and implementation concepts. With the choice of suitable problems, educational institutions should encourage Project Based Learning (PBL) through analyzing, design and implementation rather than simply defining and explaining. This paper introduces a PBL framework and curriculum for educating IT professionals who specialize in information system design and software development for small and medium size businesses. The proposed framework integrates industrial training and graduation project work in a PBL environment to groom the IT students to industry before graduation.