Tag Archives: employability

Join us to discuss using agile group projects to develop more employable graduates on Monday 13th May at 2pm BST

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Employers often love academic group projects while students often loathe them. How can Agile group projects be used to develop students skills, both hard technical skills and softer people skills? Join us on Monday 13th May at 2pm BST to discuss a paper on this published by Jordan Allison and his collaborators at the University of Gloucestershire and the University of Bristol in the Journal of Further and Higher Education. [1] From the abstract:

This article presents the usage of Integrated Course Design (ICD) in the design and evaluation of applying agile methodologies within an undergraduate module of study to foster the development of computer science students employability skills. Undergraduate programs of computer science typically follow traditional educational methods which can lead to students unable to connect knowledge learned in class to actual situations and students are often assessed individually, whereas collaborative group projects are more akin to industry practice. The teaching experience reported gives students the opportunity to relate concepts learnt in class to a practical group-based project. Students must meet the requirements of a ‘client’ who will provide feedback and additional challenges for students while following the Agile framework SCRUM. Positive student feedback and module grades 7.70% higher than the department average over a four year period indicates the teaching structure and assessment presented is an effective method to foster the development of technical and soft skills of undergraduate computer science students.

We’ll be joined by the co-authors who will give us a five-minute lightning talk summary of their paper to kick-off our discussion. All welcome, joining details at sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us

References

  1. Jordan Allison, Abu Alam, Luke Gassmann, Gareth Nelson & Kamal Zidan (2024): Fostering the development of computer science graduate employability through agile projects, Journal of Further and Higher Education, DOI: 10.1080/0309877X.2024.2340642

Join us to discuss graduate skills for Computer Science students on Monday 3rd October at 2pm BST

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What do employers want from Computer Science students and how good are Universities in producing graduates with what employers need? Join us to discuss via a paper by Roseanne English and Alan Hayes from UKICER 2022. [1] From the abstract:

In preparing computing science students for industry, degree content often focuses on technical skills such as programming. Such skills are essential for a successful post-study career in industry and is popular with students. However, industry notes that students are often limited in what can be referred to as graduate attributes or transferable skills. Such skills include effective teamwork, communication, and critical thinking amongst others. Similar gaps have also been demonstrated for computing science students more specifically, resulting in industry developing their own training programmes for graduates. To address this issue, graduate attributes could be incorporated more readily into computing curricula. Within the UK this is discussed in accreditation requirements as well as higher education frameworks. However, research which aims to explore how to achieve this is still comparatively limited. Building on existing work in this area, this paper presents a thematic analysis of graduate attributes at Russell Group Universities in the UK to identify the most common attribute themes, and uses the most frequent themes to begin to consider how these could be more readily embedded in CS curricula.

All welcome, as usual we’ll be meeting on zoom, details at sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us

References

  1. Rosanne English and Alan Hayes (2022) Towards Integrated Graduate Skills for UK Computing Science Students in UKICER ’22: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on United Kingdom & Ireland Computing Education Research Pages 1–7 DOI:10.1145/3555009.3555018 (free version via https://pureportal.strath.ac.uk… )