The idea of education is to ready students for a lifetime of work and what sort of jobs are available changes with time and when i left school the idea of Computer Science was very much only a thing a few of the nerdy types were into but in the intervening years it has become an essential skill and the IT people at work seem to be getting younger and younger and have probably forgotten more about IT then i ever knew which is fine as long as they know how to fix things after i have spilt coffee over my keyboard or deleted something i shouldn't have.
The Director of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL), Professor Chris Melhuish, is pushing for computer science to become an essential part of the School Curriculum which at the moment stands as a some computer coding lessons but he doesn't consider this enough of a grounding in tech to enable them to be more proficient in computing .
He does have a point because computer skills are an essential part of most jobs now and will only become more essential in the future where programming, robotics and AI will dominate but how to get students interested in a stream which has a reputation of being 'nerdy'.
One answer they suggest is to encourage more gender equality to attract girls into new technology which has always been the domain of males, i can only remember one female IT person in my time in employment, but whereas my Computer lessons at school consisted of learning keyboard skills, as the future is looking to be Computer and AI dominated, being able to code seems to be the basic requirement today.
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gobbolity goop...
ReplyDeletefirst, when i graduated with an IT degree in 1978, half of the computer graduates in my year were women.
second, at my first job, in houston, i was on an IT team of 11 and 10 were women.
third, my next job in san antonio was on a team of 10 and 9 were women - our sister team was 10 women and no men.
fourth, i spent 20 years working on IT teams and had 8 women managers, and 5 men managers.
when i retired, over half of the managers in IT at my fortune 100 employer were women. true for executives as well. most of the IT professionals were/are men but the ratio is probably in the 40/60 area.
IT skills... being able to use a computer is not an IT skill. professional IT skills include: generating code for large complex systems (think hundreds of thousands of lines of code minimum; building a network with thousands of end-points; maintaining a server farm with at least hundreds of servers; install, maintain, modify and optimize operating systems; building complex firewalls that handle millions of transactions per second; creating, maintaining, and optimizing databases that handle millions of transactions per hour and manage terrabytes of data.
these are not professional IT skills: building a spreadsheet with macros; writing a program in visual basic; creating web pages using HTML; authoring a blog...