Assessing BIT graduate employees in the workplace

• Main Authors: Jamaludin, Zulikha, Abdul Mutalib, Ariffin, Mohamed Elias, Ezanee
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2005
• Subjects: LB2300 Higher Education
• Online Access: http://repo.uum.edu.my/1582/1/ASAIHL05Brunei_AssessingBIT-Zulikha.pdf; http://repo.uum.edu.my/1582/; http://www.seameo.org/asaihl/

As the pioneer in offering the Bachelor in Information Technology (BIT) degree program in Malaysia and having conducted the course for the past 15 years, it is incumbent upon the Faculty of Information Technology, UUM to investigate whether or not it is producing graduates who meet the needs of the job market. These days, being a knowledgeable graduate is not adequate if the knowledge possessed is irrelevant to the organisations concerned. This study was carried out with the realization that such a situation existed. We tried the most appropriate method, as confirmed by the literature, to find out the types of knowledge and skills needed by the employers from our graduates as they compared the graduates’ knowledge and skills with a perceived importance level. Obtaining the measures for 19 competency attributes, we calculated the knowledge gap and performance gap for each attribute in order to identify the most critical knowledge and skills needed by the organisations. With such information, we identified our strengths and weaknesses, which we used as a basis to propose ways for improving our BIT curriculum that would neither sacrifice the requirements of the knowledge epistemology nor the need of the organisations. This study reveals interesting, yet challenging findings.