IBM wants multidisciplinary skills

The success of students in IBM's Extreme Blue summer internship programme shows the importance of multidisciplinary skills, such as service and business, the company said.

The ninth season of the world-wide internship programme wraps up this week, with UK and European students demonstrating projects they've been working on in Hursley, Winchester. Some 220 participants from the UK and around the world are chose from 10,000 applications to work in teams of four over twelve weeks researching mobile payments, virtual works and other topics in 14 IBM labs across the world.

While three of the students are from a computer science or other technology background, one in every group is studying business. "We're finding with skills, that they need to be multidisciplinary," said Jane Harper, IBM's director of 21st century skills. "To be productive in services oriented world, you must have multidisciplinary skills. Deep in one area, but able to speak the language of business, technology and social sides, too."

"The technology side will tell you they learned so much because they haven't been exposed to thinking about the business value of something," she said. While most of the business students have some technology skills in their background, they gain extra experience from working in the labs.

The increasing industry focus on services is one reason why IBM is encouraging training in service science, management and engineering. "It is a multidisciplinary approach to education," she said. "Students will have to be trained in service early on rather than just on the job... like ours or any other company in IT, people are immediately put in front of customers."

At yesterday's presentation, the teams showed off their research. "You'd think it was just the business students getting up to present, but usually all four are eager to, and you can't tell which is the business student," she said.

Projects this year included work on micro-positioning, RFID-based temperature tracking, sign language recognition and accessibility in virtual worlds, among others.

While some never move past the internship phase, others do. "At the end of the programme, we hope to have some innovative technology which could go into products or into the open source community," she said. So far, the programme has lead to 270 patent disclosures and six open source projects, she said.

Indeed, the projects are so successful that some seven or eight out of ten are offered a job with IBM at the end of their studies. "The vast majority accept," she said. "We're turning them on to working in a company like ours."

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