Maths graduates to save IT?

gallery

This year may have seen an even bigger dive in the number of students taking computer science at further education level, but industry insiders have claimed today's maths graduates can fill their places.

During a discussion panel on the knowledge economy at the 360 IT event, Jayne Nickalls, chief executive (CEO) of DirectGov, said you don't need to have computer science to make an impact in the IT sector.

“There is an increase in maths graduates and we know a lot of science and maths graduates then do convert into computer science,” she said.

“There also is the need for the business angle to be brought to technology. We have the raw materials that we can convert.”

Nickalls even claimed this conversion from other degrees could “potentionally” allow for cuts in budget to the funding of computer science degrees.

Charles Ward, the chief operation office (COO) of Intellect, said there was also a need to make computer science degrees more appealing in the first place and ensure there was a career path after university.

“It is not so much that there aren't jobs, there is the perception that they are not very appealing jobs,” he added. “The people who also see it the least appealing are females. We don't have a lot of females entering the field and we need to [address] that.”

Ian Brinkley, director of the knowledge programme at The Work foundation, claimed the problem went deeper than that.

“By international standards we have a lot of [graduates],” he said. “On the other hand our leading employers keep telling us they don't have the right quality.

“That tells me that could be a quality issue. We have tried so hard to get the numbers up we don't concern ourselves with what comes out the other end.”

The panel widely agreed with Ward's closing statement that there was “no vanilla solution” to the problem and the debate around our future computing graduates/IT employees was set to continue.

Email to a friend

Print this page