Flexibility
Regardless of what postgraduate degree you opt for, the keyword in today's postgraduate IT environment is "flexibility".
"Flexibility is important to meet the requirements of potential students and to fit in with their lifestyles," Grant says. "Today's working professionals are so busy that finding one or two evenings a week to come out to class regularly is very difficult."
In a bid to offer greater flexibility, many higher education institutions are starting to take elements of their most popular IT-related courses and "segmenting" them into shorter courses that are more accessible to today's IT professionals.
"Starting this year Swinburne is offering certain extracts from our master's programs as short courses, so that people from industry may simply enrol in something specific to their needs," Grant says.
"For example, IT-enabled Supply Chain Transformation is one of the core subjects in our Master of Information Systems Management, but it can also be taken on a short course basis because there are people working in industry for whom that is the specific area where they need to get knowledge in the short term."
UNSW's IT programs are designed to allow students to earn a recognized qualification in a period ranging from one semester to two years. "For instance, a student might decide to round up their computing background with the Graduate Certificate in Advanced Computing, work for a couple of years, and come back to UNSW for one more semester and complete the Master of Information Technology, so it provides lots of flexibility," UNSW's Martin says.
"These programs can also open the door to research degrees (master's or PhD), as students are exposed to the state of the art in a research active environment," Martin adds. "Students can undertake a small research project in the last semester of their master's degree. Hence our postgrad coursework programs offer many very different career paths that can be followed in flexible ways."
Benefits of Postgrad Study
A wide variety of opportunities for professional development exist in IT, all of which have their own advantages and disadvantages. The difference - and determining which option best suits your needs - is largely a matter of context.
Certifications, for instance, offer useful "just-in-time" training for particular IT tasks or skills that are required in the short term, but they don't offer much in terms of long-term professional development. Nevertheless, in a bid to stay relevant to industry and provide students with a range of flexible learning options, Swinburne, Charles Sturt and other universities have begun to link certifications from vendors like Microsoft and Cisco with their postgraduate offerings.
"Students who undertake Swinburne's Master of Networked Systems study official Microsoft and Cisco curricula, making them well-positioned to take the formal examination for certification if they so desire," Grant says. "We've worked with multiple vendors for a long while to develop these courses. That's what we see as relevant, particularly in a very practically-oriented area like network systems, where you're talking about the design, implementation and management of networks in an organization."
Another recent development which adds even more flexibility to obtaining a postgraduate qualification is the advent of open, or "distance learning" programs. Swinburne University of Technology, Curtin University of Technology, Macquarie University, RMIT and many others are partners in the distance education organization, Open Universities Australia (OUA), previously known as Open Learning Australia. Operating since 1993, OUA currently offers courses from 15 academic providers, all of which enable students to earn the same qualifications as if they studied on a physical campus.
"These courses are proving quite popular right now," Grant says. "As a university with a strong commitment to IT, we're covering all the bases, with standard postgraduate education, short courses and distance learning. This gives students the opportunity to choose according to their circumstances."
"People can enrol in the whole program from the start, or they can take chunks of our postgraduate programs and gradually tie them together to complete the whole program," he says.