Postgrad Study: Precursor to Success

IT moves so rapidly that today's professionals constantly need to keep themselves up to date. There are a range of postgraduate options available to IT workers looking to boost their salary or switch careers, ranging from self-directed study to short, certification-based courses to more formal academic courses.

Postgraduate education within the realm of IT - in the form of graduate certificates, graduate diplomas or coursework masters - generally falls into two camps: traditional courses and research degrees (masters and PhDs) designed for people who already hold an undergraduate degree in IT and are looking to extend that knowledge to an expert level, and what are commonly referred to in academic circles as "conversion programs", courses which cater to people who are graduates of other disciplines but are interested in switching to IT, or wish to add IT skills to their existing knowledge base.

In each case, the approaches to learning and the disciplines involved are quite different, with some courses focussing on the more technical aspects of IT, like business information systems or telecommunications networks, whereas others are more focused on how to manage the IT function within an organization.

Master's: the Traditional Degree

Degrees such as the Master's in Information Systems Management are aimed squarely at professionals intent on climbing the managerial ranks within IT.

At Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne's eastern suburbs, for example, the advanced master's program for existing professionals - the Master of Information Technology - offers specializations in three distinct areas:

1) Reliable Software Systems, which focuses on software engineering principles for developing complex systems; 2) Information Systems, which covers the whole IS lifecycle, from conceptualization and design to deployment within a business or other organization; and 3) Web Application Development, which is currently the university's most popular discipline.

Similar programs are offered by the School of Computer Science at the University of New South Wales, located in the Sydney suburb of Kensington. UNSW offers two streams of postgraduate courses: a Graduate Certificate in Advanced Computing (4 courses, 1 semester full time) and a Master of Information Technology (8 courses, 2 semesters full time), both of which are intended for students who have "a substantial and broad computing background, [and] who want to deepen their knowledge of IT and extend it in new directions", according to Dr Eric Martin, senior lecturer at UNSW's School of Computer Science and Engineering.

"Few disciplines evolve as fast as IT, and it is important to keep pace with technological changes, and completing well-chosen courses at CSE is a good way of achieving that aim," Martin says.

"Also many people want to do a different job at some point in their life; they want to take up new challenges, and IT is particularly suitable to making such a change possible thanks to its breadth, the fact that it is more and more entwined with other disciplines, and the fact that software becomes a component of so many of the new devices that appear on the market," Martin says.

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Conversion Programs

Conversion programs, such as a graduate certificate, graduate diploma or Master of Technology in Information Technology, are popular with people eager to switch to a career in IT from another field. These programs were all the rage in the 90s, when there was a shortage of IT professionals, but by the early 2000s they began to fade into the background following the dotcom crash and the drastic drop in IT employment opportunities it precipitated.

"There's a shortage of IT professionals in the industry again, so now is a good opportunity for people to switch over to IT," says Professor Doug Grant, Dean of the Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies at Swinburne University of Technology.

Swinburne offers degree programs at master's and doctoral levels, and the university also operates as a technical college (through its TAFE division), providing certificate, diploma, advanced diploma and associate degree programs. The Uni's Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies specifically caters to students looking for ICT degrees in business information systems, network security, software development and telecommunications.

Grant, who has worked at the Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies since it was established in 1992, says that the 1990s dotcom boom meant that opportunities for well-paid IT careers grew rapidly, and during that time the university was spilling over with applications from students who had trained in a variety of different areas, such as librarians, school science teachers or media and communications professionals, all of whom were eager to make the shift to a more lucrative career in IT.

"We had many people who were qualified in areas of engineering, which at the time was not offering very good job opportunities, but IT was," Grant says. "So they would undertake a graduate diploma in information technology, which is a two-year part-time program, and at the end of that they would have a very good entry level qualification in IT that would enable them to take up typical graduate entry positions."

Grant should know; his own career has closely mirrored that of the postgraduate students who undertake coursework at Swinburne's Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies, which he currently manages. He began his professional life as a mathematician before moving into the insurance industry, where he worked for National Mutual. When the first PCs began to arrive on the scene in the early 1980s, Grant recognized the power of the new machines to transform his industry and soon became the "PC evangelist" at his company, sparking a fascination with technology that continues to the present day.

"I think the reality is that most people have a career development that jumps around like that nowadays," Grant says. "My own experience is one of having trained in another discipline, spending some time in industry, and then having switched to IT, where I developed my career within IT firstly as an academic/practitioner and then as an academic manager."

"Completion of the graduate diploma gives people a good, solid, and broad, introduction to IT, both from an IT development point of view and an IT usage point of view. It prepares people quite well for entry level positions, particularly for IT positions in the industry in which they have their primary initial existing qualification," Grant says.

At UNSW, the conversion course stream consists of a Graduate Certificate in Computing (4 courses, 1 semester full time), a Graduate Diploma in Computing and Information Technology (12 courses, 3 semesters full time), and a Master of Computing and Information Technology (16 courses, 4 semesters full time). These degrees are intended for students with no or minimal prior computing background, who want to retrain as IT professionals, as well as students with some computing background who want to broaden their understanding of computing, according to UNSW senior lecturer Martin.

Most institutions that offer postgraduate study in IT were recently forced to extend the work required for degrees like the Master of Technology when the Australian Computer Society (ACS) tightened its rules for the professional accreditation of postgraduate conversion programs a few years ago. "It's now important to complete the Master of Technology, which is a three-year, part-time program, if people want to achieve professional-level accreditation with the Australian Computer Society," Swinburne's Grant says.

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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.

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What's Popular

According to UNSW's Martin internetworking and the e-commerce majors are "especially popular". "The former with future network engineers, telecommunication and network software developers, or network administrators, and the latter with practising or new IT professionals who plan to develop and manage enterprise applications," he says.

"The database major is the natural choice for students who want to work in large organizations with significant management needs (financial institutions, telecommunication companies, manufacturing enterprises and government departments). The bioinformatics major attracts students who are interested in applying computer science and engineering techniques to problems in the life sciences, and are employed by biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, medical research institutes and research hospitals.

"The autonomous systems and knowledge systems and data mining majors are quite research oriented, but are also of interest to students who wish to work in companies that make ready use of automation, [such as] entertainment companies," Martin says.

Career Impact

So what benefit can completing such courses have on the career of an IT professional?

Postgrad courses are particularly beneficial to IT workers who need to learn about a specific area they have not been exposed to in their undergrad curriculum, or who want to learn about the latest fundamental technological developments.

"They can then apply techniques they were not aware of to solve challenging problems, or even think of tackling new problems and create new products," UNSW's Martin says.

"Ultimately, from a human psychology point of view, being formally enrolled in a program tends to generate a greater commitment, and that helps you stick with things when the pressure gets intense and seems to be coming at you from all sides," claims Swinburne's Grant.

"Developing that knowledge - gaining new skills and developing your conceptual capabilities - certainly commends people to employers and opens up avenues for advancement, especially right now when there are shortages in the industry and organizations are really looking for people who are willing to rise to the opportunity and fill the crucial positions that are currently vacant."

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Why do Postgraduate Study?

"Personally, I am not focused solely on attracting people into long-term masters courses," says Doug Grant, Dean of the Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies at Swinburne University of Technology.

Instead, Grant claims smart educational institutions are more interested in talking with individual students about what their needs are and finding the particular approach to postgraduate education that best suits them.

"Whether it is certification, a master's or something in between, what we want to do is to be customer focused," he says.

According to Grant, the chief arguments in favour of postgraduate study are:

• You have the opportunity to get a broader conceptual understanding of the discipline that you're studying. And laying that on top of an undergraduate level degree can help you move toward being an expert practitioner or a manager of expert practitioners
• Postgraduate education gives you a chance to study deeply in a particular area, with good conceptual training that lets you reach a more advanced level of understanding.
• There are many employers out there who prefer people who have the more traditional, formal credentials, particularly if they expect to move into senior positions.