Putting PS Into IS: Developing Professional Skills And Enhancing Employability Through Curriculum Initiatives In Information Systems

Debate about the content of Information Systems (IS) in undergraduate courses often involves balancing the individual skills-based components within a degree, the broader discipline-specific knowledge required and more generic IS skills. Curriculum discussions invariably concern the use of specific software packages, programming languages or development methodologies and seek to answer the question of how to prepare students for the exponential rate of technological change that make the IS profession both exciting and challenging. In recent times, another distinctive set of skills has dominated curriculum discussion – Professional Skills. The need for profession-specific employability skills has been influenced by changing funding models of the Commonwealth government to Australian universities. Australian universities are committed to both developing graduate capabilities and enhancing graduate transition to work and curriculum aims to reflect those aims. This paper reports on curriculum initiatives within the Bachelor of Business (Information Systems) at Victoria University, Melbourne, and focuses on one mandatory unit of study, BCO 1102 Information Systems for Business, to examine strategies for developing Professional Skills for IS students. The paper draws on student evaluations of the unit’s efforts to develop communication and team skills and concludes with some suggestions for future directions