Towards a profound sense of professionalism - teaching ethics to IT and Business University students

The boom in technology has taken over every sector of the private and public life. From hospitals to banks, military to schools and even stores, all indulge in the use of some form of technology. A by-product of this boom has been the immense amount of data that is divulged to strangers every single day. So how do customers of these services know that the people, who are serving them and taking down their personal data at a daily basis, have the sense of professionalism to ensure privacy and security? How do organizations ensure they are hiring the people with the ability to respect and maintain this privacy? In doing so, how do mangers of these organizations ensure they do not cross the line themselves while using surveillance technology to monitor their own employees? In this paper, we discuss a survey study that clearly demonstrates how ethics education leads to a profound sense of professionalism, a building block in ensuring employees and managers have the knowledge and understanding to execute confidentiality or scrutiny without compromising privacy or security. We end this paper by identifying topics that, we believe, should be taught in an ethics course to IT and business university students based on the experience of the first author to help shape future employees and managers with a profound sense of professionalism