By Paul Nowell
In 2011, Dice.com, a
leading career website
for technology professionals, issued a report which concluded
the United States had a pressing need for more skilled workers to
meet the growing demand for technology
professionals.
Recently, Dice issued a follow-up report
showing the demand for skilled computer graduates had indeed resulted in large increases
in the number of new grads in the field.
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| Dean Yi Deng |
How does this relate to UNC Charlotte? Read the analysis of Yi Deng, dean of UNC
Charlotte’s College of Computing and Informatics. In fact, Deng was the first
academician quoted by the website in the follow-up report.
In an interview with Dice, Deng noted that UNC Charlotte has
ascended quickly in the fierce competition to produce a number of talented
computer graduates. The effort includes high-profile universities such as Duke
and UNC Chapel Hill in North Carolina, and nationally, institutions such as the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon.
UNC Charlotte’s number of IT
undergraduates earning bachelor’s degrees recently spiked 41 percent year over
year, said Deng, who attributed the huge surge to a concerted effort to grow
the size of the college to meet an increased demand for IT talent from the
private sector and government.
It’s another example of how
North Carolina’s urban research university is gearing its curriculum to meet
the needs of the private sector and government. The students get a
comprehensive education and graduate with relevant skills that get them high-wage
jobs that need to be filled in 2014 and beyond.
As Deng described it, the growth
in tech jobs isn’t likely to end any time in the near future, in large part
because of what he describes as “major structural changes” not only within
tech, but within the American workplace at large.
“If you look back a couple
decades, IT was pretty much a vertical industry driven by players from IBM to
Microsoft to Google and so forth,” Deng told Dice. “If you look at the industry
now … I think it’s very fair to say that every industry has become an IT
industry.”
Deng says the growth is the
culmination of strategic planning to meet what the college saw as a f need for
more tech-skilled professionals at both undergraduate and graduate levels, with
a variety of interests and abilities.
“We’re doing this with very
close consultation with a number of industries,” he told Dice. “Our view, in
terms of education, is that you’ve got to be market driven. You don’t want to
create a degree way ahead of industry. In other words, you don’t want to
graduate people when nobody is ready to hire them.
“On the other hand, you do want
to stay at the front curve of industry changes, and meet the talent demands.”
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Paul Nowell is media relations manager in the Office of Public Relations.
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