Balancing software engineering education and industrial needs

In the world of information and communications technologies the demand for professionals with software engineering skills grows at an exponential rate. On this ground, we have conducted a study to help both academia and the software industry form a picture of the relationship between the competences of recent graduates of undergraduate and graduate software engineering programmes and the tasks that these professionals are to perform as part of their jobs in industry. Thanks to this study, academia will be able to observe which skills demanded by industry the software engineering curricula do or do not cater for, and industry will be able to ascertain which tasks a recent software engineering programme graduate is well qualified to perform. The study focuses on the software engineering knowledge guidelines provided in SE2004 and GSwE2009, and the job profiles identified by Career Space.

► SE2004 and GSwE2009 core knowledge versus Career Space 2001.
► Software development industry profiles are not covered by SE2004 and GSwE2009.
► The biggest gap is found in the IT Business Consultancy profile.
► Academics can use these results to develop SE curricula to fit specific profiles.
► Industry can find out about the core knowledge of their potential employees.