definition for: #cioacademy

Software Skills in a Knowledge Economy Software skills are the foundation to a knowledge intensive economy. More and more IT professionals are trying to get away with less technical skills only to find they are unable to produce or be able to operate at a higher level of system thinking. While people skills are as essential, the lack of technical skills is increasingly becoming a problem. Industry Needs to Define the Entry Level Requirements It is our belief that all Information Technology professionals should build their foundation through learning technical skills. Software programming and software skills are essential to establishing a competitive society of highly skilled technology professionals. Interns need to build up their portfolio of project work. Industry needs to define their requirements at the entry level and ensure that software skills remains a focus. Industry Must Address the Gap Academics are debating issues like certification as if it is their responsibility to create the professional. The ongoing debates about methodologies and which approach is best is irrelevant. The reason why there is no alignment between academia and industry is because industry and the profession have not created an entry exam or requirement for proven experience that defines a professional. The absence of this means that there is no standard or benchmark that university and FTE colleges are expected to work towards. If a university program consistently produced potential doctors, accountants, architects, engineers and lawyers that failed their professional entry exams, would they not be forced to re-evaluate their program? But for IT professionals there is no such entry exam or entry point. A Program and Framework for Creating Software and IT Professionals The focus of the CIO Academy is not on creating more people who are trained to be unemployed. Our approach is on creating opportunities to fail, to gain experience, to work on projects and to build scalable enterprises that can generate more work opportunities. Our aim is not to measure how many have been trained but to ensure that we retain the invest in training by helping to guide aspiring professionals through their first 3 years entry into the market. We do this by working with the right partners who understand what it takes to create the pathways for unemployed youths from poorer communities to rise out of poverty.