Reshaping higher education: Producing T-shaped Computing professionals

Input from employer groups consistently shows that people skills are often lacking in new computing graduates. Underdeveloped communication, negotiation and collaboration skills reduce an organization’s capacity to apply specialist skills and knowledge to solve problems and exploit opportunities creatively. Graduates must also be independent learners and be able to adapt as technologies and applications continually and quickly change. Underpinning job roles are an increasing number of computing specialties and understanding of how these apply in a range of application domains. Innovation stems from not only an understanding of computing specialties, but its integration with other specialties as Computing + X, or X + Computing. The challenge for higher education is to effectively include these people skills as well as to prepare graduates for expanding numbers of roles that each have their own requirements around breadth and depth of knowledge and skills. In this paper, we call for an approach to computing education which unifies all the computing disciplines. We introduce our definition of a T-Shaped Computing Professional based on SFIA skills and Bloom’s taxonomy levels of difficulty and apply this to the ever-changing role of computing education particularly for accreditation and assessment of life-long learning and transferable skills.