CoSkiD Introduction

Current Situation

In the ICT sector, ICT skills and employment continue to be major issues, owing to growth and change in the numbers and characteristics of ICT workers and concerns about possible skill mismatches in ICT-related jobs. Demographic and education trends (such as ageing populations and rising overall attainment levels) are substantially altering the size and composition of the workforce. Apart from these general trends affecting IT work and IT workers, the rapid growth of new segments of ICT sector, such as e-commerce, the Internet, and IT services has created new types of jobs requiring new skills and increases the demand of IT Professionals.

A simple categorization of characteristic of different IT skills sets:-

• Professional IT skills: ability to use advanced IT tools and/or to develop, repair or create them.
• Applied IT skills: ability to apply simple IT tools in general workforce setting (non-IT jobs).
• Basic IT skills or “IT Literacy”: ability to use IT for basic tasks and as a tool for learning.

With so many different segments available in ICT sector, IT institutions have played a great role in providing ICT graduates a good amount of basic IT skills and theory to ensure the graduates have the ability to compete in the competitive market. However, the problems arise across the economy when there are too many supplies of Basic IT skills worker and Applied IT skills worker, and on the other hand a great demand in professional IT skills worker. If this problem persists, the fresh graduates would face the unemployment risk, and on the other hand, there is a shortage of IT Professionals.

In summary, the issues that we are facing are:-

1. Professional IT skill worker is in great demand.
2. Basic IT skills and Applied IT skills worker are facing unemployment risk.
3. Rapid growth ICT technology/tools have created a lot of new types of jobs requiring new skills which are not included in institution’s course material.
4. Companies have to spend a great amount of fund to train graduates so that they are capable in their job scope which requires a totally new skill.
5. IT institution is not able to include all of the advanced/new skills into the course material as it will incur higher cost (time and money).

Proposed Project

CoSkiD is a commercial skill development program cum public community which allows undergraduates to participate in learning and experiencing by attending various events that available to the member of the community. It helps undergraduates to get hands-on practices and stucked up with industry knowledge on new technologies available and gain experience in the environment of real commercial project development. Besides, undergraduate who participates in the program will gain the following benefits:-

• IT Skill Training
• Invited to attend the presentation by experienced developer
• A member of the community
• Technical guidance/supervision in assigned project
• Accumulative contribution will be recorded as a remark and recognition in the individual profile.

Beside the benefits mentioned above, the essential of this program is to provide a real commercial project development environment to the undergraduates; allows them to experience the processes throughout the whole project development phase. The undergraduates will be placed in teams and tasks are assigned to each of the team to be executed. One project may consist of a few teams with different job scopes, thus they are required to work together as a project team to complete the whole project. In addition, the undergraduate will be rotated among teams as this is how they are trained to experience every job scope and learn the skills set required.

Below is a list of common job scopes available in CoSkiD:-

1. Project Management
2. System Analysis
3. System Design
4. System Implementation
5. System Test
6. Research and Development

Some of the job scopes may require prerequisites as it depends on the performance and personality of each individual in the program. However, the main objective of CoSkiD is to allow the undergraduates to learn as much as skills set available in the program and packed up with required knowledge, so that they are well-prepared and have better opportunity when they venture into the real industry.