Abstract:

The challenge to find a job for our graduates after they finish their studies in specialised fields like Cybersecurity, despite of the demand in most IT fields, is large. Even for entry-level positions candidates may require having prior experience in the field.

Industry may have limited resources to train the recently appointed employees, and for that, tertiary education providers must collaborate with industry in programme development and delivery, particularly for highly specialised and demanding subjects. This paper shows the importance of collaboration between academics and industry to increase the employability chances of recent graduates in the job market.

The paper aims to introduce a collaborative framework between academia and industry that can be used at every stage of the programme development, its delivery, and beyond. The framework describes four stages: pre-development, development, delivery and post-delivery. It starts with the qualification preparation based on market needs in the pre-development stage, proposes ways on how to collaborate with industry during the development and delivery stages, and feeds back from the post-delivery stage to the programmer development and delivery for continuous refinement. The proposed framework will serve as a guideline for tertiary education providers as they develop their programme, aiming to produce work ready graduates.

The New Zealand Diploma in Cybersecurity, offered at Unitec New Zealand since 2020, is used as a case study to directly implement the proposed framework. We surveyed the graduates from 2020 to 2023 to gather information regarding their current employment status and whether the skills acquired during their studies were relevant in their current jobs. We have also surveyed employers to have their feedback about the capabilities of our graduates and the relevance of the skills they have acquired as part of their programme of study.

The 87.7% of graduates have indicated in the Graduates Survey that they can use the skills outlined in the Cybersecurity qualification, and 93.8% indicated that skills gained from the qualification are relevant to their work. Employers in their survey also stated that the graduates can use the skills and those skill are relevant to their work.

The numbers above indicated that by following the proposed framework of academy-industry collaboration the graduate will be equipped with the skills needed by the industry to start working on an entry-level job, even in a specialised field like cybersecurity.

Keywords:

Skills gaps, Academic-industry collaboration, Graduates employability.