COVERING DEMANDS IN JAVA EMPLOYABILITY

Industry-university collaboration provides an excellent framework to carry out applied research and develop cutting-edge technologies to solve problems in the industry context. Companies benefit from universities accessing to the latest scientific advancements, while universities obtain industry funding and work on practical research problems of industrial interest.
A report by ADECCO, predicted that Java programmer was one of the professionals more sought by IT consulting companies and the computing industry in 2008. The Spanish newspaper El País reported at the beginning of 2008 that programmer-analyst will be one of the most valuable profiles sought by the Spanish companies.
Big software companies are aware of the need of professional with experience in Java technology are highly demanded and offer industry-recognized worldwide programs that focus on software application development and enterprise architecture.
This paper reports the motivation and evaluation of a collaboration carried out to improve education university tied to industry needs. Our motivation is driven by the following needs:
Lack of regulated teaching in Java programming in Computer Sciences degree.
Industrialists are seeking professionals with Java skills.
There are several Java educational programs but few of them take into consideration industry needs.
Five courses are offered:
Introductory Java. This course introduces the syntax of the language and how object oriented programming is supported in Java.
Advanced Java. GUI, concurrent programming, networking and applets.
Java 2 Enterprise Edition programming. Data base accessing, Servlet and JSP programming.
Developing Enterprise software with Java and XML. XML technology and Java to develop enterprise software.
Java 2 Mobile Edition programming. The basic APIs in Java Mobile are introduced in this course and some widespread technology as Bluetooth.
The characteristics are:
Incremental process of learning. In order to see all aspects of the language a common project is developed all course long.
Cross-course project teaching. When it is possible, the same project is continuously develop in more than one course.
Teamworking. Work in groups of two or three allow students to develop the skills employers consider important in the like communication, collaboration, extreme programming, responsibility, etc.
Each session lasts four hours. There in so difference between lectures and practical. Some topics are introduced and then the students are asked to write some code using the subject.
Course curricula in software engineering and programming techniques must refresh its contents with the new trends and advances in technology. It is necessary to obtain feedback from all participants involved in these courses to evaluate periodically the effectiveness of the work.
Monitoring job entry. This allows us to measure and review the levels of student engagement in the professional market.
Permanent dialogue with Industry. We organize annually a two-day forum named “Encuentros de programadores Java” (http://encuentrosjava.uji.es) to bring together students and professionals in the context of Java technology.
We have detected some problems:
Lack of motivation from industry. Companies expect students develop their work without consideration for students' education or development.
Students do not properly work in groups.
Students gaining experience of the problems surrounding large-scale development.