Abstract:

There is an increased demand to fill in Information Technology positions in the industry with highly trained personnel and companies are hiring in great demand new college graduates form Computer Science, Information Technology, and Software Engineering fields. However, the position the industry requires demand knowledge and competence in new technologies that currently are not necessarily part of the curricula in colleges and universities. This is in part because the technology changes so fast and it is hard to adapt programs of study to a particular technology that may change in a short period (i.e., four or five years, even shorter). And secondly, colleges are focused on forming students in an integral way including hard technical but fundamental skills giving them solid basis in their field of study. Colleges and universities also include in their programs of study ethics and soft skills for the professional life.

Some of the new technologies that recruiters have mentioned us, they would like to see in our recent graduates are knowledge and skills on Machine Learning, Tableau and Microsoft Power Builder for data visualization, AI tools such as Chat-GPT and how to apply it to the organization, DevOps (integrated process between development and operations groups for continuous integration and continuous delivery CI/CD) in software development, use of Cloud Services and Cloud Native Technologies such as microservices, container orchestrators, and auto scaling services.

In our institution we have started to incorporate professional certifications offered by leading companies in the technologies mentioned above as part of our IT related courses including the following “Fundamentals of Database Systems”, “Data Analytics for Decision Making”, and ”Capstone Project for Software Engineers”. The professional certifications we have incorporated have changed over the time, mainly due to the availability of the academic initiatives that each of the leading companies offer to universities and colleges. We have used the materials and certification available at the IBM Bluemix Academic Program, AWS (Amazon Web Services) Academy, Microsoft Academic Initiative, Oracle Academy and Oracle University Certifications. One draw back is that these programs are not always free, some of the offer a basic training and certification but not the advanced courses, others offer most of the material and training without cost, but students must pay for the exam to get the certification, most recently we have been using Oracle certificates because they offer a wide range of free training and certifications.

One of the challenges we encountered was to carefully select which certification we will be incorporating at what level the material should be covered and who will be the expert to solve questions (unfortunately professor are not expert in every single new technology).Another challenge is to motivate students to take the exams for getting their professional certifications, usually students see this as extra work in class or not worth the effort.

In this paper we present the strategy and share our experience to adapting new technologies in the classroom by means of including professional certificates, what has worked and what has not, and the results we have obtained.

Keywords:

Information Technology, Professional Certifications, New Technologies.