A recent conversation with a lecturer at a well-respected University had me a bit confused.

At the moment The IT world is diversifying and devolving into it component parts. Technology is creating a large number of niche areas within the ICT arena.

As IT guru’s, We can no longer be a jack of all trades and masters of none. We have to be masters of a specific genre in the IT world. You need different skill sets to write apps, to manage networks, to be a white hat hacker or to program a switch or router. Each of these areas alone have their own idiosyncrasies, never mind the other areas of expertise that is needed in today’s world to make the technology work to the level that it needs to.

So going back to my conversation. Being at the cutting edge of academia, their IT graduates should be top of the line. The problem is that if they are top of the line why would not the lessons be based in modern technology. They should be writing scripts and applications in rails, python, PHP or dot net. We recently had a student from this same university that did not know any of them.

Is this a failing in the education system or just laziness in the industry?

Roger Smith is the CEO of R & I ICT Consulting Services, Amazon #1 selling author on Cybercrime, author of the Digital Security Toolbox and author of the SME Digital Security Framework.   He is a Speaker, Author, Teacher and educator on cybercrime and how to protect yourself from the digital world.