Good university programs should not only prepare candidates who enrol in them for their chosen career, but also attract the best and brightest into that particular field. 

I do not think that today’s IT degrees adequately do that. 

It is my observation, that the mindset of 'IT = programming' is still alive and well in many programs -  Creating the perception outside the industry is to take an IT degree creates a transformation from a school leaver to an IT nerd with the pocket protector issued on completion. 

In working with many graduates, and hiring for a graduate program, apart from a knowledge of programming, and related technologies (such as networking, databases etc), there were few candidates who had a good knowledge of what ITSM really is, or the different careers it can offer. I don’t think this is the fault of the students, I think it’s that the generalist approach to IT education is letting them down. I have seen some schools that do offer more specialised programmes, but these seem to be in the minority. 

So what should change?

I think programming needs to be considered as a specialized discipline and not a mandatory part of an IT degree. Even so called IT/Business degrees are still often just a mix and match of a general business degree and some programming classes, and I just do think this is enough. 

I would like to see more cases of industry participation in these degrees. Where students can spend time working on assignments at various companies. And I would also like to see much more emphasis on problem solving skills and an understanding of business. More mechanical skills such as how to set up a database can be taught in a training class later, if the candidate has good problem solving skills. The business side is so important because all IT is driven to support some business need and there are too many people in the industry today who think of these system only in technical terms and not what purpose they have or why they were created in the first place. 

For example, I think the following would provide a good grounding for the new IT practitioner:

• Business Analysis Skills – understanding how to apply IT to business problems
• Problem Solving Skills – Basic problem solving skills are highly underrated and all the technical knowledge in the world is useless if it cannot be applied in the real world.
• Industry Knowledge – What is the industry really like? What careers are available? What are the different fields? What are some areas of further study and research?
• General Business Skills – How businesses work – not specialized skills like Accounting but more generalized skills
• General Law skills – Basic understanding of contract, copyright, corporate law
• Interpersonal Skills – Teamwork, Interviewing, Dispute resolution
• General Technical Grounding – The focus here is on technology and how it is applied to solve problems, innovation and less on rote learning a particular skill

There are many others, but essentially my point here is that these sort of skills would be far more useful – a good grounding here enables the graduate to easily pick up the more specific skills when and if he/she needs them, instead of being like most graduates and forgetting them 2-3 years after graduation.