Development of professional and soft skills of future it specialists in cooperation with leading it companies

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DEVELOPMENT OF PROFESSIONAL AND SOFT SKILLS OF FUTURE IT SPECIALISTS IN COOPERATION WITH LEADING IT COMPANIES

Olena G. Glazunova

Tetiana V. Voloshyna

Nataliia Dorosh

1. INTRODUCTION

Training of IT-professionals for IT-industry is a rather complicated process under the conditions of dynamic changes in the field of IT-products. Universities face problems of technological lag behind the level of the development of IT-industry overall, access to new technologies, the necessity of continuous improvement of curricula and training programs.

The problem statement. The problem of technological universities lagging behind the level of development of the IT-industry can be solved only on condition that technological IT companies actively participate in training of future IT-professionals. Only cooperation between IT-companies and IT-departments can provide effective training of future IT- professionals. Universities require access to new technologies in order to support students and teachers of STEM-faculties, so that they would keep up with the level of technology development.

IT-companies through their cooperation with universities have the opportunity to distribute their products among future IT-professionals, giving their technologies for free to Universities, generating educational and instructional materials for studies, creating a cloud environment to enable access to technologies with the ability to gain practical skills using them. In addition, a considerable number of companies are introducing the certification process for their own technologies, e.g. Microsoft, Cisco, 1C.

The problem of the quality of training and future employment of IT graduates is the main challenge of STEM education nowadays.

Analysis of recent studies and publications. The forms of cooperation between IT- companies and universities are quite diverse and aimed at the improvement of quality of IT education.

Both foreign and domestic scientists were involved in the study of organizational and methodological aspects of the cooperation between IT companies and universities. In particular, Y. Kryvoruchko [1] provided examples and possibilities of evaluating the effectiveness of partnerships with business partners, I. Kondratenko [2] defined the peculiarities of university cooperation in the field of information technology, H. Gogl, K. Shedler [3] conducted an analysis of cooperation between companies and universities in Europe.

Formalized models of University-Business Cooperation (UBC) have been proposed, and the first experience of such cooperation has been analyzed by V.C. Khnbarchenko, V.V. Sklar [4], [5].

In particular, the authors have identified the following main forms of cooperation between universities and business: assistance in the organization of on-the-job training, involvement of students in the work at enterprises, individual selection of young professionals on the request of an enterprise, concluding agreements on target training of IT-specialists, presentation of enterprises at universities, participation of enterprises' specialists in academic process.

StepanVeselovsky, director of the Lviv IT Cluster notices that the IT-industry requires high quality education. The creation of IoT study programs in Lviv Polytechnic University and Data Science study programs at Ukrainian Catholic University have become the evidence of this. The launched innovative study programs will determine the development of IT in the near future and will dictate the trends to other educators [6].

In December 2015 the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine (hereinafter referred to as NULES) and "Procom" company created a joint training lab "Competence center of 1C" to provide students with practical experience in real IT- projects participation and additional certificates confirming their qualification according to the selected direction which will further their employment opportunities [7].

In Lviv among the examples of cooperation between schools and real businesses there are some projects of Lviv cluster of IT and business services (Lviv IT-BPO Cluster) founded by leading companies in the field of Information Technology and Business Process Outsourcing, that together took the initiative of making systemic changes in the business environment of the city [8].

In 2012 the cluster supported the setting-up of programming laboratories for embedded and mobile platforms at the Software Department of the Institute of Computer Science and Informatics of the National University "Lviv Polytechnic".

The creation of Master program "Internet of Things" is a joint project of the Lviv Polytechnic and Lviv IT Cluster within the "IT Expert" project, the aim of which is to attract IT specialists to the training process as consultants [9].

Karazin Kharkiv National University (hereinafter referred to as KNU) is developing the curriculum for training of specialists in biostatistics (processing of large data obtained in clinical research), which is the only program in Eastern Europe of its kind where students have the opportunity to develop their skills in applied statistics and study the clinical SAS- programming on the real data, etc.

The program was developed in collaboration with Experis and Intego Group and it is available for Master students of both KNU and other Kharkiv universities - the courses are in overall university schedule.

Most of the classes and meetings with guest speakers are held in English, all training materials are also available in English. Specialists of Experis and Intego Group are the curators of students during team projects.

At the end of the program, graduates receive not only the University diploma, but are also awarded a certificate of the Center for Biostatistical Programming. For the best students there is also a possibility to get a professional certificate of basic programming SAS, to participate in paid internships in the company and get a job as Clinical SAS Programmer.

Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics has introduced a dual education system, with 3rd year-students working in partner companies. They study two days per week, Monday and Saturday, and are engaged in self-study. And the other 4 days a week students will work. Samsung Electronics actively cooperates with Kharkiv National University of Radioelectronics (KNURE) creating joint scientific and commercial projects, developing new educational disciplines [10].

In April 2016 within the socio-educational program "LIFECELL universities", aimed at the improvement of practical skills of students in telecom-specialities, operator Telecom LIFECELL opened a special laboratory at the Institute of Telecommunication Systems in the National Technical University of Ukraine "Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute" [7].

In September 2016 the administration of Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University signed a cooperation agreement with IT-company AMC Bridge. AMC Bridge is a famous company with high demands to engineering training disciplines for technicians and system analysts. Such specialists are trained at the university in the majors "Computer Science", "Computer engineering" and "Software Engineering". University faculty will be able to get a real job experience in the company and share new experiences in the classroom. Students will also have practical training in AMC Bridge [11].

Such global companies - producers of IT products as Cisco and Microsoft open wide opportunities for universities. Companies of such level create their own academic clouds that include online courses, cloud services to access the practical use of the latest developments and tools for organization of training in their own technologies [12, 13, 14, 15].

The article's goal. The purpose of the article is to analyze the ways of cooperation between universities and IT companies, to justify the model of integrating resources and services of IT companies in the e-learning environment, to investigate the effect of using external resources and services for the development of professional and soft skills of future IT-professionals.

2. THE THEORETICAL BACKGROUNDS

Having analysed forms and ways of cooperation between Universities and IT companies we are able to summarize such cooperation (fig. 1.)

Review of sources on the topic of research of cooperation between universities and IT companies shows that the quality of IT education cannot be separated from the IT business. STEM-faculty training specialists for work in the IT-industry creates academic training programs based on the requirements for the competences of future specialists made by experts in the IT industry.

IT-industry representatives who are interested in advancing their own technologies should provide access to their technologies for educational institutions and provide teachers of educational institutions with resources and services, create conditions for the professional development of teachers. Only in such case IT education will be successful.

In terms of cooperation with Universities Microsoft offers full support of technologies being developed for distribution among users. Most developed technologies are accompanied by online course or Microsoft Virtual Academy or Imagine Academy, cloud platform forstudying technologies such as O365, Azure and the ability to go through the MOS certification lines, MCE, MTA.

In addition, Microsoft provides many other resources to support its own technologies that envisage for every developed IT product the creation of platform for access to this product, online courses for studying the features of the product and the opportunity of professional cert Microsoft is one of a few companies that offer free academic resources and services for training. With the help of these resources it is possible to gain new knowledge and skills required also for career promotions.

In particular, Microsoft provides an opportunity to study such technologies as databases, programming, virtualization, duplication, server technology for training students in the IT profession.

To explore each technology Microsoft offers training resources in the form of online courses, software and cloud environment that provide practical use of software such as virtual machines - Azure Virtual Machines.

At the same time, Microsoft educational policy is to attract as many teachers of secondary, vocational and higher education institutions as it can to study modern educational technologies based on the use of ICT in education.

Microsoft resources such as: Imagine Academy, Virtual Academy, Channel9, Educator Community, Developer Network include online courses, informative educational materials for different types of users from beginners to professional software developers.

Services O365, Azure, Imagine, CodePlex and others serve as modern tools of working with the latest versions of software, software development, as well as tools of co-work with documents, communications, creation of an educational e-environment.

In March 2016 NULES of Ukraine and Microsoft Ukraine signed an educational volume licensing Microsoft agreement and Microsoft Imagine Academy.

Thanks to this international program the gained knowledge and skills allow teachers and students to conduct certification on three lines of professional development: Microsoft Office Specialist (MOS) - getting skills in Microsoft Office; Microsoft Technology Associate (MTA) - understanding the basic technological concepts in the sphere of the development of software and information technologies; Microsoft Certified Educator (MCE) - technical literacy of a teacher.

Having obtained Microsoft certification students will be able to demonstrate their knowledge and ability to use new technologies; realistically assess their knowledge and be confident in it; achieve greater success in an effort to get higher education or get a job; gain recognition among colleagues and employers and a clear advantage in competitive labor market; plan in-service education to obtain knowledge of Microsoft on a higher level.

Microsoft has developed the program called Microsoft Imagine, which provides students with free access to design tools and software development. Through this program, students have access to resources that provide practical work and help master their skills to the level required today on labor market.

Universities across Ukraine have established over 40 IT Academies (Microsoft Imagine).

3. THE RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The experiment of using Microsoft academic resources and services has been running for 2 years in NULES. The main results of collaboration lie in systematic work with the resources and services available through academic initiatives of Microsoft with the aim to develop professional and soft skills of future IT-professionals in the following areas:integration of academic resources in the curricula, the use of services for organizing the academic process, professional development of academic faculty, promotion of up-to-date technologies in seminars and trainings by Microsoft trainers, professional certification programs for teachers and students (fig.3).

The pedagogical experiment of integration of Microsoft academic resources into academic disciplines for training IT specialists was conducted by using online courses of Imagine Academy and Virtual Academy as necessary during the study of specified disciplines.

In NULES of Ukraine some online courses of Imagine Academy are integrated into academic disciplines studied by students of different majors. In particular, for students majoring in IT such disciplines as "Information Technology", "Programming", "Organization Database" were supplemented with individual tasks for self-study on Imagine Academy online courses (https://imagineacademy.microsoft.com/?whr=default).

Within the study of various disciplines and practical training, a teacher makes the curriculum in the academy which consists of a set of online courses. Students take these online courses during laboratory and independent works planned for the relevant discipline. The Academy Administrator creates curricula for groups of students, based on the lecturer's formal request, makes reports.

The evaluation system in the university involves the accumulation system of scores for various activities. Therefore, mastering these online courses within the discipline is assessed with a certain number of points and is obligatory for students. It is also possible for students themselves to choose courses in the academy and study without any additional motivation from the teacher.

The study of a module dedicated to Excel spreadsheet consists of 8 laboratory works and independent work within the course "Information Technology”. Course content is presented in the form of screen of eLearning course based on Moodle platform in the discipline "Information Technology" (fig. 5).

Independent work of students within the module includes doing the MIA courses «Get Started with Microsoft Excel 2016» and «Get Productive with Microsoft Excel 2016" (fig. 6), which are evaluated at 10 points within 100 scores for a module. Each student gets a certificate after completing the course.

In order to substantiate the impact of using the online courses of Microsoft Imagine Academy on the quality of training of future professionals the hypotheses H₀ and H₁were checked.

The null hypothesis H0 proves that training of future IT professionals in the discipline "Information technology" using e-training course (ETC) and Microsoft Imagine Academy does not contribute to their progress. The alternative hypothesis H1proves that training of future IT professionals in the discipline "Information technology" in accordance with the developed methods of using e-training course (ETC) and Microsoft Imagine Academy contributes to their progress.

The study of a module dedicated to Excel spreadsheet in the experimental groups was carried out according to the developed methods of integration of Microsoft Imagine Academy online courses into academic discipline, and in control groups-according to the traditional methods.

After completing the study of the module, the academic performance was measured by the results of tasks control, within 100-point scale.

Table 1. The results of knowledge control in academic groups