 |
|
Ghazala Iffat (l) with tic’s Teaching and Learning Fellow, Mike Wilkes
|
Ghazala polishes IT skills to shine at tic
Four out of five organisations reported trouble in filling vacancies, due to the UK’s skills gap, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s (CIPD) annual Recruitment, Retention and Turnover Survey. Despite the economic slowdown, the survey’s findings showed employers feeling the effects of a ‘skills crunch’ so severe even a ‘credit crunch’ driven increase in labour-supply may not begin to fill the gap.
Government-sponsored agency, e-Skills, also recently identified a decline in the availability of IT graduates, despite predictions of substantial growth in demand for IT and telecoms skills. Birmingham City University’s Technology Innovation Centre (tic), is playing a significant role in educating such specialists. Its current student intake for 2008/9 is giving every indication of yet another significant year-on-year improvement. tic graduates will be prepared to enter a market forecast to need an additional 140,000 Information and Communications Technology (ICT) professionals to keep pace with demand.
Exemplifying the high standard of Birmingham City University’s ICT graduates, Ghazala Iffat has been awarded tic’s Rowlinson Scholarship. This is presented to the student from a Birmingham school who has scored the highest average mark in their year. With three ‘A’ levels gained at Joseph Chamberlain Sixth Form College, Ghazala joined the BSc in Information and Communications Technology course in 2006. This comprises a diverse programme with content varying from graphic design to computer networking and programming. tic course director, Ian Stewart, comments: “It can be a challenge to master the course’s diversity, but Ghazala is doing just that as her excellent results show.”
Ghazala’s interest in Information Technology, has been much inspired through her sister’s teacher training which showed her the ever widening range of purposes that IT can be used for. Ghazala puts the secret of her success down to tic’s helpful lecturers and support from her friends on her course. She too now has ambitions to teach when she graduates in 2009.
Birmingham City University’s tic-based ICT-teaching credentials reside in its established status as one of Cisco Systems’ leading international training academies and as a major UK university-based Microsoft academy. tic is also the first UK-university to achieve Certified Partner status in Microsoft’s Partner Programme. Its ICT strengths are helping both students and businesses explore the multiple new virtual technologies and skills which are globally transforming business.
Anyone wishing to find out more about Birmingham City University's range of technology and engineering courses should phone 0121 331 6400 or e-mail course.enquiries@tic.ac.uk
|
:: News Archive ::
|
