Working in IT: upskill for the future | with the University of Essex

In this episode, Dr Sharon Sibanda joins me to talk about the MSc Enterprise IT Management - a part time, online course available from the University of Essex. She discusses their holistic approach to assessment, staying ahead of the technological curve,  and why now - more than ever - is the time to get into IT

Participants

In order of first appearance:

• Emily Slade - podcast producer and host, Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ»ÆƬ
• Dr Sharon Sibanda - head of computing, Kaplan open learning with the University of Essex online

Transcript

Emily Slade: Hello, I'm Emily and welcome to Future You, the podcast from graduate careers experts Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ»ÆƬ. Each week we’ll be diving into a postgraduate course, learning about a job role, or answering your burning career questions. So whether you’re recently graduated, stuck in a career rut, or just curious about what else is out there, we’ll have invaluable insights from industry professionals, career advisors and students. Wherever you are on your career journey, we’ll help you take the next steps towards future you.

In this episode Dr Sharon Sibanda joins me to talk about the MSc Enterprise IT Management part time, online course available from the University of Essex. She discusses their holistic approach to assessment, staying ahead of the technological curve and why now more than even, is the time to get into IT.

Sharon Sibanda: Hi, I'm Sharon Sibanda, I'm head of computing at Kaplan open learning with the University of Essex online. And I'm here today to talk about our new exciting program, the MSc in enterprise and IT management.

Emily Slade: Amazing. So to begin with, can you briefly sum up the enterprise IT management course?

Sharon Sibanda: Sure. So the purpose of the course is to really develop student understanding. And that's around maximising business value in IT management practices, and relating them to cybersecurity practice, looking at cloud technologies, as well. And we're targeting various IT experts or those who are interested in getting into it in terms of implementing supporting and sort of managing information technology systems, whether it's in small businesses or larger organisations as well.

Emily Slade: So you briefly talked there about who we're targeting? So who is the ideal student? Do you have to have an undergraduate degree to come on to this course? And do you have to have a background in it?

Sharon Sibanda: You don't have to have a background in it. First of all, because this is a conversion course, conversion Masters course. And so what's great about this is that we understand that some people might be facing redundancy, or change of role where they might need to upskill. So this is a very useful opportunity to take, for example, to get into it by taking this conversion course. So you have two routes, actually, you can either come in with a undergraduate degree, or you can come via the second route, which is around work experience. And for that, you'd need about three years work experience in a relevant it or business environment, and that will be acceptable.

Emily Slade: And what does the lay of the land look like? At the moment? Do you tend to have more people coming up with their undergraduates moving into this? Or do you have people from industries and sectors coming and jumping on this course to expand their own skill sets?

Sharon Sibanda: Yeah, it's a really good question, we have a mix. To be honest, I think there are a few people who do have the kind of background in it, where they perhaps they've done a previous course before, sometimes it's a degree. Other times it's a certificate that they actually have some interest, they've shown some interest in the course other people come in, and they have been maybe traditional infrastructure staff, there have been a data center manager, maybe operations staff, or support staff who want to really upskill and actually get their first formal qualification in it. And so we do have this kind of mix of very experienced, and sometimes maybe less experienced people coming in.

Emily Slade: That's really interesting. And we'll talk about this a bit later. But it is an online course. But is there a way for these different students with all their different backgrounds to sort of come together as a community and learn from each other?

Sharon Sibanda: Yeah, absolutely, we've got a really active student forum. And the computing forum is similar in terms of allowing the students who are taking computing courses to come together, get to know each other, and perhaps, you know, share good practice. And within some of the modules, we also have group work that we do just to encourage that collaboration. So that's also another opportunity to actually get to know other people that you're learning with, perhaps from different parts of the world in a different sector, or applying the particular unit skills, behavior knowledge in a different environment.

Emily Slade: Yeah, that's really exciting. So as we briefly just mentioned, this is an online course. So what resources are available to the students.

Sharon Sibanda: So we have an award winning set of resources, including our online system. So we have a virtual learning environment that will be utilised to deliver the program. So the kinds of eBooks that you would be looking at, you have access to a library, and lots of various interactive activities, such as lecture casts, where you can actually get a really deep dive into a particular topic. And that's quite good, I think, because it's a an interactive way of getting to understand the topic in detail where you have text, video and graphics combined to really ensure that, you know, any kind of learning style is sort of catered for.

Emily Slade: Yeah, absolutely. So on the website, it does say it is a part time course is that across the board, everybody has to study it part time or other options to study it full time.

Sharon Sibanda: Yeah, thank you for that. That's a really good question. There are options to study at full time as it were, by what we would describe as doubling up. So you would probably take on more than one module at a time. And in that way, you shorten the period of time that you would complete. So learners do tend to do that. And as long as there isn't any sort of prerequisite module, so a module that you have to do prior to another one, then that should be fairly straightforward. You would double up all the way through until you get to your dissertation module that you'd need to complete as a separate entity as it worked.

Emily Slade: So I just want to lean into what the course covers a little bit more. We've got here cloud computing, cybersecurity and data science, are you able to just briefly sum up what those things are?

Sharon Sibanda: Okay, so starting with cloud security, that particular module, so Cloud design, and management is the name of the module, it actually is focusing on the latest cloud technologies, and how those can be leveraged at an enterprise level. And so there's aspects such as tools for scripting, how perhaps one can look at implementing these applications. Moving on to into data science, that particular module is focused on business intelligence, and how at the enterprise level data warehouse, for example, and other more recent kinds of data structures that could be utilised can help the organisation to leverage data. And business intelligence is an important way of looking to maximise your data internally, to make it an asset that will actually work for you, and help you to actually plan for the future to maximise a profit and the value that you're trying to give to customers. For cybersecurity, what you're looking at there is to develop your understanding is at the enterprise level, once again, in terms of how you can leverage most recent developments in cyber around AI ops, for example, to actually ensure that your organisation is operating in that secure environment and taking care of the company data, so to speak, and the client data as well. So those are sort of the key areas. And they're really exciting areas to be looking into in this era, I would say this era of AI development, etc. Because there will be aspects of that, that can be looked at from the perspective of the enterprise, and leveraged accordingly. So that's a really exciting time to be looking at these technologies.

Emily Slade: So maybe a little less exciting and more frightening. How will students be assessed?

Sharon Sibanda: Well, actually, I believe we've looked at assessment in a holistic manner. So in that sense, I'm hoping that those who are listening and looking at and reading about this particular program will find that quite useful, we're going to be using a variety of assessment. So we are going to be asking students to look at case studies. But we're also going to look at case studies not only from Eurocentric and kind of first world environments, but also from the global south as well, just to, you know, widen their understanding of the various kinds of contexts that you can actually utilise. So we'll be looking at case study reports and asking learners to complete those, but we're also going to be doing collaborative learning discussions. And that's where you get to maybe in a group or with other with other students, you're commenting and discussing a key topical area, and you're reviewing each other's posts. And a collaborative learning discussion is quite an interesting approach to assessment in the sense that you get to interact with others as part of the assessment, we also do things like presentations, there will be tasks where you will be asked to do up to give us a practical or develop a practical element and artifact, perhaps it could be a coding task, it could be a script that you need to do, it could be a different kind of practical task relevant to that particular module. We also have E portfolios, we think they're really important, because he portfolios can help with understanding your learning journey on a module. And you also need to be reflecting so reflective practice is quite important in computing, reflecting on what has gone well, and what could what could be changed or improved in the future. And that's another assessment method that we utilise. And we do have maybe one or two essays, which is your your typical assessment method where you have to discuss something but as I said, we would lean towards case studies rather than essays in the typical sense. So we've tried to really come up with some varied ways of assessing learners so that they can actually feel that they have different opportunities to showcase their best.

Emily Slade: Yeah, no, that's brilliant. Thank you. So once we've passed all of our assessments with flying colors, what are the career opportunities look like? where can students from this course hope to end up?

Sharon Sibanda: That's a really good question. There are quite a few areas that learners can probably get into thinking about it, you could start off perhaps with the more typical areas, which is IT Service Management, where you could be focused on, you know, staying ahead of the technology curve and deliberative delivering effective IT processes. As part of that you could be into DevOps and perhaps your DevOps engineer or consultant or analyst where you're trying to perhaps automate the software development processes within a company and you're trying to bridge the gap. between development and operations, so you're managing the services, and perhaps you're even running them in a cloud environment. And so as we've been saying cloud operations would be another career opportunity cloud engineer, cloud analyst, etc, that you could get involved. Often, where you'd be exploring a range of cloud computing tools do UI design and data analysis and seeing how to implement these services could also look into digital transformation, that's quite important as well, because of course, with with enterprises, they need to be trans transitioning from perhaps one way of leveraging their value, the value that they're given to customers and moving away from that, and moving towards other ways of providing the same value and enhanced value. So as a digital transformation specialist, you would be the person who'd be at the center of digitising services, looking at digital training and driving improvements, because obviously, transformation comes with understanding people as well as technologies. So in that role, you know, it will be key, and then concerns around risk and governance, that's still an important area, as we always talk about, especially when it comes to cyber risk, for example, it's important to be able to understand how exactly to implement different kinds of frameworks, maintaining compliance, so that, you know, you know, you could play that integral role where you're looking into those specific areas, and making sure that the risk and governance is covered. And finally, generally speaking, maybe Systems Manager as part of just that transformation, cloud transformation, digital transformation area as well.

Emily Slade: Excellent, thank you. So in the website, it says you would develop a global outlook in it that really stood out to me, can you just tell us a bit about what that means?

Sharon Sibanda: Yeah, absolutely. Coming back to the point I made earlier, you know, when you're managing a project, or when you're managing the kind of enterprise wide systems that we're talking about, it's important to have that global aspect. And so we want to be looking at various approaches from across the world, not just specific to any one locality. So we're looking at the Global South, as I mentioned, examples from Africa, from Asia, from other areas of the world, perhaps, from South America, which are not as well known in comparison, perhaps to the examples in, in North America and Europe. So that's the kind of thing that we're looking to really embed into the whole program, because sustainability is about looking at other parts of the world and seeing how they also implement similar ideas, and actually how things can help how we progress from, from one technology to another and how we can actually leverage and leverage all of those technologies to come up with a very efficient enterprise wide. IT management. Yeah, yeah.

Emily Slade: Fantastic. That's brilliant. Thank you. What is the most exciting aspect of the course for you?

Sharon Sibanda: I think when I look at the thread around sustainability, I think that's quite important. Cloud has changed things. So significantly for many organisations, and the sustainability aspect around any kind of new technology is quite important. And so even as we're harnessing these new technologies, we also need to understand the the aspects around sustainability what what is actually sustainable, and what perhaps isn't quite as sustainable as first thought of. Because in that way, we're we're we're actually coming up with sort of a legacy of, you know, good practice, ethical practice, around enterprise wide management. But certainly, I think it's just an exciting time to be in it, it's great that we can develop these kinds of courses where you can look into cybersecurity, telecommunications, all these various industries and all these various technologies, and see how we can actually develop those for the enterprise. And that could be a small enterprise, there could be a larger organisation, the size of the enterprise, does not mean that, you know, you can't take advantage of the technology. That's the fantastic thing about the kinds of technologies that are looked at for this particular program. So it's an exciting time, I think, to be in it and to look at project managing all these, these various changes that everyone is looking to get into and to see exactly which ones will be of the best value for for the organisations that perhaps people are involved with. So yeah, exciting times around sustainability for sure.

Emily Slade: Amazing that's so brilliant thank you so much for your time today

Sharon Sibanda: Thank you.

Emily Slade: Thank you so much for listening, if you're enjoying Future You, or you got something out of that episode we'd love it if you could drop us a review on apple or Spotify, and while you're there - give us a follow. You can find us on Instagram and TikTok - all the links are in the description. Once again, thanks for listening and good luck on your journey to Future You.

Notes on transcript

This transcript was produced using a combination of automated software and human transcribers and may contain errors. The audio version is definitive and should be checked before quoting.

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