Revealing the Gap Between Skills of Students and the Evolving Skills Required by the Industry of Information and Communication Technology

Abstract

Along with the fast development in information and communication technology (ICT), job skills required by ICT industries are also evolving very rapidly. It becomes difficult for ICT students to assess the gap between their skills and such evolving skills. Even though schools perform periodical curriculum evaluations, the time gap between the evaluations causes the curriculum to get out-of-date easily since it is unable to cope with the tremendous and quick changes occurring in the industry. We propose novel solutions by introducing some measures and visualization tools to reveal such skills’ gap. Using evolutionary-based data mining, the skillsets mastered by students were collected from their study reports, while the frequent skillsets required by the industry were mined out from job adverts; and based on these skillsets the skill coverage of the students was approximated. The proposed solutions were then tested on data obtained from an Indonesian higher education institution since Indonesia implements competence-based curriculum in its education system. Experimental works show that the proposed approaches not only reveal and visualize the gap, but also monitor the changes in the skills requirements, which also help the school’s administrator while updating the curriculum.