CoachLab helps students to fast track skills development
| The CoachLab™ Leadership Programme has been conceptualised to fast track world-class human resources for the high-tech industry in South African. The CoachLabs at The Innovation Hub will be run as partnerships with industry and tertiary education institutions, where respectively, the partners provide infrastructure; project work, mentorship and supervision; and post-graduate students.
Students are encouraged to take initiative, work in a team, apply knowledge and solve problems in a hands-on entrepreneurial learning environment. They benefit from working on real-life, mission-critical projects whilst earning money and continuing their post-graduate programmes. Companies gain access to affordable, highly skilled human resources, and tertiary education institutions benefit from feedback to inform curriculum development.
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The dynamic pace of growth in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry has highlighted the need for increased numbers of ICT postgraduate students in Gauteng. In response, The Innovation Hub launched an ITCoachLab, now in its second year of operation, as the first pilot in its CoachLab™ Leadership Programme. Partners in the ITCoachLab are The Innovation Hub, EPI-USE (Pty) Ltd and the University of Pretoria.
This year the ITCoachLab has five top postgraduate students working on real information technology problems for real clients. According to Prof Roelf van den Heever, EPI-USE chairman, the learning from last year clearly indicated that post-graduate students in their fourth year prefer to work on clearly defined real problems. "Their need is experience. They are goal oriented. Achieving outcomes proved to be a great motivator", he said.
There are also two B-degree students in the ITCoachLab who give guidance on web development skills while improving their own skills, and two students who participate in an internship programme, which is an outreach initiative.
The projects the students are working on include the development of a research database for the University of Pretoria, a risk management system for EPI-USE worldwide, a framework for an entrepreneurship portal, and supporting material for a third year course in Computer Science. The students use quality frameworks developed by the students in the ITCoachLab last year. These frameworks comprise international best practice for software development and maintenance, such as the Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI) of the Software Engineering Institute of the Carnegie Mellon University, ISO-standards and the Cobit IT governance guidelines.
The students are also closely involved in EPI-USE's offshore development initiative, aimed at participating in the US market, in addition to EPI-USE's current IT activities in that country. The objective is to source work in this arena, but do the work locally. "Developing your processes to the standard that is required to succeed in these markets demands a lot. The students gain valuable experience by being exposed to the quality that international competitiveness demands. It serves as a serious learning curve," Prof van den Heever said.
He believes the investment in the students is worthwhile, and that other companies should consider becoming a partner in a CoachLab. Four of the students that were in the programme last year are now employed by EPI-USE.
"Whether or not the students are recruited by the company after their year in the CoachLab, at the very least a significant contribution is made to the competitiveness of the South African IT industry. South Africa has the potential. We need to work together to create the synergy," he said.
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