Features: IT internships

Technology moves at a faster pace than any other industry and even universities struggle to keep up. So how can you get to grips with an industry that’s always one step ahead of education? Internships are the answer, says Jonathan Aston.

To keep up with continually evolving technology, businesses are demanding a much broader skill set from IT graduates than ever before. According to Silicon.com, some of the UK’s top IT chiefs have raised serious questions about whether IT graduates are leaving university with the technical competencies and business skills that employers really need.

 

Gavin Megnauth, director of operations and group IT at Morgan Hunt, told Silicon.com: ‘It has been a fast-moving era for our industry and, understandably, IT academia has not been able to keep pace to deliver us graduates who can hit the ground running and embrace real-world IT without losing some of the dated rules of IT that they've been taught.’

Developing skills

One of the main problems for graduates, according to Neil Hammond, head of IT at British Sugar, is that they don’t have enough practical skills outside of IT: ‘It's surprisingly hard to find graduates who have a combination of the technical skills and the right soft skills. Broadly speaking, the role of staff in our IT department is to work with the business to deliver the systems that the business requires. So when looking for IT graduates, we are looking for technical, leadership and collaboration skills.’

With this in mind, many graduates are turning to internships as a way of gaining useful experience and building contacts.

Recent IT graduate Thom Baker landed an internship with West Midlands Graduate Internships (WMGI) at Air and Ground Aviation Ltd as a member of the IT support staff. ‘I’m very pleased with what I’ve achieved in a short timescale. I have learnt to use, produce, and work on new software programmes and my organisational skills are really developing.’

The WMGI, who provide IT internships in the West Midlands, say that many graduates are beginning to see the value in internships.

‘Internships are all about opportunity. It’s the opportunity to learn vital, on-the-job skills. It’s the chance to make important contacts in the industry. It helps counter the difficulties of recession where so many businesses simply are not recruiting. And it gives graduates the ability to stand out from the crowd in a way that the normal recruitment process does not allow,’ says Joy Stefanicki, project manager at WMGI.

Further information

• West Midlands Graduate Internships