Your task for this assessment is to prepare and deliver a presentation on the subject:

Requisite Skills for Information Technology Professionals

Your presentation should be based on following three papers

1. K. P. Gallagher, K. M. Kaiser, J. C. Simon, C. M. Beath, T. Goles:
   The requisite variety of skills for IT professionals.
   Communications of the ACM 53(6):144-148, 2010.
   http://www2.csc.liv.ac.uk/~ullrich/COMP110/[email protected]
2. K. P. Gallagher, T. Goles, S. Hawk, J. C. Simon, K. M. Kaiser, C. M. Beath, Wm. B. Martz Jr.:
   A Typology of Requisite Skills for Information Technology Professionals.
   Proceedings of the 44th Hawaii International International Conference on Systems
   Science (HICSS-44 2011), pp. 1-10. IEEE Computer Society, 2011.
   [email protected]
3. S. Hawk, K. M. Kaiser, T. Goles, C. V. Bullen, J. C. Simon, C. M. Beath, K. P. Gallagher, and K. Frampton:
   The Information Technology Workforce: A Comparison of Critical Skills of Clients and Service Providers.
   Information Systems Management 29:2-12, 2012.
   PDF on publisher’s site
4. R. Hirschheim:
   Offshoring and the new world order.
   Communications of the ACM 52(11):132-135, 2009.
   http://www2.csc.liv.ac.uk/~ullric/COMP110/[email protected]

but can also take any other related work into account.

Your presentation should provide a summary of the findings and considerations put forward in these
papers with particular focus on the following questions:

1. What skills and clusters of skills have been identified in [1,2,3] and how
   were they identified?
2. Which of those skills are considered to be critical to retain in
   IT departments, emerging as increasingly important in the future
   or becoming obsolete in the future?
3. What skills do companies consider critical
   when hiring entry-level employees, and mid-level employees?
   What skills do companies source from independent contractors, and
   third-party providers?
4. Why is the outsourcing or offshoring of IT operations a problem for
   entry-level IT staff in countries like the UK or the US? Does it also
   provide opportunities?

Format

Your presentation should make use of suitable presentation software and
you should be able to deliver it in 10 minutes. Your presentation has to be
given using a departmental PC. So, you must ensure that the presentation file
works with presentation software available on those PCs.

You should also be prepared to answer questions on the presentation and the three sources
the presentation is based on.

Submission and Delivery of the Presentation

Submit your presentation file via
the departmental coursework submission system at
https://sam.csc.liv.ac.uk/COMP/Submissions.pl
(COMP110-4: Excellence in IT Consulting), not VITAL as for the first two COMP110 assignments by the
date indicated below.

You will also be allocated a time during week 11 or week 12
at which you will have to deliver your presentation.
The allocation will be made available on-line shortly
after the deadline for submission of work has passed.

You will have to give the presentation using the presentation file that you have submitted (not an updated version of it).

Deadline

The deadline for this assignment is

Thursday, 28 April 2016, 17:00

Earlier submission is possible, but any submission after the deadline
attracts the standard lateness penalties. Please
remember that a strict interpretation of `lateness’ is applied by the Department,
that is, a submission on Thursday, 28 April 2016, 17:01 is considered to be
a day late (analogously for submissions that are delayed further).

Assessment

This assessment will directly or indirectly address the following learning outcomes
of the module:

• effectively use relevant software packages and appreciate different
  types of software;
• effectively communicate in writing and orally;
• describe and discuss economic, historic, organisational, research,
  and social aspects of computing as a discipline and computing in practice;
• to have an awareness of the roles of computing professionals.

This assignment will contribute 25% to the overall mark
of COMP110.

Remember that to pass COMP110 you must submit work for all assignments on COMP110
and that the work must constitute a reasonable attempt.

The marking scheme that will be used to assess your work is available
here.