About the School of Information and Technology
"An IT graduate can work in any industry sector. They tend to travel, since they have international qualifications. Generally they’re quite varied in what they might do, but they tend to get what they want, whether that’s travelling the world or working in a particular industry."
- Associate Professor Peter Cole, Dean, School of Information and Technology
We asked our Dean to share some short thoughts about the field of IT and what makes Murdoch stand out.
Peter Cole, tell us about...
- The most important belief for your staff to value:
"Our staff take the time to invest in students. I believe all students have the capacity to succeed, and we are happy to spend time with them to help every one of them to fulfil their potential."
- The one thing students should graduate from the school with:
"Professionalism. IT is a field where people have access to huge amounts of information about other people. In most cases, we’re service providers who need to listen to our customers or clients and take their needs into account. Professionalism is essential in the modern IT graduate as privacy and security of information is paramount."
- How studying at Murdoch helped student Nicholas Circosta land a job at Apple straight out of uni:
"In his honours year at Murdoch, Nick had the freedom to develop his interests. During his studies he completed an independent study contract where he started working on Apple technology, so that definitely helped him to get a foothold. Nick also was awarded a grant from the Apple University Consortium who supplied equipment to help him complete his project."
- How students learn to solve problems that we don’t yet know will exist:
"Our students learn to be flexible thinkers and have the skills to solve a wide range of problems. In a lot of cases, we remove the detail to come up with ways to apply our knowledge to the new problem we’re presented with. Then, we can bring the detail back in to check the feasibility of the solution. That’s innovation!"
- The vital role IT plays in the world:
"Whole countries can go belly-up without IT. IT professionals around the world have huge amounts of responsibility to help us all to live our lives. There’s more to IT than programming. There’s building and running systems, redesigning and designing new enterprises based on the information they need. In the old days, most businesses were designed around accounting functions. Now, we design entire organisations around their information requirements, so at Murdoch, we create the ICT business analysts and the enterprise architects required for 21st century organisations."
- How the IT industry is calling for more females:
"We’re seeing a significant under-representation of females across most IT qualifications – and in the workforce only 15 – 20 % of IT professionals are female. Careers in IT cover all areas of modern business and industry and there is a high demand for female graduates. A career in IT is ideal for anybody who has great communication skills – in fact, more employers rank communication skills above technical skills when employing IT graduates."
- How the Cyber Forensics course prepares graduates for the workforce:
"The course covers cyber forensics, information management (which is how you build and manage information small to large data store) and information security. It’s a very unique course – and while there aren’t necessarily many jobs in the Perth market for cyber forensics experts alone, there is always a demand for people who can design, build and run databases, manage the security aspects of information and use their cyber forensic skills to investigate unauthorised access and attacks against their organisations data stores."
- The national and international accreditations graduates receive:
"Graduates can achieve a professional status with the Australian Computer Society (ACS), which is recognised by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). There’s a new focus on professionalism in the IT industry, and in three to five years time, there will be wide recognition for certified IT professionals, in a similar way to how accountants are recognised today for being accredited CPAs."
