Cloud, virtualisation and big data added to TAFE curriculum A new curriculum for information technology courses taught at Australia's colleges of technical and further education (TAFEs, Polytechnic for UK readers, community college in the USA) has been released. “ICA 11 2.0” emerged yesterday and describes dozens of different qualifications and hundreds of subjects taught at TAFE. The …
Why bother. It seems clear that .au refuses to employ local IT workers no matter how well trained and that those roles that do exist are outsourced to exploited third world sweatshops as soon as feasible. What rationale is there to pay thousands of dollars for soon to be privatized and increasingly sub standard TAFE helldesk training when there is no industry demand which cannot be satisfied with a 457 visa at half the price. TAFE would be better served by opening campuses in Malaysia, India, Indonesia, The Philippines, anywhere that's not .au. Any existing IT workers who dream of employment should bow to the great god of market conditions, join the great .au brain drain and emigrate.
I am not sure that emigration will save them. The West lost manufacturing to the global labour cloud and (some) moved up a layer of abstraction to services. We are now loosing services to global labour and technology clouds and some will have to move up another layer of abstraction to process, content and intelligence. We require new skill sets that allow us to mine value from these clouds, to create and charge for scarcity in a world of abundance. We already see the beginnings of this brave new world in the various collaborative platforms available on the internet and their ability to coordinate talent on a global scale. Open source was an early harbinger of this process. The biggest challenge such innovators will face will be collaborative approaches to IP and capital, free from the sticky fingers of the parasitic public sector and their corporate dinosaur lobbyists.
I only just finished the upgrade form ICA05 to ICA11 so that I could teach a cert 3 level at school - I hope I don''t have to "upgrade*" for the 3rd time in 2 years.
The first "upgrade" was actually a downgrade from my brand new degree (level 7 on the ASQA scale) to a cert 3 (level 3 on the ASQA scale) - although the degree was only 12 months old because TAFE wont recognise our school awarded units unless we have the cert 3 as well (and they make a nice business doing the training )
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
