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Robert Ndlovu
Feedback Report
Over the past 8 weeks through this weekly column, I have been writing articles to discuss ICT careers with a greater potential to land you a job in this highly competitive environment.
The response from readers was pretty impressive, interesting, informative and invaluable. A lot of information, patterns, trends and misconceptions, knowledge gap emerged.
I must repeat that the feed back I received was a great eye opener. We have a huge dilemma. This dilemma ranges from outright lack of information, wrong perceptions about the ICT sector, misinformation and general preference of easy to do “courses”.
Most people who responded to the articles had NO idea what potential ICT careers had and also almost all of them did NOT know what they wanted to do nor did they know what they were looking for. So this alone speaks volumes about our tertiary ICT curriculum or lack thereof.
Some students who responded appeared not to have any O-Level Maths and most certainly did not have any A-Level Maths nor any science subject.
To protect privacy I have chosen not to publish the correspondents’ cellphone or e-mail contact in the few examples that I found interesting.
1. Hello my name is Thabo. I must first thank you for your informative article. I am 17 years old and attending O’levels at a local school. I would like to pursue an ICT career but we do not have any computers at our school. Please assist in any way you can. Thank you in advance. (Plumtree)
2. I saw your article under the Business section of The Chronicle online entiltled ICT careers that will land you a job. I have a passion for networking and programming .I will need your guidance and counselling on which areas to specialise in. Please sir which materials do you recommend that I study for my networking and which programming languages would be suitable for a network engineer to learn. (Leonard from a Nigerian Whatsapp number)
3. Hello sir I just finished reading your articles in the Chronicle of March 10, I wish to know more about ICT and how to expect to own my own website. My name is Sandra. I have Ndebele and History and A’level at the moment I am not engaged in any business but after that article I was inspired about what you spoke about. Thank you and God bless you. (Hwange)
4. I did CCNA and still can not land a job. I read your article please chip in with advice on what I can do thanks. (Gweru).
5. We are a couple based in the UK and we saw your article online referencing careers and we are interested in having our son, who is still based in Zimbabwe to pursue FTOC — the fibre optics course you mentioned in your article. Thanks again we really appreciate your efforts and we hope you will continue with your good work. (Nottingham, UK.)
6. Good day sir. For starters I would like to thank you for your very insightful topic about ICT careers. I teach A’level Maths at a private college in Bulawayo and would like to do web development please help. (Bulawayo)
7. Dear Mr Ndlovu I work for a local MNO as a technician but our disadvantage is that we are never trained in this Huawei equipment nor given any manuals but just shown how to remove and replace card. I read somewhere you touched on VoIP and I am very keen to do it as I am told it is a very lucrative career. We were just wondering with my workmates which ICT school you went to with all that knowledge base. Please respond with recommendations of courses to take. (Bulawayo).
Summary
I could go on for ever. But what emerged was that there was very little ICT knowledge and penetration in our community. I am not talking about use of Whatsapp, Facebook, Excel or Word or browsing the web. Here we are talking about ICT skills that are globally sound and relevant. Anyone can type a document using word. Below are randomly chosen sites for your tutorials. They are kind of free but there is no free lunch. I did respond to most of the more specific inquiries directly.
http://study.com/academy/lesson/the-internet-ip-addresses-urls-isps-urns-dns-arpanet.html
https://www.ecse.rpi.edu/Homepages/koushik/shivkuma-teaching/video_index.html#bon_foils
http://study.com/academy/topic/internet-intranet-and-extranet.html
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/15-561-information-technology-essentials-spring-2005/
Way Forward
The general and somewhat superficial results and trends of the hundreds of texts and emails I received from the readers helped to move an inch closer to the root cause of this problem — ICT at schools; the much talked about e-learning. It is pretty over-hyped but not so effective. There can never be an effective e-learning implementation that can succeed without the inclusion of teachers.
Put in a more subtle way — teachers must form the very epicentre of e-learning. Too bad most of these e-learning programs being marketed are purely commercial products and that’s that. This gave me an opportunity to visit my ex-school Sobukhazi Secondary and I was not too shocked at what I found a year after I had installed broadband internet.
As a result to validate the above we have embarked on converting the traditional laboratory into a digital computer centre that is self contained with content from syllabi, past exam papers, exam preparation notes, networking courses, programming tutorials and the like.
Students and teachers access to these resources is NOT dependent on any Internet connection as we have installed a computer server that acts as an digital-library. Let us solve problems from the source rather than deal with the symptoms only.
Thanks to the Chronicle for their support.
You will hear more on this as we go down the road.
Keep them questions and comments coming.
Robert Ndlovu can be reached on 077 600 2605 or [email protected]
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