Strategies To Attract Information Technology Students: An Extrapolation Of Worker Experiences

The predicted dramatic increase in demand for IT workers in the next decade suggests an opportunity for IT educators to establish plans to ramp up to meet these needs. The purpose of this paper is to help educators understand factors that are important to IT workers and that can be influenced by the educational process. The work reported here is part of an NSF grant that explored current IT worker experiences and motivations. Data for the study was collected using a forty-four-item questionnaire sent to currently employed IT workers in the Boston area. Stepwise multiple linear regression was used to relate certain outcome variables to attributes and opinions of the respondents as represented by question item responses. Relationships have been discovered that will help educators craft academic programs and identify potentially successful students in IT. For example, the analysis indicates questionnaire items associated with the challenge presented by an IT profession and family educational backgrounds in technical areas are important outcome predictors, while gender and age are less important.