215: Preparing Graduates for a Digital Future – Management Education in the Driver’s Seat (16227)

There are several issues for universities seeking to assure professional accreditation, align program/course’s with work roles and most importantly assure Management graduates are suitably equipped with discipline specialist, digital and industry sector knowledge and skills. The 97 million new work roles the World Economic Forum expect to be in existence by 2025, demand a myriad of programs/courses, industry-based learning experiences and graduates capable of using specialist, digital and “soft” skills to generate innovative solutions to problems (Chee, 2023). The new work from home world demand has changed management cultural expectations of adult workers and learners. A demand for hybrid delivery modes that enables use of personalised digital skills to support learning activities, encased in authentic assessable learning experiences exists. The Australian Computer Society (ACS) accredit computing specialist programs/courses that deliver technical knowledge in-depth, “soft” skills and practice solving business problems in all industry sectors. However, digital graduate roles are no longer the solitary province of computing specialist discipline and sub-discipline graduates. Management graduates with specialist professional and digital knowledge and most importantly “soft” skills enable value-add business system innovations in the workplace and increasingly the incumbents of traditionally Computing cross-functional tactical roles. The number of different digital programs/courses, subjects and delivery modes is a rapidly moving target for educational organisations bound by complex policy and process environments. Higher Education institutions are geared to assuring learning and teaching (L&T) quality and industry driven changes to program/course content. Management graduates with strong digital skill sets are critical to lead innovation in the workplace. Rather than focus on what changes are required at a program/course level to address the plethora of graduate roles available. we are aiming to first look at what is needed to by all management graduates to be successful on a career trajectory that embraces business innovations underpinned by the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies like ChatGPT? Whether the work role destination is management, law, logistics or information systems graduates need to be able use emerging AI technologies to gather and analyse data, create business intelligence, innovate new procedures, systems and positions and finally communicate within and outside the workplace in question. Problem solutions need to be aligned with the industry needs of managers, ethical behavioural constraints, organisational policy and practices. A common need for all management graduates is digital literacy, and we need to work out what that means in today’s work environment. Management graduates build innovative systems using their professional understanding of how organisations and the people within them work. Digital specialist and “soft” skill foundations at a threshold level need to recognise a diverse suite of personal learning from device use in the home and workplace. Personalised learning journeys that traverse a career life-span that recognise diverse experiential starting points create a need for a variety of journeys through innovative accredited programs/courses in higher education, that call for flexible pathways. New ways of learning are critical to address Computing + Management (X) and Management (X) + Computing graduate roles, available in the marketplace (Chee, 2023). Government and industry describe graduate role specifications in terms of tech stacks that transcend the boundaries of traditional American Computing Machinery (ACM) / American Information Systems (AIS) specialist computing areas that include: Computer Engineering (CE), Computer Science (CS), Cyber Security (Cyb Sec), Data Science (DSc, Information Systems (IS)/Information Technology (IT) and Software Engineering (SE) (Artificial Intelligence (AI) curriculum soon) roles and form part of a Management digital career journey. The possibilities for Digital Management programs, courses, and units of study are enormous. This panel will describe the constraints of current program architectures using how Australian Computer Society (ACS) Information Systems (IS/IT) programs are implemented in Australia as a case study. Then the difficulty associated with the design and delivery of Digital Management university programs for the rapidly changing workplace and graduates needing to be able to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications to generate business intelligence from large disparate data pools, will be discussed. This session should be of interest to attendees with an interest in innovations that improve the work-readiness of graduates.