Postdraduate development: An intriguing journey from a graduate to the IT professional

On one hand, the universities typically offer the graduate programmes and degrees in computer science, computer engineering and information technology, on the other hand, IT companies look for IT professionals in dozens of different positions, such as programmers/ developers, analysts, consultants, administrators, database specialists, testers etc. For many positions, a degree in computer science or related discipline is just a necessary, but far not sufficient condition, deep knowledge in specific areas and technologies as well as several years of experience after graduation are required. At the same time, a lot of discussions about neccessity of cooperation between academia and praxis has been done. Observing that the university study is a quite structuted process and the requirements for particular positions are (more or less) clearely formulated with the attempt to standardize them, the process in between - here called postgraduate development - is fairly unstructured, ad hoc and individual from case to case. One of the possible answers from academia in several countries, such as Australia, Great Britain, USA and Netherland is so called professional doctorate as an alterantive to the PhD degree, to close the gap between the requirements of IT job market and the graduation at the university. We discuss the issue of postgraduate development of IT professionals with the aim to answer in a structured way not only what should be the skills for particular positions, but also how they can be gained.