Liberating IT Graduates in the AI Era: Moving Beyond Graduate Attributes.

Abstract

Artificial intelligence is reshaping information technology (IT) practice, shifting professional capability from technical execution to judgement through socio-technical understanding. This has significant implications for the curricula of university IT degrees. In a highly competitive higher-education landscape getting and keeping students is paramount to institutional survival. A major driver for attracting students to IT is the promise of abundant, well-paid IT careers.  Subsequently, universities are scrambling to re-align their IT curricula with the rapidly changing needs of industry – amid this is increased emphasis on graduate attributes. The reliance by many universities on “graduate attributes” as defining the quality of programs is at odds with the realities of AI-mediated work especially in the IT industry.  Additionally, for too long IT education has prioritized technical knowledge over human-centered capabilities such as adaptability, development of judgement and social-technical awareness. IT systems are embedded within complex human contexts hence socio-technical capabilities are foundational rather than supplementary to professional practice in IT.  AI technologies exacerbate the need for human-centered capabilities in professional practice and displace technical knowledge as the most fundamental layer in IT curricula. A case is made for a critical reframing of quality markers for IT program curricular: from a compliance-driven paradigm of discrete graduate attributes that are fragmented, to a liberal paradigm providing for educating IT graduates as adaptive, socio-technical thinkers who engage critically with AI-mediated environments. The argument is not for abandoning graduate attributes, but for reinterpreting and enacting them through a liberal education framework at the level of IT program design.