Whitireia IT graduates in hot demand!

Whitireia IT graduates in hot demand!

Whitireia IT graduates are in hot demand! In fact, they are in such hot demand that they are being employed at Whitireia before they even graduate or get snatched up by other businesses.

Rong Chen is one of those students. He is graduating this December but already has secured himself a place in the Whitireia Business Analyses and Systems Team as a Report Writer, where he is working on database maintenance and reporting.

“He was the perfect candidate for the job. The Bachelor of Information Technology had provided him with the necessary skill set,” says Stephen Porteners, Team Leader of the Business Analyses and Systems Team at Whitireia.

As part of a Bachelor of Information Technology Chen completed an interesting student project. Student projects are external contracts, where students are enlisted by an organisation to develop a new product to help solve an issue or need they have. Chen was enlisted by Whitireia to work on developing a SharePoint solution for universal program information. This established a close working relationship who would have him back in a fulltime role when he finished his degree.

Nick Wempe, Programme Manager of Academic for the faculty of Business and Information Technology at Whitireia, says he “is aware of the growing gap between IT grads and the huge number of jobs in the industry.”

“Grads are quick to learn as they are coming straight from a learning environment” says Porteners. “They are like a sponge to water and just soak up new knowledge. They are also very dedicated, which is exactly the kind of person we needed for this job.”
 
Fellow employers and past IT students at Whitireia include; Daniel Phillips who now works as an Educational Technologist at the Online Learning Centre and Juanita Richardson who is working as a Technical Officer-Laboratories.

At Whitireia students can start with a Certificate in Information Technology as an introduction to IT, or step into a Bachelor of Information Technology which begins with general skills and moves on to more specialised knowledge. There are also qualifications for those in the industry looking to further their careers.

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