Text-mining approach for verifying alignment of information systems curriculum with industry skills

Managing and developing competencies or skills are vital to professional development of an individual. Many tertiary education institutions are therefore focused on developing curriculum that will help the graduating students acquire skills that are aligned with industry practice. Industry skills frameworks such as Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) define the professionals required for an IT professional. Therefore, mapping the curriculum competencies to the industry skills framework has a dual purpose of aiding the educationists to improve the curriculum, and the students to plan the courses according to their career plan. Existing mapping methods are manual and painstaking processes. In this paper, we present an automated solution based on text analytics techniques to map the curriculum to industry framework and provide a visual based analysis to discover the strengths and weakness of the curriculum. We evaluated our solution model on an undergraduate core curriculum; Bachelor of Science (Information Systems Management) degree program BSc (ISM), offered by the School of Information Systems (SIS), Singapore Management University (SMU) and Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA).