This is the transcript for the video IT – an overview
Sam Ferguson 0:05
So I’ll be talking a bit about what is information technology? It’s a big word that means a lot of things to a lot of different people. So I want to break it down a bit for you. What kind of careers can you expect in information technology? Going back, areas of IT and UTS IT courses that we have that allow you to focus on in information technology, how to best prepare to study it at UTS. And then we’ll have our q&a session. Okay. So continuing on. Oh, dear, my keyboard doesn’t seem to want to work. Here we go. Okay, what is information technology. So information technology covers a range of technologies to do with computers and connecting those computers together. So people who work in information technology usually are focused on transmitting information between people within an organisation and across different organisations. So talk about delivering solutions that connect us in the modern world. We produce, manipulate, store and communicate information, information may be very simple pieces of data, or it may be things that are extracted from that data that are valuable, valuable things that can be used by organisations for, you know, making money or making change or solving problems.
So there’s lots of different purposes for having information. And people who work in information technology generally strive for innovation and efficiency in one form or another. What does it involve? What does it usually involve skills in logic, logic, pattern recognition, and problem solving are the main types of skills that people need, you might think you need to learn a programming language. And that’s true to some extent, but programming languages are basically methods of describing problems. That result that are basically logic based problems, not so much mathematical problems as logic problems in most circumstances. Although there is a bit of maths in programming, it’s not as much as you might think. And serious mathematicians often don’t use computer programming methods to describe their problems, they use mathematical language. So having skills in programming, that working in our lives is important. But analysing covers a large range of skills. So while you may think programming is essential, it’s not the core skill in it, a larger pattern recognition and problem solving, analysis skills, tend to be used a lot more by a lot more roles than just the programming skills directly. Most of IT teams work in organisations that are businesses in one sense or another. So there’s often a translation process between the business side of the organisation and the technical side of the organisation. And that communication process is absolutely critical to the success of projects and solutions.
A lot of IT solutions will disrupt the technology of today to build new technology for tomorrow. So many of the technological solutions we’ve had have existed for for some time now. And it provides techniques and tools that allow us to break through the the the patterns that have existed for many times and forge new patterns for for future change. So where can it take you? So this, this diagram here is from the ACS Foundation, and it’s a pretty good example of the huge range of careers that exist in it. And I’d encourage you to look at all of these different roles and think about what does someone working in each of these roles actually do? Because they’re all part of the IT industry. And so
I’m having trouble with my buttons. So you’ve got things in digital designing content, and there’s quite a range of roles there, including games developer, Creative Director UX, which means user experience design, which is a fairly new role. You’ve got security and specialities. We’ve got cybersecurity disaster recovery, database administrators, a lot of that is based around storing large amounts of data and making sure you have access to it and making sure that other people don’t have access to it. Networking is critical to all computing. You’d be surprised how much networking goes into any of the major buildings in the CBD. I’m sure you’re well aware of the difficulty of maintaining your own home network now that we’ve got not just one or two computers, but probably 12-15 devices in any family home using the network at one given time, marketing and consulting and industry. Here you have the business side, you’ve got things like search engine optimisation, which can be critical for an organisation who mainly interact with their customers through the Google search engine.
So making sure that you achieve a certain ranking in the search engine results for particular keywords is totally critical. And there are whole roles focused purely on SEO. Business Analysts are an interesting thing. Because they highlight this point that I was making earlier, there’s a large number of people who work as business analysts in organisations where they understand the business and how the IT side of that business can deliver solutions to help the business actually improve their efficiency or their solution delivery in one way or another. And so that’s an important part of the, of the organisation. Financial Technology is really important for finance organisations, and we have a fairly healthy financial technology sector in Sydney, that has been getting bigger and bigger over the last few years. And one of the largest recruiters around our area. And Sydney’s Wisetech, which is a logistics company actually. So they organise things like customs forms for, for transport, and they do so on a huge scale. So that’s some of those industries. The last two, the ones in red, they’re very common, and they’ve existed for a long time.
So hardware, enterprise community computing systems, engineers, electrical engineers, their traditional IT roles and engineering roles. And Software Engineering has been also been around for some time. And that’s sometimes what we think of when we think of it. But what I’m trying to show you here is that there’s a huge range of things, and there’s a lot of new roles always coming through. Now in the middle here, we’ve got the Chief Technology Officer and the Chief Information Officer, which are the types of roles that at the sea level, the top of the, of the building kind of roles. And around them, you have some of the newer roles like business development manager, Enterprise Architect, those types of roles, important for managing the other departments around the leadership of any organisation. So I hope that gives you a bit of an idea.
There’s lots and lots of information about this out there. But what I’m trying to do is break down the concept of information technology into not just one or two, or even five or six roles. But you can see here that there’s a huge number of roles. If you’re really interested in any of these roles, you can just type these keywords into seek.com.au and have a look at the types of ads that are out there and see what kind of organisations need each of these types of people. It’s really thoughtful approach to do at this point in your career, and you are at a point in your career. So here’s a poll, what area of it do you think you’d like to study or work in?
Okay, so we’ve got security and software as the leader so far software is leading digital design is third place, and then we’ve got a smattering of people interest interested in the other options there. So certainly software is number one at the moment. Software engineers tend to work in, in a form of digital design these days working on as front end engineers for websites, large websites that do multiple things, of course. So there we go. All right. Okay, future. So when you’re studying a fast moving areas such as it, it’s important to think a bit about the future and what it’s going to look like. So one of the things about it is it does change quickly, if you expect to spend 30 years doing the same thing in it. You can do that in some industries, but not in it, I’m afraid it changes quite quickly. And it’s worth thinking about what’s going to be happening 5-10 years down the line to work out where you should be putting your efforts. So data and AI are something that have happened over the last 10 years, data science came out of the need to use the data that all of these industries were producing.
industry was collecting lots of data, but they didn’t know what to do with it. And data science was a field that basically exploded by providing organisations with information about what their data meant, and what opportunities that held for that organisation. As that’s progressed, AI is the the ability to take those datasets and build intelligence from them. So rather than just looking at the data, we create systems that understand the data in advance and can use that data for for interesting things. Like talking to customers, for instance. chatbots are very common these days. And not all of them are humans, they are often a an AI that has been programmed by looking at all of the previous conversations. Cybersecurity analysts are another element of today’s society that looks like it’s only going to increase. So cyber security is required to stop threats from attacking networks and getting access to important data. And the attacks used to be relatively easy to resolve in previous years, but they’re becoming more and more advanced and complex.
Cloud engineers will you know, of course, that a lot of your stuff lives in the cloud these days. And so Cloud engineers are commonplace now and required for many systems to exist. Virtual Reality has become a thing these days. And it’s possibly going to be in the future. It’s not yet really something that is critical. But as you probably know, Facebook has committed to the metaverse by changing their name. So that’s the future as they see it. Robotics is critical, of course, in lots of areas, but it’s still, it’s still looking for its key key, when but autonomous vehicles are probably one of the applications of robotic techniques that are really critical. And we’re starting to see moves towards autonomous vehicles over the next probably 10 years or so. And then we’ve got biotech and industry 4.0, which have very, very broad things that are happening across lots of areas. So how does UTS fit in with its it courses, we have actually quite a number of courses that are available to you to try to align with what you’re planning for your future.
So the Bachelor of Science in it is a three or four year degree which can be combined with other degrees make a double degree. And that’s a main all around it degree with a fair amount of flexibility and a fairly broad approach to subjects which allows you to do sometimes a major and a sub major or sometimes two majors in particular circumstances depending on whether you’re combining with other degrees. So that’s an all rounder degree and it gives you a broad understanding of the IT industry.
The Bachelor of computing science is longer and it’s an honours degree and it’s IT with deeper theory. So you do instead of one year of core subjects, you do two years of core subjects and you do an honours part of your degree which means you do a little bit of research is four years long, and it’s quite technical. You do do a bit of maths. But students tend tend to like this if they’re inclined towards the technical side of computer science and you get a very strong programming basis from this course specifically, Bachelor of Information Systems focuses on information systems which are the core of these business organisations. So business system panels come out of the Bachelor of IS, and it can be combined with a Bachelor of Business. Bachelor of Science in games development is about games. And a lot of the students that take that also get a strong it foundation. So they don’t just do games and they games requires quite a strong, it fundamental understanding and quite strong programming as well. So you get quite a range of skills in that. And you also understand your interactive media quite deeply.
So although it’s focused on games development, it gives you quite a range of skills. Bachelor of Engineering, nearing software engineering is also a longer degree because it’s an accredited engineering degree. And it focuses on software engineering, which is a slightly different focus to the computing science or Bachelor science and IT degrees, but it’s a general degree that is focused on developing systems that are complex and require testing and quality maintenance. And finally, the bachelor IT is our cooperative scholarship programme for IT leaders who can code and analyse systems. So we have a range of students who have completed the Bachelor of IT and become student leaders of organisations, they tend to be very highly skilled. And this is a scholarship programme. So you need to apply for the scholarship early and you do an interview with industry organisations and academics as well, where we assess your readiness to study in this programme. And if you’re successful, you do receive a scholarship throughout your undergraduate degree. And you do a couple of internships in in that degree as well.
There’s also internships in the Bachelor science it Diploma of IT professional practice, and in the bachelor of engineering, software engineering as well. And there are options for that in other degrees. I’m going to move on and introduce Himani Nandedkar, who I’ve already introduced early on, but she’s going to speak to you about her experience as a student of The Bachelor of IT Co Op scholarship degree. Thank you,
Himani Nandedkar 17:25
Hello everyone. I introduced myself a bit earlier, but I’ll just reintroduce myself, my name is Himani Nandedkar. And as I mentioned, I’m a third year student in the Bachelor of Information Technology cooperatives scholarship programme, which you’ve already heard a little bit about during the presentation, so I won’t go too in depth with that, because I really want to focus on the student experience and what it’s like to study at UTS. It’s so wonderful to see so many of you at the webinar today, especially year 11 and 12 students because I remember being in your seat not long ago at all, and IT is absolutely a very exciting field that you’re considering.
So UTS is going to be a wonderful place for you to come study it so very exciting time right now. One of the main reasons that I think UTS is a great place to study IT is because it really focuses on industry ready skills and work experience which is combined with a lot of the IT courses out here at UTS. My programme for example, has two six month industry placements during the best Entergy, which essentially means that students get over a year’s worth of work experience before they’ve even graduated, which gives a real edge once you’re looking for grad roles and things positions after uni. Before we get to graduation though, let’s backtrack a little bit and talk about the student experience in uni life. So one of the absolute best things about UTS, in my opinion at least is the incredibly rich and lively social culture that it boasts Activate UTS has a collection of over 180 student led clubs and societies. And these range from anything between technology and engineering to food appreciation, Quidditch and dog appreciate appreciation.
So there’s a club or society for just about any of your interests. And if it doesn’t exist yet, then you have the freedom and power as a student to establish your own society from scratch which is very, very exciting stuff. I myself I’m an executive member of Bitcoin, which is a student led committee for the Bachelor of Information Technology programme. And we plan loads of fun and exciting events throughout the year like games, night networking events and student panels, things like that. So these experiences apart from just being really great opportunities to make new friends and have a little bit of fun. We need to help you develop those important work ready skills like leadership and communication which is why I highly encourage you to not only participate but really get involved and make the most out of your unique experience when you do get here.
Aiswarylakshmi Rajeev 19:43
Now moving on we’re now going to live in more of the ATAR side of the just points these are points or raw eight give your selection rank. So your selection rank is different to your ATAR and at UTS these are just points are capped to 13. And adjustment points can be given for a number of reasons. So this is includes like completing the UTS engineering and IT questionnaire, as well as getting good results in relevant HSC subjects as well. Or more than just more points, you can go to the QR code as well as tonnes of information on our website as well. Now in terms of use key dates, so the main ones that we’ll be focusing on, or really be looking at April to June is when scholarship applications open.
So this relates to what Himani was speaking to earlier in terms of the BIT coop scholarship, as well as other scholarships that UTS officers highly recommend for you to check out our website. Our dates haven’t been finalised as of yet. So it’s very important to see those two. So that you know when to apply our open day and high I’d highly focus on on the 27th of August, this is your opportunity to come in on campus and really ask questions and get to know the campus and around September’s when normally our scholarships close. And then the key or the highlight is that there’s multiple UAC offer rounds this year, so you get your ATAR results around December and then. And there’s multiple UAC offers from December to March. So this gives you the opportunity to change your preferences for each round and receive multiple offers as well. So it’s a really good opportunity to explore the options UTS has. And then in terms of UTS early entry, so as of last year, we kicked off our early entry programme. And it’s an exciting way to receive an offer to study at UTS before you sit your final exams.
So for applying for this, you need to apply to the UTS online application portal. So this is different to UAC. It’s free to apply. And the applications are open around June and July. But the data yet to be confirmed. So please see the website for updates as well. Now moving on to student support. I know I think there was actually a question in this in the in the chat, but we offer a lot of students support as UTS does not have any prerequisite subjects for any of our degrees so but we just supply bridging courses in maths, physics and chemistry, as well as there’s also a UPASS session to the stands for peer assisted study success programme. And this basically involves a student from an from an older year who’s already done the degree you’ve got a high mark to come in and tutor students a really good opportunity to not only learn from a different from a student’s perspective, as well as making new friends. So connect digitally. So this is just a screen to for you to find the ways to connect with us especially if you have questions that you don’t remember during this session, you can email us at the address on the screen as well as our website is full of information as well. So I’d highly recommend you to go to that.