Initiative 4: Skills Development

This initiative supports a range of activities to increase the ICT skill base, ensuring that Tasmania has enough people with the right education, training and experience for this rapidly growing industry.

A Skills Advisory Committee (SAC) oversees this initiative by providing strategic advice to the board about skills-related issues; assessing applications and making recommendations to the board; and ensuring that there is minimal duplication with existing or upcoming Skills Development Programs.

Projects funded under this initiative include:

Motivators for Female Choice of ICT Careers – To assist efforts to effectively recruit women into local ICT career pathways. Intelligent Island funded a Tasmanian-focused research project that aimed to determine the issues that drive females to choose ICT careers in regional areas. The results of the research will be used to design information packages and communication strategies to ensure more females are able to make a clear choice for an ICT career.

eMagine Commercial Development – This program helped to build industry support links and energise the development of an e-Learning cluster. It also helped strengthen government-industry and intra-industry relationships. Revenue to ICT e-Learning industries has increased with more than $1.8 million earned through government-industry partnerships. This program continues to support the Tasmanian eLearning Hub in its ongoing development with funding from the Department of Education.

Strengthening school sector ICT education outcomes – Under this project, Intelligent Island funding has been used to clarify the pathways from school to the ICT industry for year 11 and 12 students, redevelop the year 11 and 12 ICT curriculum using an approach that includes key stakeholders, and develop curriculum materials for years 7 to 10 to achieve the newly established curriculum outcomes via enterprising ICT approaches.

ICT Training Consortium – This project involves an industry-managed training hub, to address the industry training needs for the ICT sector.

Embedding ICT Skills in Regional Areas – This project is increasing the IT skill base amongst small to medium enterprises. Branded IT@work, the program was extended to all regional areas of the state with a particular emphasis on the North and North West. Every IT vocational teacher in regional Tasmania is involved in this project along with almost 50 businesses and 300 students. As a result, 40 Tasmanians have gained new ICT apprenticeship opportunities.

ICT Enterprise Ready – This project is an extension of the Department of Economic Development and Tourism’s existing Commercialisation Ready Program but specifically tailored to ICT participants. The EntReady Program is teaching participants the skills necessary to take their innovative ideas to market and to promote product commercialisation and business growth. The program is suitable for start-up and existing IT companies. It caters for those ICT-using companies and individuals that are commercialising an IT product, process or service as well as those needing to develop business skills to gain entry into world ICT markets. Almost 60 participants from 45 companies participated with 50 individuals graduating from the course.

Achieving Best Practice – This project was designed to assist small to medium businesses to more effectively use ICT to expand sales and reach new markets, improve staff productivity and avoid costly loss of data. The project was implemented using a three-staged approach that includes developing and presenting an information seminar to industry, undertaking an IT audit of participating firms and assisting businesses to meet best practice standards.

e-Business Planning in Small Business - This project is identifying a target group of 125 small businesses and analyse the business structure, performance and objectives to determine appropriate adoption of e-Business processes and technologies.

ICT Industry Postgraduate Research and Training Partnerships - This project is supporting five postgraduate University of Tasmania research partnerships with industry in the fields of e-security and computer forensics.

Pearcey Foundation – This project is assisting with the establishment of the Tasmanian Pearcey Award for Young Achievers in IT over a period of three years.