Reeducation to Expand the Software Engineering Workforce: Successful Industry/University Collaborations

Software produced worldwide is growing at a phenomenal rate as software is used in such diverse products as automobiles, homes, and airplanes. In addition, the increasingly global business climate and expanding emphasis on distributed computing has accelerated the need for business software. However, there is currently an inadequate number of software engineers to produce and maintain software to meet this demand. One possible solution to correcting this shortfall is reeducating existing non-software engineering employees to become software engineers. For the past two years, the Industry/University (I/U) subgroup of the Working Group on Software Engineering Education and Training has been investigating active collaborations between companies and universities in which non-software professionals and practitioners who lack formal software education are reeducated to become software engineers. This paper reports on the I/U subgroup's findings by describing their approach to the investigation, the factors involved in successful collaboration construction and execution, and alumni views of the knowledge and skills transferred by the collaboration.