“Build a stronger Australian economy by growing the digital workforce.”
The digital future is already here and we know that our prosperity as a nation will depend on our ability to build a highly-skilled digital workforce. But Australia has a problem – we are simply not seeing enough students graduate with digitech skills from our schools and universities. While it’s estimated there will be more than 100,000 new IT jobs in Australia 1 by 2024, there are currently only around 7,000 students graduating with IT degrees each year 2.
CS in Schools believes the lack of university graduates is because students aren’t engaged effectively in digitech at secondary school. Put simply, they don’t understand what it is and why it’s relevant to their futures. Though it’s compulsory in public and Catholic schools in most states, many schools don’t offer broad digitech classes for all of their students. This is often because teachers can lack the skills and confidence to teach digitech or schools underestimate its importance.
CS in Schools is addressing these challenges by building awareness in schools of the importance of digitech to future employability, creating hands-on digitech courses for students and training teachers to teach digitech. It is currently working with over 9,000 secondary students in 42 schools around Australia. By 2025, CS in Schools is planning to reach half of Australia’s 2,700 secondary schools.
The goals for CS in Schools are to accelerate the numbers of students graduating from university with IT degrees and to help solve Australia’s IT workforce shortage.
We could not be more passionate about the work CS in Schools does. Its mission connects directly to Australia’s future economic growth and everything about its approach supports the TDM Foundation’s aims of excellence and equity.
CS in Schools is leading a world class program for students and teachers to learn digitech skills. We love the way the program brings industry experts into the classroom, to share their real-world experience and show the unlimited possibilities of digitech in everyday life. And we love the program’s focus on girls and on schools from lower socio-economic areas – we know the true power of digitech skills will only be felt when the barriers to learning them are removed.
