Last year I presented a paper discussing the growing trend of offshore outsourcing and with that a growing need for soft skills by IT professionals. I addressed how we at Purdue provided that training to a Fortune 500 company. The skills presented in the industry class are now being incorporated into our introductory class in our CPT program. In this paper I will discuss the change in our introductory class for Computer Technology majors CPT 180 Introduction To Systems Development. The change in content reflects the changing skill set needed by IT professionals due to the outsourcing. The previous introductory class CPT 172 Introduction to Application Development was completely reworked. Less emphasis was placed on programming and more emphasis on developing and communicating user requirements. Many items used in training industry were incorporated into the CPT 180 course. The paper will detail the change in focus in this course and overall how our curriculum is being transformed.
