Microsoft highlights the importance of long IT educations

Posted: May 26, 2010 by Daniel Vámosi Martinussen

Danish politicians are currently discussing whether to shorten Danish IT educations but Microsoft strongly warns against such cutbacks.

Out of Microsoft's 650 employees located in Vedbæk, Denmark, more than 30 percent have come from abroad. The distribution is large caused by the fact that there are too few highly IT educated Danes for the positions:

"The costs of recruiting and relocating foreign ICT workers can reach half a million Danish Kroner so it would clearly be a lot cheaper for me to solely hire Danish employees", says Chief of Development, Michael Nielsen, to Version2 while at the same time emphasizing the importance of diversity when developing products for a global market.

From a company's point of view Michael Nielsen believes that hiring one highly educated IT worker is a far better solution than hiring two with a shorter education and from his position he should know what he is talking about: Michael Nielsen is also on the advisory boards of both The Danish Technological University (DTU) and The Danish IT University (ITU). He believes that the IT educations at both universities are so compact that it would be impossible to cut back on the length of the current 5-year educations while maintaining quality and integrity.

Cutting back on the length of IT educations is also highly irrational in relation to the state's tax income Michael Nielsen continues:

"The amounts at stake are unbelievable. The lifelong wages that highly educated earn is far greater than what you see in the service sector. Neither can the service sector contribute to an increase of the export", he explains.

Instead Michael Nielsen proposes to work with the focus of the Danish gymnasium education (corresponding to high-school) towards the various directions of university degrees. This would encourage and ease the way forward for those potentially interested in IT educations, which would increase the numbers of highly educated, he finishes.

Source: Version2