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ACPHIS IS Skills & Job Roles Project

Understanding the Evolving IS Labour Market and Curriculum Alignment in Australia and New Zealand

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About

 

The Information Systems (IS) labour market is changing fast. Emerging technologies such as AI, blockchain, and cybersecurity are reshaping the skills employers need and giving rise to entirely new job roles, often faster than higher education curricula can keep pace. For IS programs to remain relevant, they need a clear, current, and evidence-based picture of what industry actually requires - not just at a point in time, but on an ongoing basis.


The IS Skills and Job Roles Project is an ACPHIS-sponsored, cross-institutional research initiative examining the demand for IS skills, technologies, and job roles across Australia and New Zealand, and how higher education can stay aligned with a fast-changing industry. The project brings this picture together through three complementary work packages: the first synthesises existing IS/IT skills frameworks and literature; the second maps current and emerging IS job roles and in-demand skills using job indexes, job postings, and industry interviews; and the third evaluates how well IS programs at Australian and New Zealand higher education institutions (HEIs) align with these findings, benchmarked against leading international programs to identify curriculum gaps and opportunities.


Together, these work packages aim to give the IS community a rigorous, replicable, and regularly updatable way of tracking where the discipline needs to go next - supporting employers, educators, and policymakers as the sector responds to a rapidly evolving job landscape.

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Project Objectives

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The project has five key objectives:

  • Analyse existing IS/IT skills frameworks and synthesise literature on evolving IS roles and skills.

  • Extract and map current and emerging IS job roles from job indexes, postings, and industry interviews.

  • Assess the alignment of Australian and New Zealand HEI offerings with identified industry needs.

  • Provide actionable recommendations for updating IS/IT skills frameworks and curricula.

  • Support employers, training providers, and educational institutions in responding to a rapidly evolving IS job landscape.

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Progress to Date

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  • Prototype IS Job Roles Canvas has been developed to better integrate IS job roles between international guidelines and frameworks (such as ACM and SFIA) and regional job markets. The Canvas helps academics designing IS curricula account for both industry demand and university supply, and maps job roles to both technical and socio-organisational skills.A pr

  • Ethics approval has been obtained for a focus group evaluating the IS Job Roles Canvas with experienced IS curriculum designers; a protocol and introductory video have been designed, and a pilot focus group is scheduled.

  • 1,000 job advertisements spanning 6 job categories from the AIS Job Index were downloaded via the Adzuna API and analysed using LLM and GenAI techniques to identify job role trends across demographic groups, map advertised skills to SFIA-9 (and identify emerging skills not yet in SFIA), and detect emerging technologies.

  • An ACPHIS report and a journal paper are both in progress.

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Meet the Project Team:
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Project Leads

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WP1

  • Janet Toland, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

  • Rosetta Romano, University of Canberra, Australia

 

WP2

  • Maduka Subasinghage, The University of Western Australia, Australia

  • Kasuni Weerasinghe, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand

  • Dilek Cetindamar Kozanoglu, University of Technology Sydney, Australia

 

WP3

  • Ana Hol, Western Sydney University, Australia

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Project Team

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  1. Queensland University of Technology
    Wasana Bandara
    Erwin Fielt

  2. The University of Sydney
    Sultana Lubna Alam

  3. The University of Newcastle
    Marc T. P. Adam

  4. Griffith University
    Jenine Beekhuyzen

  5. University of Auckland
    Elliot When

  6. Victoria University of Wellington
    Allan Sylvester

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Project Outputs:

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Publications

  • Bandara, W., Fielt, E., Alam, S. L., Weerasinghe, K., Romano, R., Subasinghage, M., Adam, M., Sylvester, A., & Beekhuyzen, J. (2025). Bridging the IS Skills Divide: A Design-Oriented Inquiry into the Alignment of IS Roles, Industry Needs, and University Curricula. In ACIS 2025 Proceedings: 36th Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS 2025). Association for Information Systems. https://aisel.aisnet.org/acis2025/68

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Tools & Artefacts

  • IS Job Roles Canvas (prototype) - a tool developed to integrate IS job roles between international guidelines and frameworks (such as ACM and SFIA) and regional job markets, supporting academics in designing IS curricula that account for both industry demand and university supply.

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