Improving professional IT doctorate completion rates

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3127/ajis.v19i0.1073

Keywords:

Career management, community of practice, postgraduate education, retention

Abstract

Professional doctorates in Information Technology (IT) have been a relatively recent phenomenon, giving IT professionals career management choices not previously available to them. However, successful completion rates are the lowest of all disciplines. Completed doctorates rate in quality equivalent to PhDs, and retention has been identified as a major obstacle to completion. This qualitative study, involving 44 semi-structured interviews with students, supervisors and institutional support personnel, investigated the obstacles. Amongst the strategies discovered to improve completion rates were retention, student engagement with supervisors, feedback on progress, student engagement in the course, and student involvement in institutional communities of practice.

Author Biography

Oliver Kisalay Burmeister, Charles Sturt University

Associate Professor, School of Computing and Mathematics

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Published

2015-08-18

How to Cite

Burmeister, O. K. (2015). Improving professional IT doctorate completion rates. Australasian Journal of Information Systems, 19. https://doi.org/10.3127/ajis.v19i0.1073

Issue

Vol. 19 (2015)

Section

Research Articles

License

AJIS publishes open-access articles distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Non-Commercial and Attribution License which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and AJIS are credited. All other rights including granting permissions beyond those in the above license remain the property of the author(s).