Career Paths Course for the First Year Students in Information Systems Science - Enhancing students' working life orientation

A gap between real life and theory often exists in academic education. As an attempt to cross this cap at the University of Jyvaskyla we ran a Career paths of IS course for new information systems students at the beginning of their studies. The aim of the course was to strengthen students' motivation to proceed in their studies in IS/ICT, their professional identity building, and to give them possibilities to reflect in their own interests within the field and thus help them make choices during their studies. The purpose of the course was thus to strengthen students' working life orientation. In this paper we analyze how the students' work life orientation was developed during our career path training. In addition, the paper discusses the results of the empirical part in the light of Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in Information Systems of ACM and AIS.