THE PROBLEM
Thousands of students join and graduate from professional and vocational institutions every year, yet a large subset of the student community remains unemployed or end up in jobs they did not initially plan to pursue. This directly reflects on the curriculum structure and methodology followed in majority of the educational institutions. The question therefore - How do we design a curriculum that is flexible, yet targeted towards the learner acquiring the necessary “knowledge base” to make him “employable”?
This paper is a step towards looking at curriculum design from the employment perspective – considering the fact that industry readiness requires “customization” at an individual student level and not a generalized method of delivery and assessment.

A good curriculum – the structure of the courses, the syllabus and the assessment – is an essential requirement for ensuring the quality of any academic program. The challenge is thus, to identify the core competencies that a student is required to achieve after completion of the course, and the subsequent designing of the syllabi to acquire these competencies.

THE SOLUTION
Competency being defined as having the necessary skill or knowledge to perform a task successfully, the “Instructional Training” imparted to a student must ensure the attainment of the “knowledge” and the “know-how” required for sustainable employment in the industry. In the competency based model, a proscribed competency (or sub competency ) is the instructional goal - and the curriculum presentation, learner guidance, practice and evaluation strategies need to be targeted towards acquiring this particular goal.

Designing the curriculum would thus start from identifying employment opportunities and duties involved, competencies required, and learner material designed to acquire these concepts. Pre-requisite and Complementary conceptual knowlege also needs to be identified.The curriculum is designed at 3 levels of Knowlege – elementary, intermediate and advanced. As a result a learner could acquire a particular level of competency in a specific area . Further, an inter-disciplinary student can opt for only those conceptual requirements that suit his domain requirements. This structure also lays an emphasis on the way in which a student assimilates knowledge – a reasonable “workload” being a precondition to a faster and deeper level of learning.

This paper proposes a general framework for curriculum design and uses it to model a curriculum for career opportunities in the realm of Data Management in IT. The learning material is looked at in areas of:

(i) Information (which does not require learner guidance or practice and can be looked at material given for self study )
(ii) Knowledge (concepts that must be covered in a pre-requisite order, and for which learner material and guidance needs to be provided)
(iii) “Know –How” (assignments and practice to consolidate the concepts learned)
(iv) Skills (a particular subset of the possible skill set that the learner acquires while performing the practical)

After identifying the above in the form of competency modules, various entry and exit points for the different career opportunities can be identified.

The concepts required are shown in the form of a conceptual mapping that also reflects the pre-requisite knowlege required for every concept.