The “i Competency Dictionary” Framework for IT Engineering Education

Information technology (IT) engineering education in Japan has a major issue in linking IT education in universities with IT industry requirements. The IT world is changing very rapidly now and the academia-industry linkage is becoming difficult and divergent. In this paper, the authors describe the “i Competency Dictionary” (iCD) framework developed and announced by Information-technology Promotion Agency (IPA), a Japanese government organization in 2015. IPA developed this iCD framework for IT user organizations and IT vendor companies for their human resource development. Since its announcement, iCD has been expanding very rapidly within Japanese IT industries and the framework is becoming a reference in many IT organizations outside Japan. In the meantime, universities and educational organizations are starting to use iCD to develop and evaluate their curricula since it contains rich industry requirements reflecting today's rapid IT changes. The authors believe that iCD can contribute much to educational areas and they illustrate examples of the iCD successes in academic circles.