A synergy of industrial and academic education

Both industry and academia educate software engineers, but each has its respective shortcomings. Universities emphasize theory and often ignore meaningful applications, while industry focuses on practical methodologies, failing to sufficiently stress the underlying concepts. Neither of these institutions typically provides the supplementary skills needed by a software engineer. This paper describes these and other problems with software engineering education, and illustrates one industrial training program that is attempting to resolve many of the problems. The training program combines the best features of both academia and industry, resulting in a synergy that successfully eliminates many problems inherent in existing software engineering education.