This paper was presented at the ICS 2011 Conference entitled 'Enhancing Employability of Computing Students'.
This is a practical paper which sets out an innovative approach to developing ‘soft’ skills in the undergraduate Computer Forensics curriculum.
A distinction is drawn between seeing the forensics practitioner’s role in the narrow sense as a scientist/technician from the broader view which sees the practitioner as a coinvestigator who participates in a much wider range of technical social and problem tackling activities. Both roles require ‘soft’ skills but the second role requires a stronger communicative and problem solving capability for tackling complex situations. It is argued that ‘traditional’ forensics courses focus on developing a narrow set of mainly technical skills which do not equip the student with the ability to think for themselves when faced with the soft complexity evident in many real life problem situations. To address this deficiency an alternative approach is described which supplements the traditional curriculum by introducing a module which develops a complementary set of skills which are felt to be desirable for the coinvestigator operating in a fluid and confusing environment.
