Certification Magazine - September 2007 - (Page 20) CERTIFICATION Back to School: Funding an Ongoing Education DANIEL MARGOLIS In IT, skill sets can become outdated in a matter of months. To stay current, IT education must be an ongoing process — which can mean continual tuition and exam fees for techies. How can IT pros plan to pay for their never-ending skills development? An IT education differs from other types because it is necessarily ongoing — students in IT or an IT-related field start by assembling a skill set that will quickly become outdated, and they must stay current. IT professionals remain lifelong students of technology, maintaining a continuous education through various means, with certification being one. Therefore, IT professionals have to be able to finance not only the establishment, but also the extension, of such an education. Mladen Vouk, computer science professor and department head and information technology associate vice provost at North Carolina State University, said the college goes to great lengths to impress upon students that their IT education will be ongoing. “That’s the first thing out of the instructors’ and advisers’ mouths when the students walk in,” Vouk said. “The advisers always tell them, ‘Welcome, it’s great to see you. Please remember the one thing we are trying to teach you is how to update yourself and your knowledge because IT knowledge has a limited shelf life, and you have to continually keep upgrading yourself.’ It’s not like math or some other thing where you can learn something and then reuse it and hone it — you really have to keep up with the trends and the changes.” This is certainly a sentiment echoed by the industry. Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. employs about 6,000 IT professionals, making IT the second-biggest department in the company. With this much IT talent on hand, the company is cognizant of the need to maintain and update its workforce’s expertise. “Five years is a lifetime in the IT skill life cycle,” said Randall Stevens, director of IT recruiting for the company’s talent acquisition department. “If you were an expert five years ago, the likelihood is that 90 percent of your total skills base is, if not obsolete, at least approaching obsolescence. So, it requires constant and ongoing formal education, as well as additional training.” Starting From Scratch Scott Griffin is a 49-year-old microcomputer specialist working for Orange County government in Florida. His IT education began in high school, when he earned an associate degree in electronic digital technology from a local community college. Griffin’s degree initially was sponsored by the local government. “The county helped finance about two years, and it took me three years, going to high school and the local community college at the same time,” he said. Griffin proceeded to earn a bachelor’s degree in electronics management from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. He said the difficulties of financing this went beyond those of a normal education. “At the time, we had to build our own microcomputer, starting from a blank sheet of paper and actually designing it and building it,” Griffin said. “For college students, that was expensive.” He paid for all this through grants and students loans. “Then, I also ended up working on copiers full time for a local company to pay the rent or for whatever else I needed,” Griffin said. 20 CERTIFICATION MAGAZINE September 2007
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