Oct. 31, 2018 – The National Science Foundation recently awarded a $ 3,755,825 million grant to Collin College to support the national project “Information Technology Skill Standards, 2020 and Beyond.”
This four-year grant will address the critical need for IT workers and provide up-to-date, future-facing skills standards. The initiative will facilitate curriculum development for two-year and four-year programs that offer applied information technology degrees as well as benefit smaller employers for use in identifying talent. The skills standards will focus on the knowledge, skills, abilities, tasks and performance criteria that employers expect from workforce job candidates.
“The pipeline funneling workers into information technology (IT) jobs is far too narrow, and we simply do not have enough employees to meet the growing demands of this field,” said Dr. Ann Beheler, Collin College executive director of Emerging Technology Grants and principal investigator for both the Information Technology Skill Standards grant and a National Convergence Technology Center grant. “It is an honor to be selected to lead this NSF grant which will enable us to focus on the technical content and employability skills that industry needs and serve as a liaison disseminating that information nationally to two-year and four-year educational institutions.”
Collin College will lead the project and is partnering with educational team members from across the country including Suffolk Community College in New York, Lake Washington Institute of Technology in Washington State and Lone Star College in Texas. In addition, the project team will work with skills standards experts throughout the U.S. According to Beheler, over the lifetime of the grant, the project will involve at least 400 subject matter industry experts from businesses of varying sizes and more than 200 educators selected nationally from educational institutions of varying sizes.
As part of the dissemination process to national educators and employers, the project will offer several workshops across the U.S. and assist with the application of the new IT curriculum standards within historically black colleges, Hispanic serving institutions, tribal colleges and colleges committed to active veteran programs such as Collin College.
Recognized as a national leader in the field of information technology and communications, Collin College is home to the Convergence Technology Center (CTC), which was founded as a regional center in 2004 and was named a national center in 2012.
For more information, visit www.connectedtech.org.
Collin College serves more than 55,000 credit and continuing education students annually and offers more than 100 degrees and certificates. The only public college in the county, Collin College is a partner to business, government and industry, providing customized training and work force development. In addition, the college operates the Collin Higher Education Center, which serves 3,500 additional students each year in partnership with The University of Texas at Dallas, Texas Woman’s University, Texas A&M Commerce, Texas Tech and the University of North Texas.