March 20, 2013

Director’s Note

It is a very exciting time to be in the computing and information technology arena! It looks like there is finally significant attention being paid to developing the necessary workforce to stay competitive.

President Obama highlighted it in his State of the Union:

“If we want to make the best products, we also have to invest in the best ideas…Now is not the time to gut job-creating investments in science and innovation. Now is the time to reach a level of research and development not seen since the height of the Space Race… Four years ago, we started Race to the Top – a competition that convinced almost every state to develop smarter curricula and higher standards, for about 1 percent of what we spend on education each year. Tonight, I’m announcing a new challenge to redesign America’s high schools so they better equip graduates for the demands of a high-tech economy. We’ll reward schools that develop new partnerships with colleges and employers, and create classes that focus on science, technology, engineering, and math – the skills today’s employers are looking for to fill jobs right now and in the future.”

Code.org, a non-profit foundation dedicated to improving access to computing education, was launched in mid- February. Their website http://www.code.org was released two weeks later and already has over a half a million pledges to work together to ensure that “Every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn to code”. I have signed that pledge and I hope you will join me and do the same!

I had the opportunity to attend the NCWIT Aspirations in Computing Awards at the Google offices in Cambridgewhere ten high school female students were honored for their achievements in technology. It was an electrifying evening where these girls demonstrated their passion for the field and celebrated with their families and local business and education professionals.

On the workforce front, every major outlet is touting the availability of jobs in the tech sector. In analyzing job postings over the last 90 days on Burning Glass Labor Insight , the highest percentage of jobs in that time period were in the Computer and Mathematical occupational group. With over total 3.5M job postings, that equates to over a half million jobs! Monster’s Technology Outlook 2013 report concurs, “If you’ve got the right combination of skills and experience putting those skills to work to solve mobile, interactive, big data or healthcare technologychallenges, 2013 should be a very sweet year for your career.” PayScale.com, an online salary database, reports that technology jobs are ‘hot’ because they are in a high-demand, rapidly growing field (projected growth at over 14%).

I look forward to working with all of you to continue our quest to create the best learning and earning environment for our students.

Best regards,
Deborah Boisvert, BATEC Executive Director

LoveTech

We love the benefits of a good technical education, and our LoveTech program is aimed at helping your students share this belief. Look out for the LoveTech video contest, to be unveiled across the BATEC national network at the end of March!

We want students, faculty, and industry across our network to grab a camera or put together animation, slides, typography – anything! – and tell us in 60-90 seconds why they LoveTech. Get It? IF you are struggling to understand the concept, let us share with you the early results from three community colleges in the city of Boston. Technology students from from Bunker Hill Community College, Middlesex Community College and MassBay Community College have created six 90-second videos to give you an idea, and you can check them all out atwww.youtube.com/bateccenter.

The LoveTech contest is simply about creating a sense of community among students and faculty in our different regions. We plan to invite our faculty and students form our partner institutions to help us share the “love”, and promote the excitement of technical education.

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Summer Institutes

We are pleased to announce that BATEC will host its 2013 National Summer Institute in the City of Boston. This Professional Development series will feature a new and revised week long format. Industry trainers from the likes of EMC and Oracle and Subject Matter Experts from across the country will lead the courses you find listed below.

The Summer Institute will be held over a two week period. The first week (Week 1) will start on Monday, July 29thand finish on Friday, August 2nd. The second week (Week 2) will start on Monday, August 5th and finish on Friday, August 9th.

We would be immensely grateful to gauge your interest and availability through this brief survey.

Each course, listed below, will be conducted over a five-day period:

SI-2013.101 App Inventor Mobile Programming
SI-2013.102 Big Data Analytics
SI-2013.103 Cisco CCNA Exploration
SI-2013.104 Cyber Security
SI-2013.105 Exploring Computer Science
SI-2013.106 IT Problem Solving
SI-2013.107 Office 365 Deployment
SI-2013.108 Oracle SQL
SI-2013.109 Oracle PL/SQL
SI-2013.110 Windows 8 Administration

Registration will open in early April.