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CCN Impact on Students and Faculty

By Connected Tech | May 2, 2016 |

The National Convergence Technology had their annual National Visiting Committee meeting this past week and with that, we gathered the best impact reports from several of our Convergence College Network schools.

Student Impacts

  • One Clark State Community College student was employed at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in the Distributed Shared Resource Center (DSRC- Supercomputing site) and another at Wright Patterson National Aerospace Intelligence Center (NASIC).
  • One student at El Centro College made several connections with people in the industry and heard directly from employers at a conference what they were looking for in a variety of network related fields, while another successfully passed all rounds of competition in the 2015 Cisco NetRiders and ranked 60 in the USA and Canada region.
  • At Lansing Community College the CIT program had at least 39 students with paid IT internships/apprenticeships during calendar year 2015. 26 of those were from convergence related programs.
  • There was 89.5% success rate and 96% retention rate in convergence classes for calendar year 2015 at Northwest Vista College.
  • On average, 50% of the students at Orange Coast College who have completed the main 3 industry certifications, A+, Network+, Cisco CCENT have gone on to get very good jobs in the IT industry.
  • At Renton Technical College, close to 30 students earned TestOut certifications. 9 of which also obtained CompTIA A+ certifications and 5 obtained CompTIA Network+ certifications.
  • Almost 75% of internships for Sinclair Community College students are paid due to state program and LinkedIn is now required for internship and other disciplines are requiring it of their students as well.
  • 5 to 6 students at Tallahassee Community College placed from their program into local jobs with the state, Tallahassee’s largest employer.
  • At Milwaukee Area Technical College, one student landed a full-time Network Engineer position with a salary nearly twice as much as he was earning prior to attending school.
  • As a result of skills acquired through the Cyber Security program, one student at Century College moved from Call Center Appointments for a healthcare provider to User Compliance and Monitoring at a retail organization. Another student was hired by a security consulting company.
  • One 24-year-old student from Fox Valley Technical College is now an IT Specialist (and the sole IT person) at Performa, Inc., an architecture and engineering design and consulting firm in De Pere.
  • In the first three semesters of the Network Enterprise Administrator Technical Diploma program (leveraging TAACCCT support) at Waukesha County Technical College, 60 students have participated in providing 3092 hours of services to 19 community-based partners.
  • Also at Waukesha County Technical College, one internship partner indicated that WCTC students were some of the best prepared network specialists out of the numerous colleges they receive internship students from. And because of the training received by faculty members at Working Connections, WCTC was able to create a new course – Shell Scripting, and incorporate it into their Network Specialist AAS degree. This skill was identified as necessary by the KSA exercise in 2014.
  • Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) held an Information Session to recruit students at Georgia Southern University and the HPE representatives were graduates from GSU.
  • BILT meetings are now on site and online at Sinclair Community College to accommodate more employers and online meetings are having more participation and dialogue about jobs and training.
  • Ferris State University has had the opportunity to modernize their curricula and include emerging topics, especially in regards to cloud computing.
  • Faculty at Sierra College has recognized the benefit of training opportunities of the CCN program, providing assistance in the effort to keep program quality up and offering relevant training for students.
  • At University of North Texas, the BAIT program continues to grow, one to three online courses will be introduced each semester starting Fall 2016 and they will begin recruiting the first batch of mentor colleges to offer the program from within the CCN membership Fall 2016. UNT also plans to launch an online competency-based program that will permit students with high school programming skills or job training and experience to complete the Introductory Programming sequence in an expedited fashion.
  • Due to training from the CCN program Milwaukee Area Technical College has brought several new and relevant technologies to their students and they have shared this with their employers. The advanced training helped faculty stay in step with the technology recommendations of their advisory committee for greater student success.

Student Quotes

“Cleveland Community College’s Computer Technology Integration Program has taught me the skills and knowledge to go further in my career and provide more for my company. The best thing about the CTI Program is that my full time class schedule, online and in class, allowed me to continue working full time.” – Cleveland Community College student

“The courses I have taken at WCTC directly relate to the tasks I am responsible for in my full-time position I received after graduation.” – Waukesha County Technical College student

“I am considering my options for further education and being at FVTC has renewed my passion for learning. I am looking forward to earning my bachelor’s degree after FVTC, something that several years ago I would have thought unreachable.” – Fox Valley Technical College student

Faculty Quotes

“SDN in Winter Session was really good. It provided a good hands-on experience towards the future of networking with software. The information was relevant toward the outlook in the industry and the tools and resources available. I’ve had a conversation with the course creator on using the information to create opportunities for students entering in the field or those who are already in the industry.” – Anne Arundel Community College adjunct faculty member

“With the instruction that I’ve received from the Summer Working Connection, I’ve incorporated Wireshark training into my Cisco Networking courses.” – Trevor Chandler, Houston Community College faculty

“The vSphere training that I attended, which was hosted on NetLab, prompted me to pursue the acquisition of a NetLab platform for our college, which has enhanced the quality of the student learning.” – Abass Alamnehe, Houston Community College faculty

“The Working Connections training has given me a tremendous opportunity to grow and learn new technology concepts and to be involved and share different points of view with other technology instructors.” – Tarrant County College faculty member

“I am able to provide better examples working with students who are using virtual software in online networking classes. I have more experience as a result of Texas training.” – Dwight Watt, Georgia Northwestern Technical College faculty

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