The Midwest Center for Information Technology

The Midwest Center for Information Technology (MCIT) has steadily built an active consortium of ten community colleges across four states to support increasingly skilled faculty, a shared process for ongoing faculty professional improvement, a robust articulation-supported pipeline of students, an interested and contributing business community and the integration of the innovative Careerlink system that directly connects the IT classroom with IT workplace goals.  The MCIT impact is continuing to grow as the project is sustained, with a total to date of more than 600 associate degrees and certificates awarded, over 1000 faculty over the four states trained, and hundreds of students each year sharing cloud-based educational scenarios while learning the skills most needed by IT businesses.  Most importantly, MCIT has established a viable consortium model within the context of the ten community colleges and businesses with a relationship based on trust, collaboration and shared resources. 

The MCIT is facilitated by the Applied Information Management Institute (AIM) that is based in Omaha, Nebraska and works closely with the ten participating community colleges, whom together educate more than 90% of all community college students in the four-state Midwestern region.  AIM is a not-for-profit community organization that works strategically across both education and business partnerships to promote technology to empower people, enhance organizations, and create brilliant communities. The core mission is IT talent development, from early student interest - to linking people to careers - to ongoing IT career development.  MCIT has been a signature AIM collaborative initiative during the last decade.

MCIT’s collaborative innovation is steadily expanding the IT workforce pipeline in the four-state region. MCIT has already partnered with over 2,200 Midwest employers, while leveraging the online Careerlink system to make direct connections between industry needs and the school curriculums. An average of 4,250 IT jobs are now listed monthly within Careerlink that are directly linked to IT coursework and more than 30 problem-based scenarios, accessible by nearly all of the community college population across the four states. 

MCIT’s efforts have been informed by consortium studies, including a Women in IT study that interviewed 43 women and 26 men IT professionals, documenting a variety of insights, such as perceived improvement in the “glass ceiling”, the importance of early IT engagement for girls, and a subtle “social exclusion” of girls interested in IT.  The Youth Perceptions of IT study, which conducted 16 youth focus groups with 157 youth, resulted in insights such as: most students think of IT as an individual enterprise; students would become more interested in an IT career if given more useful coursework; and that the way some IT courses are taught make them relatively unattractive.

Based on MCIT’s collaborative studies, past successes, and the growing Careerlink resources, MCIT is continuing to build a foundation of IT program and workplace innovation that is becoming a hallmark of the consortium. The MCIT program was recently showcased in a 2015 article in the Journal of Community College Research and Practice called “It Takes a Village to Raise an IT Student: Ten Observations on Institutional Collaboration by the Midwest Center for Information Technology” and the project continues to inform other community college consortiums on how they might work together better to grow and benefit the IT pathways from “cradle to career” in their local communities.

Last Modified: 10/14/2015
Modified by: Bradley D Mcpeak