CSSIA's Virtual Data Center is the virtual gymnasium for the National Cyber League's competitions. It has more than 200 lab exercises for faculty and students to access. It is also one of four cyber gyms that ATE centers make available to National Cyber League competitors to develop and practice their cybersecurity skills.

With the completion of the first full season of the National Cyber League, the leaders of the four Advanced Technological Education cybersecurity centers who created the series of virtual competitions with George Washington University report they have attained proof of their concept.

The concept: students will pay a small fee to participate as individuals and teams in games that prepare them for industry certification exams. The next big step for the league will be getting employers to pay attention to the "scouting reports" that list how participants performed overall and on eight cybersecurity workplace competencies.

"It's exactly what industry wants—to be able to find students who have somehow been able to validate competencies around skills that industry has said they're looking for," said Casey W. O'Brien, director of the National CyberWatch Center (CyberWatch) at Prince George's Community College in Maryland. The founders of the National Cyber League hope that employers will eventually recruit new technicians from the scouting reports.

Energy Services & Technology students at KVCC learn advanced skills in multiple technical areas. The female student in the photo hopes to return to the program in the future; the male student is a veteran with a bachelor's degree who wants a more hands-on career.

Kennebec Valley Community College (KVCC) administrators and faculty crafted a versatile Energy Services and Technology program after Maine employers told them a stand-alone plumbing program would provide technicians with only a fraction of the skills that owners of energy efficient buildings and energy businesses need.

"We really need multi-faceted technicians with the licenses, to boot, and the experience, because their jobs are changing on a daily, weekly, monthly basis," Dana Doran said, summarizing industry's feedback to the college's initial idea of starting a stand-alone plumbing program. Doran is director of KVCC's Energy and Paper Programs.

The other "loud and clear request" from industry was that KVCC's new program teach critical thinking.

With the support of a $735,944 grant from the National Science Foundation's Advanced Technological Education program, KVCC devised the Energy Services and Technology (EST) program. It teaches multiple trades and uses problem based learning (PBL) to develop students' critical thinking across academic and technical courses. In addition to awarding students associate in applied science degrees, the EST program prepares students to take four state licensing tests and four separate national industry certification exams.

Recent evidence of the success of the new program comes from the selection of KVCC's Bradley Harding as 2014 Plumbing Instructor of the Year by a national industry association.

Agriculturalist Will Allen met with SAgE faculty members in November and discussed where they intend to install an aquaponics system at Edmonds Community College.

Faculty at a triad of community colleges in Seattle, suburban Seattle, and rural northwestern Washington are cultivating varieties of sustainable urban agriculture with an Advanced Technological Education (ATE) grant from the National Science Foundation.

The project aims to develop sustainable agriculture skills among the Puget Sound region's residents who will then be able to spur economic development by making existing small farms more viable, starting new agriculture operations in urban areas, working in new food distribution systems, pursuing agriculture research, or becoming sustainable agriculture advocates.

Edmonds Community College (EdCC) created professional-technical courses on how to grow food crops in urban settings. Seattle Central Community College offers a more theoretical transfer degree in agroecology; while Skagit Valley College focuses on professional-technical courses for small farm agriculture. Washington State University, the land grant college in western Washington, provides its agriculture expertise to the project by providing research opportunities and outreach to diverse populations.

Supply chain technicians use a blend of mechanical, electrical, and information technology skills to keep massive, automated warehouse systems running.

E-commerce is generating numerous, lucrative career opportunities for supply chain technicians.

Based on its survey of 625 employers with warehouses and distribution centers, the National Center for Supply Chain Technology Education (SCTE) estimates that 61,000 more supply chain technicians will be needed in 2015 than were employed in 2013.

Supply chain technicians install, operate, support, upgrade, and maintain the software, hardware, automated equipment and systems that support the supply chain. Their average salaries are $48,000 per year, according to SCTE's industry advisory committee. (See info below on the salary ranges for technicians with specialized skills.)

Aretha Murphy (left) and Geri Neal work together as engineering technicians; their friendship began in classes at Lawson State Community College.

Aretha Murphy and Geri Neal became friends during the final months of the industrial electronics program at Lawson State Community College in Birmingham, Alabama. This fall they completed their first year as colleagues at Power Grid Engineering, LLC, where they work as full-time electrical engineering technicians.

"These two really stand out," said Nancy Wilson, chair of the Engineering and Manufacturing Technology Division at Lawson State in Birmingham, Alabama. Wilson is a senior team member of the Consortium for Alabama Regional Center for Automotive Manufacturing (CARCAM), the ATE center based at Gadsden State Community College in Gadsden, Alabama.

Lawson State uses CARCAM's curriculum for advanced technology degree programs that incorporate multiple crafts like electrical, electronics, welding, and machine tooling for manufacturers. Students have the option of taking more courses in a particular craft depending on their interests. Lawson State and CARCAM's partner colleges also use the outreach program CARCAM developed to attract, enroll, and graduate diverse populations for manufacturing careers.

2,331 students from 68 middle and high schools toured manufacturing facilities on National Manufacturing Day in Florida thanks to FLATE's leadership of this statewide career recruitment event.

Two ATE centers have found that explanations of modern manufacturing are effective when they include a bit of show-and-tell in the form of facility tours.

Florida Advanced Technological Education Center of Excellence (FLATE) and the 360? Manufacturing and Applied Engineering ATE Regional Center of Excellence use National Manufacturing Day as an opportunity to work with their industry partners on manufacturing facility tours at various locations in Florida and Minnesota, respectively. FLATE is located at Hillsborough Community in Tampa, Florida; 360? is located at Bemidji State University in Bemidji, Minnesota.

FLATE Surveys Document Positive Results of Industry Tours

FLATE coordinated the celebration of National Manufacturing Day in Florida on October 4. As a result of its collaboration with its regional industry partners, 2,331 students from 68 middle and high schools, 71 parents and 110 teachers toured one or more of 72 high-tech manufacturing facilities located in 23 Florida counties.

Altogether 225 employees from 71 manufacturers and colleges, regional manufacturers associations, manufacturing-related professional organizations, and school districts across the state worked together to make the day successful. In addition to arranging the tours, FLATE and its industry partners raised $5,000 for manufacturing day t-shirts. FLATE designed and delivered the t-shirts to manufacturers throughout Florida.

FLATE’s surveys of participants provide evidence of the tours’ impact.

Matt Martella explains his work as a mobile applications programmer in award-winning video on DeafTEC's website.

DeafTEC, Technological Education Center for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Students at the Rochester Institute of Technology, received a 2013 Telly Award for its video Deaf Professionals in IT: Mobile App Programmer. It is one of the compelling new videos about STEM technicians with hearing loss on the center's website.

The video was created by Pellet Productions of Reading, Massachusetts. Pellet Productions has produced several other ATE-related videos including ATE Central's ATE Student Success Stories.

The award-winning DeafTEC video features Matt Martella explaining the work he does as a mobile applications programmer at Highmark Inc., a health insurance company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Rassoul Dastmozd, Ann Beheler, and Vince DiNoto offer advice during the MentorLinks meeting.

All community college educators can benefit from the advice that three community college administrators shared recently with MentorLinks mentees.

Vince DiNoto, principal investigator of the ATE GeoTech Center, Ann Beheler, principal investigator of the National Convergence Technology Center, and Rassoul Dastmozd, president of St. Paul College, have served as mentors for several MentorLinks cohorts.

All three have also been involved in small and large National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education (ATE) initiatives and other externally funded projects. During a panel discussion at the meeting of MentorLinks mentees and mentors in October, they talked about the "multiplier effect" of building on the success of small grants, like MentorLinks.

MentorLinks is a program improvement initiative of the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC). The association awards funds from its National Science Foundation ATE grant to two-year colleges that want to start or improve STEM technician education programs. Colleges selected for the program receive the services of an experienced community college mentor, $20,000 for faculty release time for planning and professional development, and travel stipends over the two-year grant period.

AACC will issue a new request for proposals from community and technical colleges in February 2014.

Kostian Iftica, Tech Apprentice alumnus, and owner of Brilliant Geeks, a computer services company.

Kostian Iftica's experience as a Tech Apprentice shaped Brilliant Geeks, the technology services company he operates in Boston.

Conversations with New England Baptist Hospital physicians as they adopted electronic healthcare records during his Tech Apprenticeship in the summer of 2007 were among the seeds for the business he started two years later while attending college full time.

Tech Apprentice is a model internship program developed by the Broadening Advanced Technological Education Connects (BATEC), an ATE National Center of Excellence for Computing and Information Technologies at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, in partnership with Boston Public Schools’ Office of Instructional and Information Technology TechBoston unit and Boston Private Industry Council.

Jessica Zabloski, Research Associate at Bioo Scientific Corp., describes making ELISA kits in the Jobs sections of Biotech-Careers.org website.

Biotech-Careers.org gives students details about real work environments, realistic estimates of paychecks, and accurate information about the academic paths to careers in a variety of biotechnology fields.

These three categories are among the among the information gaps Bio-Link purposefully addresses with Biotech-Careers.org (http://biotech-careers.org).

"We realized that there weren't career sites out there that met this need, so we built our own," said Sandra Porter who developed the website with Linnea Fletcher. Both Porter and Fletcher are co-principal investigators of the Bio-Link Next Generation National ATE Center for Biotechnology and Live Sciences based at City College of San Francisco.