People who know me know I started my post-collegiate career as a teacher. Even before I graduated from college, I was already teaching adults how to do things (most notably how to swim). But in addition to being a Masters swim coach, I was also teaching professors how to use computers, graduate students how to use the Internet for research, and high school students how to code.
When I left academia and moved into the corporate arena in the late nineties, I found that, in addition to entering a world where I would be building and leading IT departments, I had entered a world ripe for education. I had never previously considered just how much learning a skill and forming mastery of it is effectively the engine that drives all industries.
For the last 25 years, I have worked with many outstanding teams and have had countless opportunities to develop IT leaders while constructing an educational model that works best for identifying and building the next generation of IT talent. Nearly all the individuals I have worked with have gone on to become IT Leaders at their respective companies and are using the skills they learned with me to train their teams. I have also spent considerable time mentoring in mentorship programs for college students and early-career IT managers. I see first-hand how the next generation of leaders is not given the leadership skills they will need to grow.
Over the past decade, and with a particular emphasis on the last two years, I have participated in and audited IT Leadership programs across all of the more notable offerings and prestigious programs. Everything from big-named University leadership programs, which cost well into the tens of thousands of dollars, to the much less expensive self-paced leadership training offered through standard online programs.
Aside from strictly technical training classes, such as those offered by Coursera (most of which I believe are fantastic if you want to learn a technical skill), and with an open mind and objective lens, I have found that there is extraordinarily little value among the programs I participated in besides a student being able to claim to have been “there” and achieved “that certificate.”
That is why I believe the time is right to finally take everything that I have been doing: the authoring of How-To books, the mentoring of the next generation of leaders, the practical application and refinement of developing today’s leaders, and put it together into a structured and rigorous program that does exactly what it says it will do.
Sadly, you won’t be able to spend $35,000 and get a certificate from So-And-So U. that says you spent 9 months learning archaic principles from professors whose only real-world technological experience is funding entrepreneurial software startups consisting of their graduate students. Instead, you will get precise and applicable knowledge to enhance your current role and advance your career with a foundation in all of the elements of the principle understanding of what it takes to become an IT Leader.
I, for one, cannot wait to get started.
