Posted at 17:46h
in
STEM
by Lumity
By Michelle Peterson and originally posted on
CompTIA.org.
High school junior Shannon Watkins didn’t have a career path in mind when she started at Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy in Chicago, but her skills-based learning experience at one of Chicago’s five
Early College STEM Schools (ECSS) — plus exposure to real IT workplaces like IBM and Razorfish — opened her eyes to some wild possibilities.
“It was interesting being able to see different jobs people were doing that weren’t just teachers and police and firefighters,” said Watkins, now with a clear idea of her future. “I want to go into programming, because I’ve done it and I’ve seen how easy it is to code a website.”
During “The State of IT: The Diversity Divide,” a panel hosted by
CompTIA, the
Creating IT Futures Foundation and
Lumity, she and classmate Saul Sahagun shared their experiences attending a school that focuses on skills needed in the modern workplace — an educational initiative created to build a pipeline for talent and solve the IT industry’s skills gap.
At the end of the 2013-2014 school year, a team of professionals from Slalom Consulting held a kickoff event at Amundsen High school for the Slalom Innovation Challenge. When the students returned in the fall, the team was ready to begin the first of four modules that would bring the students from the initial planning stage of a project to prototype and pitching stage by the end of the spring.
Module 1 began in the fall when the students returned to school. This module served as a workshop and research stage to explore different customer needs in relation to the problem established. Participating teams conducted customer interviews, studied innovation topics and brainstormed product concepts often in the form of mobile apps.
Slalom hosted the students in October where they pitched their product concepts based on the market research and interviews conducted in Module 1. Kristi Eilers, Assistant Principal at Amundsen, noted that for some students, this was their first experience visiting an office in downtown Chicago. While many were nervous at first, they left excited, motivated and ready to work hard to one day obtain a career like the ones they just observed.
